A Gift From the Heart

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Spotlight on A Gift to the Heart

When the Queen of Misrule takes over the town, sins are laid bare, and brothers lose their hearts.

When Cilla Wintergreen supports her sister’s plans to punish the man who ruined their friend, she helps in a miscarriage of justice, for they catch the wrong man. But no harm is done, except to her imagination. She cannot forget the sight of their victim, half naked, his torso shining in the candlelight. Just as well she is unlikely to meet him again. Until she does.

When Drake Sanderson is mistaken for his licentious older brother Colin, he readily forgives the women who captured him. After all, they release him when they realize he isn’t Colin. But the event changes his life, for one of those women captures his heart, and he won’t give up until she agrees to be his wife or marries another.

When Livy Wintergreen tries to take revenge on a cruel seducer, and catches the wrong man, she puts in train a series of events she could not have imagined. For she had long thought she was too old, too contentious, and too independent to find a man to love her.

When Bane Sanderson rescues his brother from female revelers out for retribution, he did not expect their queen to consume his heart and mind, until courting her seems the only sensible course of action. If she is not put off by his scars, his irregular birth will disgust her. But he must try.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTFYXNXB

Two brothers, two sisters, two love stories.

An Excerpt from A Gift to the Heart

Livy had come down to earth with a crash. Everything had been going so well. Sanderson had come in response to the letter. He had drunk the wine she had given him and passed out. Her collaborators had helped to strip him and put on the goat’s head. Exactly as they had planned.

And, oh, the uplifting sensation of striking back at all the men who thought they could have whatever they pleased while denying the same freedom to women!

Pacing beside the ass, surrounded by her temporary subjects, she had felt powerful, free, and above all, accepted. And then he had arrived. The man in the hood. Riding through the gathered women to haul their prisoner up onto his horse, and then delivering the devastating words that laid bare her mistake.

It didn’t help that something about his voice, his posture, his sheer presence made her tingle, and not in an unpleasant way. A ridiculous and shaming reaction to a complete stranger she had just offended.

Why had she insisted on having none of the locals in the room before Sanderson had been blinded by the goat head? She had meant to protect them from retaliation, and instead, she had led them into a debacle.

Though they didn’t seem downhearted. They were carrying on with the plans they’d had for the evening before the Maplehurst Hall party had joined them. Blankets had been spread out on the ground. Some of the matrons were carrying around baskets of food.

Several of the villagers were passing out jugs of wine. A group was singing. Livy had heard the tune before, but the scandalous lyrics were new to her.

“Come along, Miss Wintergreen,” said a girl from the village that Livy had met earlier in the evening. “Come and have fun.”

Livy allowed herself to be led to where her sister and other people from the house party were sitting, all mixed in with the villagers and other neighbors. “I am so sorry,” she said to them. “My mistake has ruined the evening.”

“Not your mistake,” someone protested. “You had no way of knowing that the silly boy would take the letter to the wrong brother.”

The whole neighborhood—but not the house party—had known that Colin Sanderson was holding a scandalous gathering at his house for Livy’s cousin Jasper Marple and his friends, all of whom were apparently cut from the same cloth. Mrs. Sanderson had gone to spend Christmas with her mother and had given every maid under forty leave to do likewise. Mr. Sanderson had responded by bringing in a carriage load of scandalous women from the nearest town.

“It sounds as if Colin Sanderson well and truly deserved a shaming,” Cilla observed. “What a pity we got the wrong brother. We didn’t even know there was more than one brother.”

“If I had asked someone who knows him to look…” Livy said.

“They are kind of alike,” another of the villagers offered. “Mr. Drake and Mr. Colin. Though I doubt Mr. Colin Sanderson looks so good with his shirt off! Mr. Drake works on the farms and such.”

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Courtship trials on WIP Wednesday

The girls’ chaperone is determined to thwart a courtship in A Gift to the Heart. Three extra ladies on a walk to Hyde Park might deter all but the most determined of suitors. But Bane has an idea.

Ahead of them, Bane and the other two Marple sisters had stopped by a woman wearing a large basket on her back and carrying a tray. Cilla’s sister looked around as Drake and his two ladies approached, and grinned at Cilla, who raised her eyebrows in question.

