Fourteen years of exile in an Australian convict settlement fuelled his passion for revenge against three men and drew him back to English shores. Now the day of reckoning was at hand...

“I see danger!” she hissed. “Dark danger, honourable gentleman, which will come upon you out of the past! Beware, beware, lest you should not escape retribution!” But the gipsy’s fortune-telling did not save Sir Eustace Knowle, whose battered corpse was found the next morning.

He was not the only one to have been warned. Threatening, anonymous letters had already been delivered to two others in the party of friends, neighbours and relatives gathered in York for the wedding of Sir George Morton’s daughter.

A chain of mysterious and frightening ‘accidents’ followed, but it was at the masked ball that the Honourable Justin Rutherford and his prodigiously attractive niece, Anthea, witnessed the first incident. Devilish scrapes were a diverting pastime – as delicious as romantic assignations – but this seemed an unlikely start to one of their famous adventures...