Thank you to Jan Miller and Lacy Lalene Lynch from my literary agents, Dupree Miller, in Dallas. You have never, ever stopped believing in my dream of becoming a novelist.

Thanks to everyone at the Royal Lodge, to my own office team and my publicists. Steadfast supporters, who have been pillars of strength for all these years, thank you all. I couldn’t have done it without you.

And finally thank you to my wonderful sister, Jane, whose impressive memory has helped to refresh my mind regarding all our ancestors.

(Signed) Sarah

Historical Note

Historical Note

Her Heart for a Compass is populated by a mixture of real-life historical characters and those entirely of our own invention, and set, as far as possible, against a background of real events and locations.

Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott was the second daughter of Walter, the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, and his wife, Charlotte, who were the Duchess of York’s great-great-great-grandparents. The scant information we have been able to glean about Margaret, we have woven into this story: her age, her appearance as a bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Helena and Prince Christian of Schleswig Holstein, and the date of her marriage to Donald Cameron, 24th Lochiel, which was comparatively late (she was twenty-nine, he was forty). The remainder of Margaret’s journey, save for these salient facts, is entirely fictional, though we have tried to be true to the prevailing culture of Victorian society in which she and her family would have lived, especially in the London scenes.

All Margaret’s relationships with real people, including the troubled one she has with her parents and her romance with Donald, are entirely imagined. While there is evidence that she was friendly with Princess Helena, not only from her appearance in the wedding photos but from a reference to “Helena Letters” in Donald Cameron of Lochiel’s personal papers in the Highland Council Archives, there is no evidence that Margaret and Princess Louise were friends, though they would certainly have been acquaintances. Where possible, we have tried to place Louise in the right place at the right time, primarily using Queen Victoria’s journals, with one notable exception: there is no evidence that she attended Margaret and Donald’s wedding. Princess Louise continued to sculpt and exhibit after her marriage to the Marquis of Lorne, who later became the Duke of Argyll. The couple had no children.