Miss Livy pointed at the ducks, who were hastening toward the vendor and her customers. Ah! Drake understood what had excited them. Clearly, they knew what the vendor was selling, and what happened after that. “My brother is buying bread to feed to the ducks, ladies. Would you enjoy feeding the ducks?”

“I would love to feed the ducks,” Miss Ruby declared.

Bane heard, and declared, “I have purchased enough for everyone who wishes.”

A cunning fellow, Drake’s brother. In less time than it took to tell, Miss Ruby was tearing small chunks off a loaf of bread and dropping them as she walked toward the Serpentine, a trail of ducks processing behind her. Her sisters, with a loaf each, had hurried ahead, and were feeding those birds who had not joined the exodus.

Bane was carrying three more loaves under one arm and had offered the other to Miss Livy. They followed the Marple sisters and the ducks, but at a slower pace.

“Do you wish to feed the ducks?” Drake asked Cilla, hoping she didn’t, for Bane had bought them time to actually talk, and the bread would not last forever—or even for very long, given that every waterfowl in sight had converged on the three young ladies and quite a few blackbirds and sparrows were darting under the beaks of ducks, chasing crumbs that were too small for the larger birds.

“What I would like is for us to talk, Mr. Sanderson,” Cilla said. “My aunt likes you as a person, but does not approve of you as a suitor. I will make up my own mind, however. And I want to know more about you before I do.” She blushed prettily. “That is, if you are courting me. Do I need to apologize for speaking so openly?”

“You do not owe me an apology,” Drake told her. “Straight talking saves a lot of misunderstanding, and I’m pleased you have spoken so honestly to me. Yes, I am a suitor. Like you, I need to know more but I very much like what I have seen of you so far. Will Lady Marple’s opposition cause problems? For you or for us? Or is it your father’s approval that is most important?”

She tipped her head on one side and regarded him with a steady blue gaze. “My approval is most important. If you gain that, Mr. Sanderson, I shall deal with my father and my aunt.”

 

 

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Little tame creatures


“How did they allow them to keep rats as pets?” asked my editor at the end of my epilogue, when my nine-year-old boy cousins were racing indoors after a fortnight away, to check on their pet rats. “Were they even domesticated at this time?”

Well, yes. They were. And nine-year-old boys love rats as pets at least in part because it upsets the maids and bothers the adult female cousins. Not my boys’ mothers, of course, who are made of sterner stuff.

Rats as domestic pets might have been familiar in Europe as early as the seventeenth century, and this was certainly  the case in Japan. We have excellent documentation for domesticated rats in England in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the ancestor of many of today’s pets might have been raised by Jimmy Shaw or Jack Black. (This might not have been his legal name, but it is the name under which he was interviewed by Henry Mayhew. The interview the two men was published in a book titled London Labour and the London Poor.)

Jack and Jimmy were ratcatchers. He suppled live rats to the rat pits, a popular blood sport that didn’t end until 1912. Another lucrative income source for him was breeding from rats that had different coloured coats. He told Mayhew ‘I have ’em fawn and white, black and white, black white and red. People come from all parts of London to see them rats. They got very tame and you could do anythink with them.’  He sold them as pets or curiosities, mainly to young ladies. Jimmy Shaw was even more interested in the odd rats. If today’s pets are not descended from those kept by one of these two men, they no doubt originated in a similar way.

Laboratory rats appear to have been used in research from at least 1828, and probably were also saved from the rat pits or bred from such animals. The Albino rat often used in laboratories or as pets is also known to have been around for a while. There was apparently a wild colony of Albino rats in Bath in 1828.

 

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A brief history of umbrellas

Umbrellas were used in China as early as 3,500 BC, and waterproofed with a combination of wax and lacquer by 3,000 BC. They came to Europe through ancient trade routes, but were considered appropriate only for women. In England, they were still considered a female accessory as late as 1790, but a man called Jonas Hanway ignored popular ideas of suitability, and used an umbrella for decades. By the early 19th century, men and women both used umbrellas. The folding umbrella, though, would not appear until the 1850s. Which are some of the things I discovered when I went down the research rabbit hole while writing A Gift to the Heart (coming in November 2025).

