Judging by her own ideals of beauty and drama, Diana Dalziel’s arrival in the world must have been a bit of a let-down. That her Scottish father’s lineage merely went back to 834, or that her mother was part of the narrow 1890s New York society, was not half as picturesque as she’d have liked. Her blood, she felt, should be throbbing with the violent purple corpuscles of a Montezuma or Genghis Khan, her skin as palely violet as that of Diane de Poitiers or Liane de Pougy. She would live in lacquer pavilions lapped by lily-scented seas, or a snowbound, bitumen-blackened reindeer yurt
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