THE AUTHOR

Alias: Violet Haberdasher

Age: 24

Residence: London & New York City

Frequent haunts: grubby cafes, used bookshops, hidden libraries, Gothic rooftops, picnic blankets in parks

Likes: detective stories, open-air theater, flea markets, photography, opera houses, foil fencing, pranks, gloomy poems, leather satchels, parliamentary procedure, obscure medical facts, wandering cities at night.

Favorite subjects: Ethics, Chemistry, French, Fencing and Medicine

Left or right handed: Left handed.

Knightley Academy began quite innocently, in the dimly lit balcony of a theatre during intermission. I attended an elite school for young ladies, which I quietly despised. As my classmates giggled over the performance, I sat and wondered if every school had a student who felt like an outsider. I wondered what sort of boy would be branded odd and different at a school for knights.

No good ever comes from fitting in, particularly during one’s school days. I took this sentiment to heart as I endured a chemistry laboratory filled with privileged boys who wished for me to fail, even more than they wished for me to go back to the girls’ school across the road and resume my French lessons.

Time passed, and the story of a misfit knight remained stoically by my side until, at last, I began to write. The scene was thus: The darkened taverns of East London’s Brick Lane, once the haunts of Jack the Ripper. It was winter, with frost pressed up against the windowpanes. I huddled inside my warmest coat in the back corners of unremarkable cafes, feverishly scribbling the tale of a boy called Henry Grim, and his misadventures at Knightley Academy.

For a while, I lived above a shop, with mice scurrying over the floorboards. But just as Henry went off to Knightley Academy after a short stay in the city, so did I leave my meager accommodations for a townhouse at the top of Primrose Hill, filled with scandalous bohemian women. Ours was a grand house that had fallen into disrepair; dinner was served by spluttering candlelight and the kitchen sink threw frequent temper tantrums. At night we joined the legendary soirees of high society and frequented artists’ lofts where everyone spoke longingly of bygone eras and exhibitions in Paris.

Despite its charm, my world was far from perfect: a series of burglaries, a disastrous flood, the increasing melancholy of a dear friend and army officer as he prepared to ship overseas once again to war. Through all these things, I sat up late at night in that little Regency townhouse, and I watched the police guard with their tea cups and guns outside a neighboring diplomat’s home, and I thought of that misfit girl I had once been, dreaming of adventure amongst the prim and proper young ladies a continent away, and I wrote.