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Brothers on WIP Wednesday


And here are my heroes from A Gift to the Heart – Drake and Bane.

“The wife is out,” said the blacksmith, when Bane poked his head into the kitchen to see if supper was ready. “It’s Misrule Night. Don’t know what they’re up to, and I’m not going to ask. Supper is on the table.”

Bread, cheese, and a big slab of plum cake. Good enough. Bane poured himself an ale and sat down, as did the blacksmith. They ate in silence—when the lady of the house was home, she chattered enough for all three of them, but the blacksmith was a man of few words, and Bane had been eating alone for most of his life.

Besides, his mind was not on the food or the company, but on his brother. Something about the whole situation didn’t sit right. Drake was popular with the ladies, but—as far as Bane knew—this was the first time he’d ever received an anonymous invitation. Not, in itself, suspicious, but Bane didn’t like the timing. He couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that on Misrule Night, women used their temporary freedom to seek revenge.

Revenge for what, though? Drake was, as Bane had cause to know, the kindest, most giving of men, with a positive talent for staying on pleasant terms with his amours both during and after their liaison.

He had almost finished his ale when a hullabaloo started from outside—the rata-tat-tat of drums, the shriek of whistles, clanging sounds that put him in mind of kitchens.

“Better check,” said the blacksmith, and got up to open the door, just in time for the parade to pass in front of the smithy and then the cottage alongside it.

The noise makers came first. The clanging, Bane noted, was made by various types of spoon against pot lids. The women all wore costumes and masks, like the group he’d seen earlier. Even their own mothers would not have known them.
More women, similarly garbed, followed the noise makers. They were oddly positioned, in long lines, and it took Bane a minute to realise they were pulling on ropes—at least half a dozen ropes, each with eight or nine women haulers. Others danced among them with lamps, lighting the whole scene.

As he craned his neck to see what they were dragging, he noticed that doors and windows were open up and down the village street. The men of the village were silent witnesses to whatever was happening.
“It is a shaming,” said the blacksmith. He sounded awed. “There hasn’t been one in Marblestead for seven years! I wonder who it is?”

A shaming. Bane had never seen one, but he had heard about the last one. The man had been a serial fornicator, seducing one girl after the other with meaningless promises. After being led through the whole village and around the major farms and manors all one Misrule Night, he had left town and had never returned.

The object at the end of the ropes was plodding into view. It was a donkey, stolidly ignoring the ropes, the noise, and the murmuring of the onlookers. That, Bane saw at a glance.

What took all of his attention was not the steed but the rider. He was male. Since he wore nothing but knee breeches and a head-concealing mask in the form of a goat’s head, his gender was beyond a doubt. So said the broad shoulders and the muscular torso, arms and thighs.

He sat backwards on the ass, bound to the saddle with rope, swaying slightly as if he was drunk. Bane knew that torso, those arms! He narrowed his eyes as the rider drew level, and was aided by one of the dancers, who lifted her lamp so that it shone on the rider’s elbow.

“It is Drake,” Bane said.

“Really?” asked the blacksmith. “What has Drake done to deserve a shaming?”

“Nothing,” Bane said, grimly, and took a step forward, but the blacksmith grabbed his arm. “If you go out there, you’ll be joining him.”

“I can’t leave him there,” Bane protested, but the blacksmith was right. He’d not get Drake free without using his brain instead of just reacting. “I need my horse,” he said. “And a good knife. I’ll grab him when they take him off the donkey to throw him into the pond.”

“They’ll overpower you,” the blacksmith warned. “There are what? Fifty of them? One of you.”

“I can’t fight them. Not women,” Bane admitted. “But I have to try. If I get dunked alongside Drake, so be it.”

The blacksmith pursed his lips. “Cut the goat’s head off,” he advised. “Let them see they’ve got the wrong man.”

That might work. Bane left for the barn, where he also stabled his horse.He wanted to merely bridle the horse and be off after his brother, but his common sense told him that he might need the stability of saddle and stirrups. It took several minutes, even with the blacksmith’s help, but at last he was in the saddle and galloping after the Misrule party.

