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A Cornish-set time-shift romance! Perfect for fans of Sarah Burton, Stacey Halls, Jessie Burton and Kate Mosse.
Two centuries separate Carla and Harriet … but will something shift to bring their stories together?
Cornwall, 2020
At the beginning of lockdown, teacher Carla Burgess needs to make some changes to her life. She no longer loves her job, and it’s certainly time to kick her on-off boyfriend into touch. But then, while walking on the cliffs she meets, Mani Dolcoath, a gorgeous American with a dark aura.
Mani is researching his family history, and slowly their lives and their heritage begin to entwine. The discovery of a locked Georgian tea caddy in the barn on her parents’ farm intrigues Carla, but then she starts to see orbs, something that hasn’t happened since her grandmother died. They terrify her and she’ll do anything to outrun them, but will she lose Mani’s friendship in the process?
Cornwall, 1810
Harriet Lemon’s position as companion to Lady Frances Basset (Franny) perfectly conceals the fact they are lovers. But when Franny is raped and falls pregnant their lives are destined to change forever.
The one person who may be able to help them is Franny’s childhood friend, William Burgess, a notorious smuggler. But he has secrets of his own he needs to protect. Will his loyalties be divided, or will he come through?
THE LOST HEIR is a beautiful time-shift romance set in Cornwall between the Regency era and the modern day. It is part of the Cornish Echoes Dual Timeline Mystery series.
Publisher: Sapere Books
Format: Ebook (11 August 2023)
My thanks to Rachel of Rachel’s Random Resources for the tour invite and to Jane for providing the post. Jane has featured on my blog several times with guest posts and my reviews of previous books (these can be found via the search bar) and I’m delighted to host Jane again with another excellent guest post.
FINDING MY SMUGGLER
by Jane Cable
My Cornish Echoes books are Regency dual timeline romantic adventures, so it stands to reason there needs to be a smuggler in them, doesn’t there?
The beginning of the period, when The Lost Heir is set, coincided with the last years of their heyday. England was at war with France, which made free trade all the more lucrative, and the army and navy were far too busy to shore up the beleaguered preventative men.
Although it isn’t always possible, I do love basing my characters on real people whenever I can. At this distance in time it’s hard to tell what they were actually like, but you can get an impression from their recorded deeds and the opinions of diarists and their kind who might have come across them.
I had already selected the great house at Tehidy near Portreath for The Lost Heir, and Lady Frances Basset, later Baroness Stratton, to be at the centre of the story. She fascinated me, because despite being one of the most eligible women of her generation in terms of wealth and title she never married. But that is another story.
So I needed a smuggler who was relatively local, and I quickly found one who was active in the area at about the right time. His name was William Burgess, and rather conveniently he lived on a farm just outside Tehidy’s park. He was clearly very successful too, and quite the businessman; there was a ropewalk on his premises – I could see why rope could be useful in scaling and transporting barrels up the high cliffs that characterise the local coves – and he also owned a couple of inns. The whole supply chain for brandy and rum covered. The profits all his.
Delving around in Cornwall Libraries’ online catalogue I found that someone had written the Burgess family history so I immediately ordered it. Hopefully I would learn more about his exploits there, deeds of smuggling derring do I could adapt to fit the pages of my book. And I needed a family tree for my story too, so perhaps his might be a good place to start. I might even place my modern day protagonist in his farmhouse. It was all coming together very nicely, but lacked an essential connection. How might Lady Frances and the smuggler have met in the first place?
And then it happened. That magical serendipity, the sort of research gold that writers dream about but so rarely exists. William Burgess, smuggler, was none other than the illegitimate son of Lord de Dunstanville, Lady Frances’ father. They were half brother and half sister. Not only that, but William had been adopted by the steward and brought up in and around Tehidy.
It was true good to be true. But although it was never proven, a number of sources quoted the really quite detailed story of who William’s mother was and how she and the young Basset met. The whole thing sounded entirely credible.
There were so many stories about Burgess I could not use in the book – and naturally so much I had to make up about him as well. But one of my favourite real life tales was when, in his guise as landlord of one of his inns, he sent the preventative men on a wild goose chase after the notorious Burgess, well away from that night’s operations. On another occasion he only just beat them back to Redruth, and bound their wounds with much sympathy, all the time telling them what a rogue Burgess was. What a character! And just who I was looking for to slip between the pages of The Lost Heir.
Jane Cable writes romance with a twist and its roots firmly in the past, more often than not inspired by a tiny slice of history and a beautiful British setting.
After independently publishing her award-winning debut, The Cheesemaker’s House, Jane was signed by Sapere Books. Her first two novels for them are contemporary romances looking back to World War 2; Another You inspired by a tragic D-Day exercise at Studland Bay in Dorset and Endless Skies by the brave Polish bomber crews who flew from a Lincolnshire airbase.
Jane lives in Cornwall and her current series, Cornish Echoes, are dual timeline adventure romances set in the great houses of the Poldark era and today. She also writes as Eva Glyn.
Purchase Link https://getbook.at/LostHeir
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