Grateful thanks to my editor, Samantha Bruce-Benjamin, for her extraordinary passion, intelligence, generosity and hard work.

Thanks too, to Cynthia Cannell for her loyalty and enthusiasm, and to Kate Miciak for her faith and support.

It is sometimes a difficult job reading an early draft of a novel, and I am grateful to Douglas Herring, Ruth G. Zimler, Michael Rakusin, and Alexandre Quintanilha for their invaluable comments.

I am forever in debt to Laurens van der Post, whose books first started me hunting for Midnight, and to authors too numerous to name for their wonderful historical research.

Special thanks to Alex, who — like this book — links three continents.

Afierce wind was driving the rain in off the sea as I made my way home across the slippery cobblestone streets of my beloved city of Porto.

It was May of 1798, a month after my seventh birthday. Carefully tucked away inside my cane basket were two scrolls of indigo muslin that I had agreed to fetch for my mother — but only in exchange for a favor, I have to confess. If this rain were to splash so much as an inch of her fabric, she would grumble to herself all evening and refuse to make me my favorite sweet. Hence, not so much for the continued protection of the goods themselves as for the sake of my sweet tooth, I sought out shelter.

A certain inherited distrust of all things religious prompted me to choose Senhor David’s old bookshop, rather than the whitewashed chapel next door, as a place to wait out the storm. As I entered through the low doorway, David encouraged me to leave my basket behind his writing desk and to remove my sodden boots, which he dangled over the iron railing by his fireplace.