Maud Bailey Timeline and Summary

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• Maud Bailey receives a visit from Roland Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher at Prince Albert College, who wants to learn a little bit about the nineteenth-century poet Christabel LaMotte.
• After learning that Roland may have found a connection between Christabel LaMotte and the nineteenth-century poet Randolph Henry Ash, Maud invites Roland to spend a night on her couch so that he can get a bit more work done in Lincoln the next day.
• The next morning, Maud drives Roland out to Croysant le Wold—a rural village near Seal Court, the manor house where Christabel LaMotte spend the last 20+ years of her life.
• After Roland gives some much-needed help to Lady Joan Bailey, one of Seal Court's current owners and occupants—Maud and Roland are invited to join the Baileys for tea.
• When Maud and Roland explain their interests in Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, the Baileys allow them to explore the room where Christabel once lived.
• As they look around the room, Maud remembers one of LaMotte's riddling poems, which describes a "dolly" that keeps a secret.
• By looking beneath a cot where a number of dolls are sitting, Maud discovers bundles of letters that had been wrapped and hidden away. It's a full set of correspondence between Christabel LaMotte and R. H. Ash.
• Sir George and Lady Joan Bailey agree to read out two of the letters—the first and the last—but Sir George announces that he wants to seek advice before letting Maud and Roland read the rest of them.
• Weeks—maybe even months—pass. In the winter, Maud receives a letter from Lady Joan Bailey, inviting her and Roland to return to Seal Court in January.
• Like Roland, Maud accepts the invitation, and she returns to Seal Court early in the new year. There, she and Roland read through the Ash-LaMotte correspondence.
• Although she commutes back and forth from Lincoln on most of the days that she visits Seal Court, an unexpected snowstorm forces Maud to spend one night in the manor house. When she and Roland accidentally bump into each other outside the bathroom that evening, Maud gets her first hint that there might be some sparks between them.
• Maud doesn't see Roland again until April, when the two of them meet up to visit the cottage where Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover once lived.
• Sometime later—we don't know exactly how long—Maud decides to visit Beatrice Nest in London. There, as she pores over Ellen Ash's journals, she finds hard evidence that Blanche Glover had been in touch with R. H. Ash's wife.
• Maud has a distressing run-in with her ex-lover, Fergus Wolff, as she's leaving Beatrice's office. Fergus demands to know what she and Roland are up to, and he promises to figure it out.
• Two days later, Maud and Roland meet up again. This time, they decide to take a trip to North Yorkshire together, where they'll travel the same terrain that R. H. Ash was known to have travelled in the summer of 1859. They hope to find some evidence that Christabel LaMotte had been there with him.
• Maud and Roland spend five days together in North Yorkshire, visiting Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood's Bay, Whitby, and Boggle Hole.
• While visiting a shop in Whitby that sells jet ornaments and jewelry, Maud realizes that a jet brooch that she wears all the time might have belonged to Christabel—and, what's more, might have been purchased during Christabel's trip to North Yorkshire with Randolph Henry Ash.
• Later that summer, Maud receives an unexpected visit from her American colleague and sister- feminist Leonora Stern.
• Leonora brings an equally-unexpected clue that might help Maud and Roland to find the next piece of the Ash-LaMotte love-affair puzzle: a letter from a French scholar, Ariane Le Minier, who says she's discovered evidence that Christabel LaMotte was in Brittany in the autumn of 1859.
• During Leonora's visit, everything suddenly hits the fan. Mortimer Cropper has caught the scent of Roland and Maud's discovery, Sir George has suddenly realized that the Ash-LaMotte correspondence might be worth a lot of money, Sir George's lawyer has contacted James Blackadder, and, all of a sudden, Roland and Maud's secret quest has become a very public affair.
• Maud suggests that she and Roland take off to Brittany to visit Ariane Le Minier. They do, and pretty soon they're reading a set of photocopies that Ariane has made for them.
• The photocopies are from the journal of Sabine de Kercoz—Christabel LaMotte's Breton cousin—and they reveal that Christabel LaMotte was pregnant when she arrived in Brittany in the autumn of 1859.
• Maud and Roland spend three weeks together in Brittany, but head back to England when they realize that Mortimer Cropper, Leonora Stern, and James Blackadder are hot on their trail.
• Back in Lincoln, Roland takes up residence on Maud's couch while she heads into the new term.
• In October, Maud gets a phone call from Euan MacIntyre, who asks her and Roland to meet him for dinner.
• At dinner with Euan, Val, and Toby Byng, Maud learns that she may be the rightful owner of the Ash-LaMotte correspondence.
• When she and Roland get home that night, Maud gets yet another phone call—this one from Beatrice Nest, who's calling to say that Mortimer Cropper intends to rob R. H. Ash's grave. We're not making this up.
• Maud and Roland decide to head to London. There, Maud stays with one of her aunts while Roland heads back to his old place.
• Soon, Maud meets Beatrice, Roland, Euan, Val, and Blackadder for a "conference" at Beatrice's home. There, Maud and Roland explain what they've been up to all year, and the group discusses how to thwart Mortimer Cropper's grave-robbing plan.
• When the big showdown goes down in the cemetery, Maud is right in the thick of things. Together with the others, she helps to prevent Mortimer Cropper from making off with the "treasure" from Randolph Henry Ash's grave.
• Back at the Rowan Tree Inn, the group opens the "treasure"—a black specimen box—and finds a final letter from Christabel LaMotte inside.
• As Maud reads the letter aloud to the group, she realizes that Christabel wasn't her great-great-great-aunt, as she'd always thought, but her great-great-great-grandmother instead!.
• After the talk dies down, Maud asks Roland to help her find a room. There, the two of them discuss their feelings and their plans for the future, and, for the first time ever, they head to bed together.