The Chelford estate has a legend — a black-robed monk who walks at night — and a treasure that several people would prefer to find first. Wallace was illegitimate, raised by a Billingsgate fish porter, left school at twelve, and wrote so fast that a joke went round that a caller was told to wait, as Mr Wallace was in the middle of a novel. Sixty plates of portraiture and landscape by painters such as John Lavery and Philip de László, spanning 1846 to 1927, mirror the novel's world of hidden identity and buried fortune.
