"Wonder of wonders, a section of the bookcase, which had seemed to be fitted to the wall, rolled away to reveal an aperture…"
A masked highwayman known as Captain Midnight leads an ambush on a mail coach and kidnaps Elinor and Arabella Duncan. The appearance of this character is made more sinister by a "milk-white horse whose appearance had a ghostly presence in the shadows." When George Ackworth has recovered from a wound he sustained in this attack, he and his friends set out to find the two aristocratic sisters, making the distinctive horse as much a target as its rider and also Midnight's enigmatic but frightening 'Lieutenant.'
The cavalry officer and his friends, Matthew Harewood and Mathilda Parrish, will need to locate the houses of Whitestone and Arden and a forbidding London inn called The Cupid's Bow. It will be a story involving disguise, a secret passageway, treachery, and great loyalty. The hunt will require knowing not two sisters but four.
"You said we were an adventure…and so we are."
More than two hundred years later, the ancestors of the characters we have already met act out a drama of their own. This time Johnny Midnight is a gang leader bent on superseding his mentor, Harry Duncan. When he kidnaps two sisters as an act of revenge, he is thwarted by Fran Carstairs and her "project", her young lover Redburn. Though Redburn twice protects Frances from the enforcers of a dangerous enemy, they will soon need the help of Colin Drew, who will follow Redburn in using a secret passageway into another house called Arden. A painting in this house depicts an attack by highwaymen on a stagecoach-a house that will be the location for a startling conclusion.
Tales from Two Centuries uses ideas that interconnect and complement each other-tales that have a trail before them and an interest in how a story might take shape… or indeed a trail of your own, which is being relentlessly followed.
"You mean your eyes have seen, but your mind has not yet properly used the information."
