Pushkin.

Out of the turmoil of Victorian London, seven men emerged from the shadows.

They each have the same target, the most famous woman in the world.

She threw herself into the arms of those in the carriage and was horribly frightened by this attack.

A flintlock pistol has every chance of killing someone.

Whether she was a young bride or an elderly widow, Queen Victoria was a target.

But little is known about these would-be assassins and why they did it.

Listen to Killing Victoria.

Freeland is a village in the English countryside.

A few miles north of Oxford where I live, it boasts a 19th century church, a cricket team,

and a pub called the Oxfordshire Yoman.

It has about 1500 residents.

In 2007, one of them, Clive Stone, went to see his doctor.

Stone was a bank manager, recently retired.

He joined the bank straight from school and worked his way up.

Now he was concerned about a mysterious pain in his chest.

Renal cell carcinoma is cancer of the kidney.

If you have it, you don't normally discover that because you have a pain in your chest.

Nevertheless, that is what happened to Clive Stone and the prognosis was bad.

The diagnosis was a great shock to me, Stone later wrote.

Both my wife, Jan and I were regular walkers who kept ourselves fit with visits to the gym

and I was a swimmer.

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