Читать книгу The Caged Countess - Joanna Fulford - Страница 3

When I was writing HIS COUNTERFEIT CONDESA Anthony Brudenell was a minor character who played a small but significant role in events. An unwilling participant in an arranged marriage, estranged from his wife, he raised some interesting questions, and it struck me then that his personal situation had the potential to become a novel in its own right. My editor agreed.

This book picks up the story three years later, but it appears Anthony has become a different man. After sustaining horrific injuries at Vittoria he is forced to resign his commission in the army. Cast out from everything he knows and values, he continues to serve his country by taking up a posting in the intelligence service.

This was a shadowy world which featured some fascinating characters—like the English spymaster William Wickham and Napoleon’s Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché. The latter seems to have wielded enormous power, to the point where even Napoleon feared him. Although Fouché was out of office for a short time during the Emperor’s exile on Elba, I have bent the facts slightly and brought him back a couple of months early to suit the events in my story.

As it turns out, Fouché’s agents are only the beginning of Anthony’s problems—because fate is about to reunite him with the beautiful and angry wife he abandoned eight years earlier.

Trapped in a marriage of convenience, Claudia has found fulfilment elsewhere and made a new life for herself—a life she conceals from fashionable London society. She has learned to enjoy freedom and independence, and has no intention of giving them up just because her absent husband has inconveniently returned. Claudia is determined to outwit him, but she has reckoned without the dangerously charismatic and powerful man who is equally determined to make her his wife in fact as well as name.