A Respectable House is now out!

.

A Respectable House - the second in the four-book Furze House Irregulars series - is now out.

This one features Kitty Eastwick - Verity Bowman’s half-sister from A Rational Proposal - and starts immediately after the end of that book. It was quite a challenge writing the first couple of pages without cramming in a lot of ‘the story so far...’ from book one. I hope I managed it!

Kitty Eastwick is running for her life. Nicholas Dacre is guarding her. Both are scarred in different ways and must learn to trust each other before anything like a happy ending can be reached.

Once again the story stands alone as far as the love story and mystery is concerned, but woven through it is the whole-series conundrum of the ‘shadow master’ Flint.

The ‘respectable house’ (or at least discreet, as Kitty puts it) of the title refers to Furze House at the top end of Newmarket High Street (which I am convinced ought to be there even though all the maps strangely disclaim any knowledge of it). While I was busy imagining the big, echoing house and adding a laundry, stables, vegetable plot and tiny cottages to the rear, I got a little concerned that I was cramming a lot into quite a modest space.

Grosvenor Yard cottages, now demolished

Imagine my absolute joy at discovering pictorial evidence of the old Grosvenor Arms site a few alleys down!

Old site of Grosvenor Yard, Newmarket

Grosvenor Yard is now a fairly unlovely car park, but in the past there was a large inn (with a ‘jug and bottle’ for off-sales), a decent sized courtyard, an old farmhouse and - yes - two rows of tiny, terraced one-up-one-down cottages! It is moments like that which make a historical novelist's life so glorious.

We really are embedded in the past!

Photo credits of Grosvenor Yard to the Newmarket Local History Society.