Amidst the haunted marshes of outlying Essex, the routine and romance of homes and offices in the Surrey heartland, and the crumbling feudal heritage of Lundin town, the action unfolds like the panorama from a stagecoach window. Jane is a sixteen-year-old civil servant under Her Majesty. Sent to audit the spoils of battle, she falls for Captain Modesty Clay, precipitating a maelstrom of events that force her to grow up fast, and in which she catches the eye of the Empress herself. The first novel in the Warriors of Love series, a projected twelve volumes of intertwined stories told by three female narrators, Jane is a beguiling evocation of a memory-haunted future, combining erotic picaresque, breathless narrative in the best tradition of British adventure yarns, and poetic delineament of place and person.