A Maggot is the larval stage of a winged creature, as is the written text, at least in the writer's hope. But an older though now obsolete sense of the word is that of whim or quirk. By extension it was sometimes used in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century of dance tunes and airs that otherwise had no special title... Mr Beveridge's Maggot, My Lord Byron's Maggot, The Carpenter's Maggot, and so on. This fictional Maggot was written very much for the same reason as those old musical ones of the period in which it is set: out of the obsession with a theme. For some years before its writing a small group of travellers, faceless without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event. Evidently in some past, since they rode horses, and in a deserted landscape, but beyond this very primitive image, nothing. I do not know where it come from, or why it kept obstinately rising from my unconscious. The riders never progressed to any destination. They simply rode aloud a skyline, like a sequence of looped film in a movie projector, or like a single line of verse, the last remnant of lost myth. However, one day one of the riders gained a face. By chance I acquired a pencil and a water-colour drawing of a found woman. There was no indication of artist, simply a little note in ink in one corner, which seemingly says, in Italian, 16 July 1683. This precise dating pleased at first as mutes the drawing itself, which is not of any distinction; yet something in the long dead girl's face, in her eyes, and inexplicable presents, a refusal to die, come slowly to hound me. Perhaps it was that refusal to die that linked this real woman with another I have much longer admired, from rather later in history. This fiction is no way biographically about that second woman, though it does end with her birth in about the real year and quite certainly the real place where she was born. I have given that child her historical name; but I would not have this seen as a historical novel. It is maggot.