Orczy, Baroness

(1865 -1947)

Information

Baroness Orczy was always keen to use places she knew well as settings for her novels and the one she wrote during her three years in Thanet, ‘The Nest of the Sparrowhawk’(1913), has as its background the area around the tiny village of Acol where she and her husband rented a house. She decided that nearby Epple Bay at Birchington, where at high tide the sea crashes against the jagged chalk cliffs towering above, was the perfect setting for a fatal meeting between the dastardly Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse and the young man who threatens to expose him.

Quotations

The mist had not lifted.It was heavy and dank like a huge sheet of grey thrown over things secret and unavowable.Over the sea it hung, thickest down in the bay, lurking in the crevices of the chalk, in the great caverns and mighty architecture, carved by the patient toil of the billows in the solid mass of the cliffs.
Up above it was slightly less dense: allowing distinct peeps of the rough carpet of coarse grass, of the downtrodden path winding towards Acol, of the edge of the cliff, abrupt, precipitous, with a drop of some ninety feet into that grey pall of mist to the sands below.
…. A gentle breeze had risen about half an hour ago and was blowing the mist hither and thither, striving to disperse it, but not yet succeeding in mastering it, for it only shifted restlessly to and fro, like the giant garments of titanic ghosts, revealing now a distant peep of sea, anon the interior of a colonnaded cavern, abode of mysterious ghouls, or again a nest of gulls in a deep crevice of the chalk; revealing and hiding again: - a shroud dragged listlessly over monstrous dead things.