Lily (Flower Trilogy) (40 page)

Hawkridge Hall was modeled on Ham House, another National Trust property. Known as the most well-preserved Stuart home in England, Ham House was built in 1610 and enlarged in the 1670s. The building has survived virtually unchanged since then, and it still retains most of the furniture from that period. The house and gardens are open daily from April through October. Ham House was owned by the Lauderdales, one of the most powerful families in Restoration England, and a visit gives a wonderful picture of seventeenth-century aristocratic life.

Rand’s house in Oxford was inspired by the house Edmond Halley lived in while he held the post of Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1703–1742. If you visit Oxford, look for the house in New College Lane near the Bridge of Sighs. The building isn’t open to tourists, but you can see the outside, including the rooftop observatory Halley added (although he never saw Halley’s comet from it, since it made no appearance between 1682 and his death).

To see pictures and learn more about the places in
Lily,
please visit my Web site at www.LaurenRoyal.com, where you can also enter a contest, sign up for my newsletter, and find recipes for some of the seventeenth-century foods that Lily and Rand enjoyed in this story. I decided that nun’s biscuits should be Lily’s favorite cookies because they’re my favorite, too! If you try the recipes, I hope you’ll e-mail me at Lauren@Lauren Royal.com and tell me which one
you
enjoy most.

If you missed Violet and Ford Chase’s story, you can find it in
Violet,
the first book in my
Flower
trilogy. And if you’d like to revisit Lily and Rand, watch for my next novel,
Rose.

In the meantime, I love hearing from readers, so I hope you’ll drop me a line. If you’d rather send a “real” letter than e-mail (I answer both!), write to P.O. Box 52932, Irvine, CA 92619, and please enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope, especially if you’d like a free auto-graphed bookmark and/or bookplate.

’Til next time,