Red Sky at Noon

Acknowledgements

I am hugely grateful to my superb editor and publisher Selina Walker for her delicate, energetic, tireless and sensitive editing, but also her sense of fun and comradeship on this and the other two novels – and to her assistant Cassandra Di Bello. Thank you to Mel Four, who designed this glorious cover. Thanks to my outstanding and irrepressible super-agent Georgina Capel and her team: Rachel Conway and Romily Withington (who have now sold these novels into twenty-seven languages) and her dynamic film/TV maestro Simon Shaps. Thanks to Lorenza Smith for the Venetian and Italian details; to Jonathan Foreman for his excellent editorial advice; and to my nephew Major Johnny Hathaway-White for his invaluable expertise on cavalry lore and horsemanship.

I want to thank my dear mother April Sebag-Montefiore, once a novelist herself, who came up with the name Silver Socks – and manages to be witty, wise and acute at the age of ninety.

Thanks above all to Santa who is wife, mother, novelist, friend, partner and consigliere on all matters – and to my children, daughter Lily and son Sasha, who make me laugh so much, and who, together, make up our ‘musketeers’.

This book is dedicated to Sasha.