Dancing on the Wind

Author's Note

The Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe were founded in 1752 by Sir Francis Dashwood, a man whose great wealth and talent were matched by his passion for debauchery and love of outrageousness. The world at large called the group the Hellfire Club, and its preoccupations were sex and Satanism. I don't know that any of the members were as dreadful as the worst Hellions of Dancing on the Wind, but as a group they were brutal, selfish, and terminally immature.

Members of the club included some of the most influential men in Great Britain, including Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Bute, a prime minister. Benjamin Franklin might not have been a member, but he certainly attended some of their orgies and lobbied the members to win support for the American colonies in the early 1770s. Together Franklin and Sir Francis Dashwood wrote a prayer book that was a great success in America and became the basis for many modern prayer books.

The Hellfire Club's first meeting house was in an abandoned abbey on an island in the Thames. The chapel and grounds were full of clever, wildly obscene artwork. Alas, some years later the location became public knowledge. Sightseers overran the Garden of Lust and sat on the river banks with picnic baskets to watch the monks glide in on their barge. It quite ruined the mood. (No, I did not make that up!)

Dashwood created a new meeting place by digging an enormous maze of caves (in a sexual design) into a chalk hill on his own estate, West Wycombe Park. It gave Dashwood the opportunity to employ his fertile imagination in freshly pornographic ways.

Nitrous oxide parties were indeed trendy in some circles during this period. Many thanks to my friend Linda Moore Lambert for providing me with a copy of "A Dissertation on the Chymical Properties and Exhilarating Effect of Nitrous Oxide Gas," written by a medical student in Philadelphia in 1808. His experiments were performed on himself, and he seems to have had quite a jolly time of it. (Getting high for course credit! Even in Berkeley, they didn't do that.)

On a more prosaic note, the Treaty of Ghent was signed on Christmas Eve, 1814, ending the War of 1812, so Jason Travers would not have had to keep a low profile for long.

Readers of earlier Fallen Angels books will have noticed that Dancing on the Wind takes place after the first book, Thunder and Roses, but before the second, Petals in the Storm. But what's a little confused chronology among friends? In the future, look for The Rogue's Return, which is about the irrestistible Lord Robin Andre-ville from Petals in the Storm. That will be followed by Michael's story, Shattered Rainbows.

I'd like to end with a very special acknowledgment to Ellen and Elizabeth De Money. Their fascinating, articulate insights about the twin bond became the psychological core of Dancing on the Wind.