No Name

Magdalen Vanstone

Magdalen is the younger Vanstone daughter — quick, fearless, and used to being adored — until the discovery that her parents' marriage was invalid leaves her and Norah nameless and penniless overnight. Where her sister submits, Magdalen burns to fight back, and her variable spirits swing between feverish gaiety and intractable despair as she enlists the disreputable Captain Wragge for a campaign of disguise and deception. Her willingness to stake her identity itself on revenge is what drives the novel's central, uneasy question: how far will she go, and what will it cost her?

Norah Vanstone

Norah is the sedate daughter, slower to charm but deeper in loyalty, whose rooted distrust of Frank Clare and refusal to bend put her at odds with the family long before disaster strikes. When the sisters are disinherited, she chooses endurance and respectable work while Magdalen chooses war, and the rift between their temperaments becomes the novel's emotional fault line. Her longing for her sister — and Magdalen's confession that she wanted only to put her arms round Norah's neck — keeps the story tethered to something warmer than vengeance.

Mrs. Lecount

Mrs. Lecount governs Sea-View Cottage and its foolish master with quiet, absolute authority — until the arrival of the Bygraves threatens her position and her plans. She fights back not with open anger but with forged descriptions, anonymous notes, and a vigilance that never sleeps, testing Noel's secrets by watching doors and windows before sunrise. Her duel with Captain Wragge is the novel's sharpest contest of wits, and her tigerish patience makes her far more dangerous than any mere domestic tyrant.

Noel Vanstone

Noel inherits the Vanstone fortune that should have been the sisters', and lives in timid luxury under Mrs. Lecount's thumb at Sea-View Cottage. Vain, suspicious, and secretly delighted by his own cleverness, he fancies himself a match for his housekeeper even as Captain Wragge and Magdalen play him like an instrument. His vacillation and self-congratulating cunning are exactly what make him so easy to maneuver — and so central to the schemes closing around him.

Captain Wragge

Captain Wragge lives by his wits, staging elaborate domestic fictions with his addle-headed wife Matilda recast as 'Mrs. Bygrave' and Magdalen as his niece 'Miss Bygrave.' He is a rogue with a relish for the game, coaching Magdalen in deceit while privately applauding his own audacity, and his running battle with Mrs. Lecount is a duel of con artists. His cheerful amorality gives the novel its comic energy — and makes him the engine of Magdalen's descent into disguise.

Miss Garth

Miss Garth has long been the household's high authority on domestic questions, and she flatly declines to step off her pedestal for anyone — not for Frank Clare, not for the parents who favored him. Her bristling congratulations and ominously prophetic eyes make her a tart counterweight to the family's easy enthusiasms. When the sisters are cast adrift, she remains their steadiest, most unsentimental friend, the one Magdalen can still ask for help 'for my father's sake and my mother's sake.'