Curious about what’s behind Fool’s Gold? Explore my author notes about the historical details behind the book.
These notes do contain some plot spoilers! Otherwise, they’re as shared at the end of the book, with edits only to share the most useful links and cleaning up some formatting for the web. Posted March 2026.
Thank you so much for joining me on this trip through Fool’s Gold!
As noted at the beginning of the book, this book is very much about the consequences of Seven Sisters and the events that led up to it. It comes out of Kiya Nicoll, my editor, pointing out I hadn’t yet had fun with a villain redeemed trope, and that Robin was a great candidate. The more I wrote about him, the more fascinated I got by how he got to be how he was. And then, what he could be like if he stopped being quite so tangled.
And of course, I’ve been wanting to write more about the Scali banking family for a good while now. And the custos dragons, who are mentioned briefly in a couple of places.
The core of this book is art forgery, a subject I find rather fascinating. I read about the Spanish Forger, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th century, creating at least 200 forgeries. Many of them were manuscript miniatures, and once you’ve looked at a few of them, it gets easier to pick out the forgeries.
While my plot ended up going in a rather different direction, I highly recommend Lydia Pyne’s book Genuine Fakes, which has a chapter on this (A version of it appears online via LitHub). The story of how they realised these forgeries had been happening is even more fascinating, and features Belle da Costa Greene, who was the Pierpont Morgan Library’s chief librarian in the 1930s.
The detection technique used in Albion that Robin references a few times is part of the plot of Pastiche (set in 1906). Of course, they’re using sympathetic magic techniques rather than spectroscopic investigation or other modern scientific techniques.
Painting and paints are also a key part of this story. I’ve loved the idea of the colourmen since I learned about them. These were businesses that focused on pigment in all its forms, and the photographs of them (even in black and white) give such a sense of vibrancy. As Robin notes, many of those pigments are dangerous to refine, store, or otherwise prepare (and many of them were also functionally trade secrets.)
The pigments named are all more or less as described. I encourage you to look them up and see what glorious colours they are! If you’d like to learn more about pigments, I adore Victoria Finlay’s Colour: A Natural History of the Palette for the stories she tells about colour, and there are a number of other great and readable sources out there about the topic as well.
The artists named are mostly actual historical artists, with the exception of Roderick Sterling-Wise (of course) and Ethan Enburgh-Bright, whose work I imagine looking something like Henri Rousseau’s.
Jean-Léon Gérôme is an artist who was painting around the time of the Impressionists, but in a very detailed style. (His L’Eminence Grise has been a favourite of mine for the evocation of fabric and use of light since I was introduced to it during a museum trip in something like 7th grade.)
Iron oak gall ink is in fact made about how Robin describes it. You take oak galls, soak them in an iron solution for a period of time (a week or two), and then strain them and add something (often gum arabic) to thicken it, to produce a densely black ink. The British Library had a series of videos on mediaeval manuscripts and inks, including one on oak gall that was very useful here. (It’s not currently online, but YouTube can find you some.)
Fountain pens were of course a common writing implement at the time. The Gold Starry is a real line of pens made in the period. I’m pretty sure the Gryphon was as well (though I have expanded its business to the magical community), but I can’t find my notes to confirm that at the moment. The Wyvern is my own invention. The 1920s were a period when people were experimenting with all sorts of new materials, including celluloid, and I was very caught by what Robin would think of the brilliant translucent colours.
The Scali banking family have been mentioned in a number of my other books, but Beatrice’s grandfather, Amadeo Scali, and several of her uncles and relatives appear in Sailor’s Jewel as secondary characters. Historically speaking, there was an actual Scali family who were a significant banking family in Florence in the Middle Ages. They started as local cloth traders, and grew to an international business, including being heavily involved in the wool trade in the British Isles. Then, suddenly, they went bankrupt in 1326, and disappear as a banking house. (Well, at least in the non-magical community.)
I’ve been thinking about how coins work in Albion since writing Goblin Fruit (where some of the magical implications of what Beatrice describes about travelling coins is quite relevant). The 1920s are a deeply fascinating and confusing period when it comes to actual precious metal money. As Beatrice mentions, basically every country wandered off and onto and off the gold standard a couple of times, sometimes in a few different ways. If you look into the history, you’ll see why I didn’t bother trying to figure out what was going on precisely during the months the book takes place. It’s dreadfully tangled.
I found the earlier chapters of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson helpful in thinking through the magical implications of money, and the stories that we (as countries and civilisations as well as individuals) tell ourselves about money.
This led to me thinking about what the role of a banking family is in Albion. Obviously, they are connected to a wide range of specialists who can support the care and protection of various magical items which may be needed or used only intermittently. As Beatrice notes, they maintain both easier-access smaller vaults (rather like our modern safe deposit boxes) but also deep vaults with extensive storage space. Caves, as I have had reason to learn in my library career, are excellent places to store things at a consistent temperature and humidity, so long as you don’t end up with flooding or too much moisture in the system.
One complication in this period was the question of inheritance. When there was such massive death overseas, it became much harder in some cases to handle inheritance, and many countries had a period of time before someone could be declared dead. (Since someone could have been incredibly ill and unable to communicate in hospital, and then recover somewhat, or have abandoned his previous life.)
Eventually, though, some of those decisions have to be handled, as well as follow on implications. If someone leaves property to someone who may or may not be dead, and then that first person dies, you get an incredible tangle of what happens next.
The custos dragons are a logical outgrowth of some of these thoughts. They are some of the Fatae who stayed after the Pact of 1484, but they have a very specific role in the magical ecosystem. (As noted, most people know they exist. But equally, most people never see one, or only at a great distance, and have no idea what they do.)
I was not sure that they talked until I started writing the first chapter where Emrys appears. As Beatrice says, more often the issue is getting a word in edgewise. I had a great deal of fun writing him.
George is named George for two reasons. First, I couldn’t resist the pun on St George, dragonslayer and patron saint of England. Second, I have a tendency to name any man I need a name for George. I promised my editor that if I got to use George for this George, it would be the last time. (To be fair, I tried to name four different people George in Outcrossing and this is legitimately confusing and pointless. Even if it was an incredibly common name in the period.)
The last point is about Albion’s legal system. As noted, there are methods for either compelling truth-telling or at least knowing when someone is lying, if you can set up the proper magical protocols. This obviously changes some things about legal cases (extenuating circumstances obviously affect things, as does the fact that many legal situations are not purely about truth or lies.)
As far as I understand it, there was no statute of limitations in the UK at this time for crimes like art forgery. Fraud usually had a 6 year limit as of an act in the 1980s, but this is Albion, so we’re going for 7 years as a legal limit for some kinds of cases. (Including getting Robin to admit to forgery. I do not swear this is canonical unless and until it comes out in text in a book, but I expect it’s the sort of thing where they would go back further if he were actually charged with something, but not when he’s being questioned in regard to another case.)
That brings us to the end of the notes. The next book in the series is The Hare and the Oak which explores the land magics and the effect of the War on inheritance. I hope you’ll continue to join me for other tales of Albion!