I’ll let you into a little secret. The journey of Lady Margaret, which you have just read (and hopefully enjoyed!), was originally intended to follow a very different path indeed. Long before I sat down to write Her Heart for a Compass, I carried a vivid image of Lady Margaret in my head. I pictured her—dressed in breeches and a waistcoat with a man’s white shirt and tall black riding boots, her red hair flowing out behind her—astride a white cob called Pasha, galloping over a bleak Scottish moor. She had stayed out too long, and was trying to sneak back unnoticed into a Palladian mansion, when she heard a pistol shot through the open French window. Rushing to investigate, she found her father lying dead. She picked up the gun and was holding it when her brother came on the scene and assumed that it was she who fired it. “Duke’s Daughter Accused of Murder” would be the banner headline in the Illustrated London News. I imagined sending my fledgling heroine off on a journey that would take her to the slums of London, to Bedlam hospital, and journeying half-way across the world in order to clear her name.

Of course, as any writer knows, your characters have minds of their own—capricious Lady Margaret was never going to do what she was told—but in essence her character has changed very little from the person I first imagined: a woman with great personal charm and strength, with the courage and conviction to break with convention to live her life on her own terms.

As the daughter of one of the most influential aristocratic families in the court of Queen Victoria, it’s difficult to overstate just how strictly controlled Lady Margaret’s life was. Her sole purpose was to make a prestigious marriage and to start popping out the offspring required to continue the line and extend the dynasty’s web of influence. Queen Victoria herself set the benchmark with her nine children. Her eldest daughter, Princess Victoria (Vicky), had eight. Margaret herself was one of seven; and her elder sister, another Victoria, matched the queen by having nine of her own. But Lady Margaret bucked the trend: she didn’t marry until she was twenty-nine. She was a rebel, I realized after encountering her on my family tree.