An Arrow of Righteousness

My current focus is on The Forgotten Daughter. Deadlines loom—Yikes! This one begins with a shop clerk in Manchester on the brink of ruin.

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Frances Hancock—Fanny to those who cared—always knew she was a bastard. Her mother’s husband made sure of that. She didn’t know her father was an earl until her mother died.

Her stepfather, Horace Rundle, no use to anyone and half crazed on gin, croaked in the gutter outside the Happy Cock tavern soon after. It took Fanny one month, six visits from credit collectors, and damage to the remaining inventory in the back of the shop to fully accept the degree to which the reprobate had bled her grandfather’s store dry. She and her two younger siblings stood on the brink of homelessness and hunger. Fanny knew that she had to find this earl and demand his aid.

Never one to sink under troubles, she went to work immediately. The information she found scribbled on a scrap in her mother’s sewing box identified the man as The Earl of Clarion. She visited to the reading room of the Royal Manchester Institution and learned that his primary estate lay near the village of Ashmead. And so, it was to Ashmead that she aimed herself like an arrow of righteousness.