Martin is elated when Leo hires him to root out the cause of Elizabeth's desertion of Strafford. After years of despair, during which Elizabeth married his college friend, Gerald Couchman, Strafford accepted a consular post in Madeira, where he spent the rest of his life. Strafford then attempted to retract his resignation, to no avail. Willing to forego career for love, he resigned his post as Home Secretary but that night his fiancÉe, Elizabeth, mysteriously broke off contact with him. At Leo's request, Martin reads Strafford's journal: after a meteoric rise, Strafford fell for a suffragette-political poison in that era. At loose ends, divorced and unemployed Martin Radford travels to Madeira, where he meets Leo Sellick, a wealthy businessman living in a house once owned by the late Edwin Strafford, a member of Asquith's cabinet. First-novelist Goddard tells a labyrinthine first-person tale of a historian whose assignment to solve a vintage mystery entangles him in a web of deceit and violence.
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