Author’s Note

I’d like to believe that I can track the inspiration for this book all the way back to the beaches of North Uist, a windy, barren island off the north-west coast of Scotland where my family spent their holidays and where, as a moody fifteen-year-old, I was first given a copy of Frenchman’s Creek.

Almost from the moment of opening it, I became – as I imagine so many fifteen-year-old girls had before me – Daphne du Maurier’s heroine, the wilful Dona St Columb, in love with her pirate, dressed as a cabin boy and outwitting boorish aristocrats. I spent that summer feverishly reading in the shelter of the sand dunes, dreaming of all manner of escapes and searching the sea in vain for the white sails of La Mouette on its stormy breakers.

Dreams of escape tend only to flourish under the weight of real life and a few years ago, using the excuse of writing Midnight Cactus, I took my children to live in the mountains of Colorado – where, some time later, in the thrift shop of our local town, amongst the old glass bottles and broken watches, I came across a battered copy of Frenchman’s Creek.

Turning the pages that night several things struck me. First, that here, in the wilds of America’s south-west, I was once again in Dona St Columb’s shoes, though this time for real, with the dark and furtive world of the Mexican border my own secret creek. Secondly, that the driving themes behind Midnight Cactus – the possibility and impossibility of escape, the tug of war between freedom and duty – had been as resonant back in the seventeenth century as they still were today. There’s a truth which underpins both these books – one that presumably Daphne du Maurier had known all along and one that I had taken a lot longer to discover for myself – that, at one point or another, life can make fugitives of us all.

So I’d like to dedicate the book to the Dona St Columbs of both the past and the future, and indeed to every fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of becoming one.

Acknowledgements