The Water Bird, which some have called “Britain’s first seaplane,” began its life in Manchester, England, where it was built as a land plane. It was first flown in July 1911, and was then moved to Lake Windermere, to a hangar on Cockshott Point, where a float and airbags were substituted for the wheeled undercarriage. It made its inaugural seaplane flight on November 25, 1911, and after that, made an astonishing 60 flights on 38 days, its longest 20 miles at an altitude of 800 feet. The plane’s chief financial backer was a man named E. W. Wakefield from Kendal; its pilot was Stanley Adams. Early in 1912, a second plane joined the first, and Wakefield was said to have plans for five more, with which he hoped to establish a passenger route between Bowness and Grasmere.

There was a great deal of understandable enthusiasm for the project among local shopkeepers, who felt that aeroplanes would be good for business, and the press was regularly invited to take photos and write stories. The promoters energetically spread the word that the work they were doing had scientific merit and that the aeroplane—and specifically, the hydroplane—would prove useful if England went to war with the Germans. There was a great deal of war-talk in the years before fighting broke out, and the government was actively supporting experiments in flight.

But the local folk and those who loved the scenic beauty of the Lakes were not nearly as enthusiastic about the project. The letter Beatrix Potter begins on page 13 of this novel, expressing her unhappiness about the hydroplane, is an excerpt from one she wrote to Millie Warne on December 13, 1911. Potter spoke for the many who found the hydroplane not only a nuisance (what we today call “noise pollution”) but a serious hazard to boating, fishing, and transportation, and she found in this “a cause she could not ignore, for both personal and environmental reasons,” as Potter biographer Linda Lear puts it. In January 1912, Potter wrote to Country Life magazine, protesting that “a more inappropriate place for experimenting with flying machines could scarcely be chosen,” citing the “danger to existing traffic—the traffic of steamers, yachts, row-boats and Windermere Ferry.” She was specific about the situation:

The flying continued daily, although there was a brief respite in February, when Potter wrote to Harold Warne that “the hydrop. seems to be stopped with ice at present.”

Beatrix Potter wasn’t the only one writing letters. That same month, Canon Rawnsley, a personal friend of the Potters and one of the founders of the National Trust, wrote to The Times, saying that “the value of the shores of Windermere as a resort of rest and peace is seriously imperiled.” The barrage of letters continued for some weeks, and Potter herself launched a petition that garnered local and London signers. “I find radicals much more willing [to sign] than conservatives,” she wrote to Warne. The National Trust formed a committee “to preserve Windermere from being used as an experimental ground for the hydroplane” and lodged protests with the home secretary, who brought Parliament into the act. On March 20, 1912, a meeting of Members of Parliament and “interested parties” was held in the House of Commons, where objections were raised to this rude disturbance of the tranquility of the Lake District. At the end of the meeting, it was decided to ask the home secretary to hold an inquiry and regulate the air traffic under the new Aerial Regulation Act 1911.

Shortly after that, however, the dragon took matters into his own hands. Oh, no—I’m sorry. It wasn’t like that at all. It appears to have been a simple windstorm that did the damage. On April 4, 1912, Beatrix wrote to Harold Warne that she was “very pleased to hear that the roof of the hydro hangar has blown in, & smashed two machines.” One of the aeroplanes was repaired, but the Water Bird was totally destroyed.

The British Admiralty must have been disappointed in this outcome, for there was serious military interest in the plane. It is not recorded that Winston Churchill ever visited the Cockshott hangar, although he certainly might have. He was keenly interested in flying and in fact took flying lessons himself in 1912-1913, stopping only when his instructor died in a plane crash (as the fictional Oscar Wyatt dies in this book) and his wife, Clementine, put her foot down, grounding him. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill created the Royal Flying Corps in May 1912. It was his personal sense of urgency that got England into the air during the First World War and eventually made the seaplane an important weapon against enemy submarines.

In addition to inserting the dragon into the aeroplane story, I have taken a few other liberties with real-world facts, chiefly with the way Beatrix Potter tells her parents about her engagement. According to Linda Lear, she made that announcement some months later, in the summer of 1912, after which “there ensued another long and bitter contest of wills, not unlike the violent battle between badger and fox that she had described in Mr. Tod.” If I were Miss Potter, I think I would have chosen to tell them in a letter.