Esswood House
A great English country house, the equal of Longliet, Hardwick Hall, Wilton House, Sissinghurst, and that pile owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Located in Lincolnshire, near the charmless village of Beaswick., and set upon a descending series of terraces. Long owned by the Seneschal family, now perhaps extinct, perhaps not. Under the management of the capable Mr. Robert Wall, Esswood has long been known for its magnificent Adams library, the repository for otherwise unknown manuscripts by most of the leading modernist writers of the twentieth century. Hence a treasure trove, a honey pot, to the literary scholar, one of which annually is named an Esswood Fellow, to be invited for a summer’s term doing research amongst the neat rows of manuscript boxes. It should be noted that the visiting Fellow is required to partake each night of the same main course, veal with morel sauce, although the wines that accompany the unvarying menu grow increasingly rare and valuable. The most fortunate of the Fellows will find themselves greeted on their arrival by a woman of unusual beauty and intelligence, a faux-chatelaine, who never gives her name and is, alas alas, never seen again. The basement and cellars of Esswood House are off limits to all but the staff, who are invisible.

Shorelands
A great manor house and estate owned by the Weatherall family of Massachusetts, and tucked away into their private woodland and park near Lenox. Consists of a Main House, last inhabited by the famous hostess Georgina Weatherall, who in the nineteen-twenties turned the entire estate into a literary colony. In its scattered cottages, called “Bungalows” and given names like Pepperpot, Gingerbread, and Honey House, the novelists and poets courted their various muses by day and of an evening, met for cocktails and dinner in Main House. Famous guests include T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, and the legendary fantasy author, Hugo Driver. Now chiefly a tourist attraction, under the management of the Weatherall Foundation and managed by Ms. Margaret Ryan, a woman who must be called formidable. Shorelands was once the scene of a despicable crime which floated into view forty years later, shaking its bloody rags and creating havoc all round.