The Judge's Cat

Thomas Bradshaw, a fine, upstanding, recently widowed lawyer, progressive, sensitive and music loving, with five small children living in a Grace and Favour apartment in Hampton Court Palace, meets Emily Halkett, eighteen, pretty, romantic, innocent, and without a dowry. She is fifteen years younger than he, but they fall in love and marry, producing five more children. This is the saga of a prosperous, middle-class Victorian family with a dependable cast of characters; the needy, manipulative, widowed mother, the distinguished soldier grandfather, the mad cousin, the rich best friend with her royal connections and dark undercurrents of jealousy, a falling out and the consequences. More
These are the chronicles of the Victorian age; from the great tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic, to the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, there are royal weddings and a coronation, assassinations and the start of World War 1, the book spans a hundred years of British history seen from the perspective of a few ordinary, but observant people.
This is also an account of a real family of that time, based on the author’s personal history. It catalogues the rise to prominence of the Judge, his enduring love for his wife Emily, and his fall from the Grace he most desires. Much of it is seen through Emily’s eyes; there are the sons who died young, the daughters who never married and the houses where they lived, their travels abroad, births, deaths and weddings, the court presentations, the cousin’s confinement to a lunatic asylum, all told in the elegant style of the period through letters, diaries and journal entries.
Through it all a mysterious white cat appears from time to time, a harbinger of both good and evil.