James Bond Meets Jane Austen in a Regency That Never Was...

by Rosemary Edghill

From the Dust Jackets

The opportunity to collaborate with Miss Andre Norton was both a privilege and an honor, and the chance to revisit one of my favorite periods in history - and some of the characters of my four Regency Romances - was not to be missed.

SHADOW OF ALBION is set in 1805, but an 1805 that has seen the Stuarts reign in an unbroken line from the time of Charles II. It is a world where magic works, but when Napoleon bends all Europe to his will, sometimes magic just isn't enough ... which is where the Duke of Wessex takes a hand. A member of the elite White Tower Group, the espionage apparat that seeks to deny Napoleon mastery of Europe, Wessex is a man with a dangerously conflicted nature: espionage is not the work of gentlemen, and at any moment his loyalties may be impossibly divided. King Henry IX presses him to marry in order to extend his protection to Prince Jamie's bride, Princess Stephanie of Denmark, but though the betrothal is an old one, Wessex's bride is not-at-all what he expects. For the Marchioness of Roxbury is quite literally not herself: she is Miss Sarah Cunningham, of an America which broke free of the tyranny of the English Crown, and which has no use for magic...

I hope you will enjoy SHADOW OF ALBION as much as Miss Norton and I enjoyed writing it. We are working on a sequel...

Baltimore, 1805

When young Sarah Cunningham's father dies, she is left alone in the world. At the behest of her aunt, she leaves behind her few friends and heads across the ocean to the hope of a new life in England with a distant relative.

Little does Sarah suspect that her journey will carry her much farther than a mere ocean's width. For as she crosses the Atlantic, powerful magics are being worked by Lady Sarah Roxbury. Lying on her deathbed, Roxbury casts a spell that will summon her counterpart form the universe-next-door...Sarah.

Waking, Sarah finds herself in a world not her own, a world where the Stuart kings still rule England, where Baltimore and the original thirteen United States are still British colonies, where Napoleon runs rampant on the European continent, a world where she is the Lady Roxbury.

Under the influence of a steady supply of drugs and insidious manipulation, Sarah comes to believe that she is Roxbury, and soon finds herself embroiled deep in the machinations of court intrigue and scandal. She also comes to despise her intended, the Duke of Wessex.

As the threat of a French invasion grows, the only hope for England is a peace treaty with Denmark. But when the Princess of Denmark goes missing and France's agent, the Marquis de Sade, is found in council with Denmark's king, it is up to Sarah and Wessex to put aside their differences.

Together they must find a way to rescue the princess from her captivity deep in the black heart of Imperial France before Napoleon can cross the channel and utterly destroy England.

In a tale as rousing, romantic, and full of intrigue as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Andre Norton and Rosemary Edghill have created an alternative history as real as our own and as fresh as today.

See also:

Andre Norton's Foreword and Chapter One of "Shadow of Albion"
Chapter One of "Leopard in Exile"


Rosemary Edghill's Official Webpage