A Room Full of Bones (34 page)

It ought to be easy, thinks Ruth, watching Nelson disappear into the crowds and the smoke. Nelson is happily married, Ruth is about to start a relationship with a man she really likes. Nelson can see Kate; perhaps, in time, all four adults can become friends.

It ought to be easy. But it isn’t.

The Smith family and the Slaughter Hill Stables are completely fictitious. However, in order to see how a racing stable operates, I spent some time at the incredible Cisswood Racing Stables in Lower Beeding and would like to thank Jayne and Gary Moore for their hospitality and help. Special thanks to Lucy Moore for showing me round and answering all my questions. I need hardly say that Jayne and her wonderfully talented family have absolutely nothing in common with Danforth Smith and co.

Similarly, the Smith Museum has no counterpart in real life, though many British museums do hold human remains, and there are pressure groups demanding their return. For details of one such repatriation, I am indebted to John Danilis’s marvellous book
Riding the Black Cockatoo
(Allen and Unwin).

Bishop Augustine is fictitious although Pope Joan apparently did exist.

Thank you to Michael Whitehead for the Blackpool background and apologies to Sarah Whitehead (who looks lovely in tangerine) for the football joke. Thanks to Andrew
Maxted and Dr Matt Pope for their archaeological expertise and to Keith Jones, equine vet extraordinaire, for the information about horses. However, in all these cases, I have taken the experts’ advice only as far as it suits the plot, and any resulting mistakes or inaccuracies are mine alone.

I didn’t get his name but thanks to the lovely guide at Norwich Cathedral who showed me Mother Julian’s cat. Thanks to Becki Walker for her help with proof-reading.

I’m very grateful, as ever, to my editor Jane Wood, my agent Tim Glister, and all at Quercus and Janklow and Nesbit, for their continued faith in me. Heartfelt thanks to all the publishers around the world who have taken a chance with Ruth.

Love and thanks always to my husband Andrew and our children, Alex and Juliet.

This book is for my friends Nancy and Anita, with whom I shared so much of my childhood, and in memory of their mother, Sheila Woodman, who was always so encouraging about my writing.

E.G. January 2012