A work of fiction

The setting is real. The story is not. Burford, Bibury, Stow-on-the-Wold, Daylesford, Broadway, Chipping Norton: these are places you can drive to. The pubs keep their actual hours, and the light over the limestone at four in the afternoon is the light the chapters describe. Past the village boundary, the work is invented.

The characters are invented. No real person is depicted, and no keeper is a composite of anyone living. The houses where the gatherings happen are invented too, placed near real villages but never inside the walls of any real estate. The events did not occur.

The Cotswolds Code itself is invented. The Tenets quoted across these pages, the Sponsor, the Withdrawal, the Ruin, the Lost Years: all of it belongs to the story. The Assembly does not exist outside these pages. The principles a reader takes from the work are theirs to take.