Someone had once told Emma Molinero that she was made for trouble, and certainly it had dogged her steps from childhood onwards. Her earliest memories were of life with one of the many travelling shows – part fair and part circus – that toured the shires at the dawn of the Victorian era. 

          But at the age of seven she found herself an orphan who, in accordance with her Spanish father’s dying wishes, must now leave the warm and friendly community to live with an unknown English grandmother far to the north in County Durham. With her she took the whips and knives used with such dexterity by her father for his act and for which she had an inherited skill: a strange legacy that would play a significant part in shaping Emma’s destiny.