They had reached the pond and were dragging Drake from the saddle, none too gently. Fortunately for Drake, only a few of the women—ten at most—were involved in the dismounting. The rest were not even watching. Rather, they waited on the edge of the pond for the next event in the night’s entertainment. Bane grinned. He would give them something to watch.

He set the horse at a gallop, straight at the cluster around Drake, pulling up only at the last minute. They had, as he’d hoped, leapt out of the way, and Bane reached down and grabbed the rope that bound Drake’s arms to his body. “Mount behind me,” he shouted, and heaved as Drake jumped and scrambled until he was seated behind Bane.

The horse danced and skittered, objecting to the noise, the load and the whole situation. That was a help, for the women who might have objected to losing their prisoner were keeping their distance.

“This is my brother Mandrake Sanderson,” Bane shouted. “He has done nothing worthy of a shaming.” He was pretending to be trying to control the horse, but his knees were encouraging its jittery behaviour.

A woman with the crown and staff of the Lady of Misrule stepped forward—an Amazon with dark curly hair. He could not see much of her face behind her half mask, but what he could see distracted him for a moment. She was stunning.
“Mandrake?” she asked. “Not Colin?”

Bane hoped it was her readiness to listen to reason that soothed his anger, and not his awareness of her as an attractive female. Or perhaps it was just that Colin probably deserved whatever the women cared to dish out. They had made a mistake, and Bane had rescued Drake before they could half drown him. Or all the way drown him, which old timers said had sometimes happened.

“Not Colin,” he replied. “I’ll show you.” Bane twisted in the saddle so that he could use his knife to cut the ropes, an act the horse made more difficult than it needed to be. “Drake, take the head off,” he said.

“I don’t feel too good,” said Drake, in a voice that quavered over the register, but he fumbled with the goat’s head and lifted it free. His eyes looked odd. They must have given him something.

As the horse calmed, the women had gathered closer.

“It is Drake,” said one of the women. Bane couldn’t be sure, but he thought he recognised the voice of the blacksmith’s wife.

“Mr Colin Sanderson is older,” explained another to the Lady of Misrule.

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Meet a new heroine on WIP Wednesday

I’ve made a start on A Gift From the Heart. The Winterberry sisters are my heroines.

