The Castle Inn

Dice keep fashionable travellers occupied when their carriage stops at an inn near Oxford in the spring of 1767. Sir George Soane, already weary of costly amusements, hears a postboy describe a woman seeking a gentleman willing to fight a duel for her. This roadside report gives Stanley John Weyman's historical novel an opening built around curiosity, social rank and the possibility of sudden action.

Coaching inns and the roads toward Bath provide the setting for encounters between aristocrats, servants and other travellers. A later scene follows Soane, Mr. Fishwick and their companions in pursuit of a chaise carrying Julia. Their horses tire, the night wears on, and the creak of carriage wheels gives the riders a new reason to press forward. Readers drawn to historical adventure will find eighteenth-century manners alongside the practical pressures of travelling by horse, with urgency conveyed through darkness, distance and fatigue.