When Captain George Ackworth travels on a stagecoach in North Yorkshire, he and his fellow passengers are attacked by a highwayman and a violent gang who murder the driver and the guard on the coach, before kidnapping two sisters from an aristocratic family leaving the survivors to speculate on why Captain Midnight should have taken them. The appearance of this so-called ‘captain’ is made more forbidding by a black hat, cloak and mask and a “milk-white horse whose appearance had a ghostly presence in the shadows.” It is on this mount that the older sister, Lady Elinor, is forced to ride.
In this tale of ‘The Hunt for Captain Midnight’, as in much that I have written, my chief wish has been to tell a story, to create a narrative that readers will enjoy and wish to understand better. Throughout there will be a trail to follow and a number of unanswered questions. Who is this elusive Captain Midnight? How does a white horse come to be the mount of a villain? Why were the sisters stolen and other valuables ignored? The struggle of Elinor and Arabella Duncan to understand how they have offended can be easily made the struggle of the reader. A deeper mystery still is the compulsion Captain Ackworth feels from the first, when he is wounded by pistol fire, to rescue these ladies, given that he had never seen either of them before he travelled for the first time, as they had, in a public coach. There is no black cloak for this captain. Readers of this first tale must travel with him and will, I hope, wish to understand where the journey is taking both him and them.
It was my intention when I first began ‘The Hunt for Captain Midnight’ over a decade ago, to set a story in an earlier time, in this case the eighteenth century, when travel, medical knowledge, communications in remote places and investigations were all more challenging…………..and yet not everything need be a secret……………………”wonder of wonders a section of the bookcase which had seemed to be fitted to the wall, rolled away to reveal an aperture.”
Though this first tale may have let me indulge in the world of historical romance, I wanted the best of both worlds. Well over two hundred years later, in ‘The Surest Way’, the ancestors of the characters in the first part, or people with similar names, play out a drama of their own. As in my other published work, this story brings us back to our own times.
The Frances Carstairs of more recent times, helped by her friends Milly Parrish and Sue Turner, has had some success dealing with heavy drinking, depression and a faithless husband who abandoned her for her former friend, Nicole, leading Fran to revert to her former name of Carstairs, that name she shares with other mysterious ladies in ‘The Hunt for Captain Midnight.’
But Fran’s life undergoes a still more dramatic change when one day, quite by accident, she backs her car into a young man called George Redburn just as he is trying to escape from a gang of louts who had hoped to catch him in the car park of a supermarket. Attracted to this boy in ways she cannot understand, Frances rescues him, gives him casual work at her house, another place called Arden to match the one in Captain Midnight’s world, quickly makes him her ‘project’, teaches him how to drive, how to shoot, shows him a secret exit out of her house (a mirror image of the escape route featured in the first tale) and shows him her painting of the attack on that stagecoach over two hundred years before. The two become lovers and share various adventures; they enjoy a regular exchange about which of them did most to save the other, until a chance meeting at a service station reveals to Fran Carstairs two girls, Alison and Sophie, the daughters of her enemy Nicole Byrne. As it becomes clear that these girls are the victims of a kidnapping, she will enlist Redburn to help free them and so learn there are consequences and dangers when meddling with this story’s own version of a character called Midnight. Crime and a need for revenge will play their part in this other search for two more sisters. “You said we were an adventure,” the lovers agree, “and so we are.”
There have been writers who have questioned whether a book needs an ending at all. But I have always found that my tales need some sort of conclusion, whether their ideas were first considered years ago or more recently. Then again, what ending should there be? A friend of mine, when he read ‘Shaped By Memory’ told me he was glad that the people in that story finally resolved their problems. ………………and so now to ‘Tales of Two Centuries’ and the time I’ve spent wondering how it might work out for those of long ago or more recent times. As one actor tells us, “your eyes have seen, but your mind has not yet properly used the information.”
I hope you enjoy following the trail.