At the time, Lucilla Winterbury thought the Twelfth Night rumpus to be perfectly justified. And just! Unwise, perhaps, but only because she did not want even a hint of it reaching her father. For if Father knew what she and the other young woman at the party had done, he would shut her sister Olivia in her room forever, and Cilla he would never let out of his sight again.
Father had been reluctant to allow Cilla and her sister Olivia to go to Marplehurst Hall for a twelve-day Christmastide party. No. He was reluctant for Cilla to go. Cilla was his younger daughter and his pet. As he had told Livy more than once, his elder daughter could go straight to the devil for all he cared.
In the past, he had never given permission even for Livy to go. Lady Virginia Marple, hostess of the event, was his younger sister, and the two did not get on. Indeed, perhaps his dislike of Livy was rooted in his fraught relationship with his sister, for he frequently said that Livy was just like Aunt Ginny.
As to the party, Aunt Ginny had only begun them after the end of her period of mourning for her husband, and for the first three years, neither Livy nor Cilla could have gone. Neither would have left their mother during her long illness, nor could they attend while they were in mourning for her.
The following year, Father said that Aunt Ginny had grown wild since she was widowed, though he would not disclose any details.
This year, Aunt Ginny descended on him in person, and demanded that both daughters be released into her care. Aunt Ginny was Father’s younger sister, and he swore that Livy was exactly like her. Cilla and Livy listened to their conversation from the secret passage that ran beside the fireplace.
“Olivia may go,” Father said, “but Lucilla is not out, Virginia.”
“It is an all-female party, Horace,” she told him. “My own daughters, goddaughters and their mothers. I want my nieces with me. Other girls of Cilla’s age will be there. Younger girls, too. It is disgraceful, by the way, that Cilla has not yet made her debut. The girl is nineteen, after all.”
“You shall leave me to know what is best for my daughter,” Father insisted. He sniffed. “Lucilla is delicate. I would not expect you to understand.”
Father had always insisted that Cilla was delicate. Mama had been delicate, and Cilla looked just like her, but had always kept excellent health. Livy said that Mama’s delicacy was caused by Father’s bullying, which might be true.
“Then the matter is easily resolved,” Aunt Ginny retorted. “I shall look after Cilla, and so shall Livy. You may be confident that we will not allow her to become overtired or stressed. Though I think you should trust Cilla’s good sense, Horace.”
Father was firmly of the view that women had no good sense, but were instead creatures of emotion. Livy said that this proved Father to be a creature of emotion.
“I cannot reconcile it with my conscience,” Father insisted. “Olivia may go.”
“Both of my nieces,” Aunt Ginny insisted. “I do not wish my other guests to think I am ashamed of the connection, Horace.”
Cilla winced. Father would not like that. Wealthy though he was, he was still only a merchant in the eyes of the people Aunt Ginny counted as friends. The remark worked, though. After a few other objections, each of which Aunt Ginny countered, the sisters were permitted to leave with their aunt.
They had a fabulous time. Cilla already knew and liked her cousins, and she soon made other friends. As for Livy, away from Father and in an all female environment, she blossomed. It helped that, on the first night, her slice of the Christmas pudding contained a silver crown, making her the Lady of Misrule for the whole of the party.
She threw herself into the role, showing the sly humour that she normally shared only with Cilla. It fuelled a seemingly endless succession of merry tricks and hilarious games, and inspired others to offer suggestions of their own.
Everyone was enjoying themselves. Everyone, that is, except Aurora Thornton, a girl from the next village, who did her best to join in but was clearly unhappy. Cilla tried to draw her out of her shell, but to no avail.
“It is odd,” one of the cousins said. “Rory is not normally like this.”
“She was happy when the party started,” said another cousin. “Very happy. I thought she had a suitor, but if she did, he has disappointed her.”
Poor girl. Cilla had never had a suitor. From the stories she was hearing this week, perhaps that was a good thing.
In the end, what caused Aurora to sob her heart out on Cilla’s shoulder was a game, for one of the girls claimed that she could read the cards and tell fortunes, and the fortune she told for Aurora was a tall fair headed man who would be faithful and true.
“But he wasn’t,” Aurora wailed. “Colin was not faithful, and he wasn’t true. He made all kinds of promises, and they were all lies, for he is ma- ma- ma- ma- married!” The final word was broken by sobs, and even though the young ladies—the mothers and aunts were closeted with a bottle of port and had left the damsel to their own devices—even though the young ladies gathered closely around, it was some time before the story was told.
She had had a secret suitor, who became her lover. He lived in this village, and so Aurora had arrived full of hope, certain she would be able to make arrangements to see him, to find out why he had not visited for several weeks.
And on Christmas Day, when the house party attended church, she did see him—in his pew with a woman and two children. A few questions to those who lived locally soon confirmed that they were his family—his wife and their offspring.
“Well,” said Livy, when she understood all, “you are not with child, and nobody knows except us. And we are all your friends, Aurora, and will keep your secret. The question is, what do we do to Colin Sanderson to embarrass him in public the way he has embarrassed you in private?”
Cilla had never been prouder of Livy. Though some of the maidens had been horrified to have a ruined women among them, Livy had reminded them that Aurora was a sheltered innocent and Sanderson a mature man who should have known better.
“He set out to ruin her,” she said, fiercely. “Who is to say that any of us would have fared better, believing his lies and his promises as Aurora did.” And one by one, they nodded their heads.
Even the most censorious promised to keep the secret, and all of them had suggestions about making Sanderson pay. The plan they came up with for New Year’s Eve was masterly, Cilla thought.
New Year’s Eve, in Marblestead, was the Festival of the Lady of Misrule, where the women took over the town and the men stayed indoors out of their way. It was the perfect time to make a fool out of a lying deceiver.
They had to enlist the groom who was sweet on Cilla’s eldest cousin to lure the Sanderson mountebank to the tavern in the village, but everything else, they could handle themselves.
It would be the highlight of the party.