A01=Winifred Duke
Author_Winifred Duke
Category=FF
Category=FFC
Category=FKC
Category=FLC
Category=FLG
classic
creepy
crime
dual timeline
eq_bestseller
eq_crime
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_science-fiction
forthcoming
time-slip
unsettling
Product details
- ISBN 9780712369756
- Publication Date: 20 Aug 2026
- Publisher: British Library Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the dock stood a girl, but could she be the one who had lately entered and was seated between her female companions?… Even the judge, sitting in Mr. Justice Deidpole's seat, was unfamiliar, a wraith from another century. A faint perfume, as of herbs or wholesome flowers, stole to the young man's nostrils… Was it reality, this scene, or a form of nightmare?
In the 1930s, when a string of pearls is stolen from a wealthy guest at the Wheatsheaf hotel in Derriford, suspicion quickly falls on Ann Bacon, an 18-year-old maid. Though she protests her innocence, she is arrested and hauled up in front of the county court. In 1752, a rich traveller stays at the Cock Inn just outside the town, where she, too, is relieved of her pearls. Everyone is convinced of the guilt of Patience Passey, an 18-year-old serving girl at the inn, and she too is arrested and tried at the local assizes.
Linking the two eras is a marshal of the court who starts to realise he may be the only person able to witness both cases first-hand.
Compared to Charlotte Brontë during her lifetime, Winifred Duke (1890-1962) was a prolific author, writing both fiction and books on Scottish history and the legal system from the early 1920s through to the mid-1950s. By the late 1940s, though, she’d become fascinated by the way that eras entwined, and how the effects of something that happened in the past could still echo loudly – and devastatingly – in the present, themes she explores in both 1948’s The Black Mirror and Dirge for a Dead Witch, which was published the following year.
