Emma is a pretty, bright, inquisitive young woman who has lived most her 19 years in the comfort of her parents' relatively happy home in Mayfair, London. She has the best of everything her indulgent father's money can buy and her mother's good breeding will permit.

Her father is tea magnate Sir Tedmund Norton Godwinson, a self-made merchant whose knighthood was conferred upon him by Edward VII for a shared passion for yachting and his spectacular defeat of a mutual rival in a yacht race.

Her mother is The Hon. Elisabeth Montverre Godwinson, sister of the present Baron Montverre and daughter of the 30th Baron, Charles, and his wife, Baroness Elisabeth Montverre, a popular West End society hostess whose mission in life, or so it appears, is to preserve her family's gentility.

Emma's greatest passion is sleuthing (which includes prying into other people's business), and she reads any and all books and periodicals remotely related to crime and detection.

She also enjoys riding, leisure sports, dancing, reading, writing, dabbling in watercolours, amateur theatre, costume design and other pastimes of a young Edwardian lady.

She is naturally - though not consciously - flirtatious and subject to flights of fancy. She can be quite outspoken at times and even tomboyish when free of her mother's supervision. A product of her time, she is influenced by the rise of suffrage, but not a suffragette like her dear school friend Lucy Willoughby.