October 15, 2016 by judeknight

How a disease of cows saved hundreds of millions of lives

Would people innoculated with cowpox become cows? The cartoonist James Gillray lampooned the fear.

Would people inoculated with cowpox become cows? The cartoonist James Gillray lampooned the fear.

I’ve been looking back over 250 years of growing knowledge about the human body, the ills that befall us, and how to treat them. In her book Smallpox, Syphilis, and Salvation, Sheryl Persson points out that the idea of curing disease is a very new one. For most of history, and for many illnesses even today, physicians have treated symptoms and tried to keep the body alive long enough for it to cure itself.

As for eradicating a disease, we’ve managed to get rid of one, and it took us 180 years from the time a country doctor in England first published a pamphlet suggesting not just the possibility, but the method.

How can we who live in the West in the 21st Century imagine a society where a single illness killed one tenth of the population every year? Where a quarter of the entire population was killed or permanently scarred by that same illness?
Smallpox was no respecter of persons, killing kings and street beggars alike. It was responsible for one out of every three deaths in childhood at a time when a third of children died before they were nine.

It changed the course of history several times, contributing to the fall of Rome, altering the succession of the British throne and ushering in the Georgian era, killing the rulers of the Aztec and Incan nations and crippling their nations so the conquistadors could sweep all before them… The list goes on and on.

Death among the Mezo-Americans

By the middle of the 18th century, England had learned the practice of variolation; fundamentally, the practice of rubbing a cut or scratch with material from a smallpox scab to give a healthy person a case of smallpox. As long as the person administering the treatment avoided both of the two major risks, the person had a far better chance of surviving the disease, and then they wouldn’t catch it again.

The risks? Doctors tried to find milder strains of smallpox by looking for people who were recovering, but sometimes they got it wrong. And—without a germ theory of disease transmission—some of them weren’t that careful about washing their instruments (or even their hands) between patients. Variolation was common during a smallpox epidemic, and doctors carried contagion from their dying patients to their well ones.

George III of England lost two infant sons to variolation within six months of one another. Still, a death rate of less than one in fifty was an improvement over the status quo.

A physician inspects the growth of cowpox on a milking maid' Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A physician inspects the growth of cowpox on a milking maid's hand while a farmer (?) passes another physician a lancet. Coloured etching, c. 1800. Published: [ca. 1800]

A physician inspects the growth of cowpox on a milking maid’
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, http://wellcomeimages.org

Edward Jenner, the country doctor I mentioned, drew on folklore to find a better way. While not the first to inoculate healthy patients with cowpox, he was the first to press his treatment on the medical community. Cowpox was a related disease, seldom fatal or even serious, and country folk had long known that milkmaids were immune to smallpox.

When, in 1796, Jenner inoculated his gardener’s son with cowpox taken from a local milkmaid, he founded the science of vaccination, and took the first step in the long road to the last natural case of smallpox, a hospital cook in Somalia in 1977.

I’ve been reading about illnesses and deaths in the 18th and 19th centuries, and about medical knowledge, for some of my books. In A Raging Madness, (Book 2 of the The Golden Redepennings) the hero is crippled after being hit by a canister shell (today we’d call it shrapnel) and the heroine is a doctor’s daughter and was her father’s apprentice. In the Mountain King series, the next book after The Bluestocking and the Barbarian is The Hermit and the Healer. My healer takes on a cholera epidemic at a girls’ boarding school, and needs to deal with the prejudice of the locals as well as the suspicion and anger of the reclusive parent of one of the girls.

I have one of my regular background characters dying of syphilis (the great pox—more about the medical history of that scourge next week).

And I’m still working out what will kill Mia Redepenning’s husband’s Javanese wife so that Mia can finally have her happy ending in Unkept Promises, Book 4 of The Golden Redepennings. (Something lingering, so she has time to send a letter halfway around the world to her English ‘sister wife’ to beg Mia to be a mother to her four little children.)

The first vaccination

October 13, 2016 by judeknight

Scolds, gossips and harpies on WIP Wednesday

VFS109732 Ladies Gossiping at the Opera (oil on canvas) by Barnard, Frederick (1846-1896) (attr. to) oil on canvas 39.3x37.4 Private Collection English, out of copyright

Ladies Gossiping at the Opera, by Barnard, Frederick (1846-1896)
English, out of copyright

The scandalmonger is a staple of Regency romance. I like my protagonists (of either sex) with a bit more meanness to them, and lean therefore to malicious gossiping. But maybe yours is just a garrulous person, or a mother with a bit too much interest in the actions of her adult children. Or maybe your work in progress has an outright villain (male or female) who uses social position to exert power.

Please share. Mine is an ex-lover of my hero, expressing her jealousy by supporting an attack on poor Ella, the heroine of A Raging Madness.

Ella, watching Alex treating a crowd of admiring females to his best imitation of a man pleased with his lot, was surprised when Mrs Fullerton spoke at her elbow. “Silly . He is being polite, of course, but I dare say our new Lord Renshaw is hating every minute.”

Ella controlled her surge of irritation. She had no place objecting to Mrs Fullerton’s possessive ‘our’, or her implicit claim to understand Alex. Diplomatically, she replied, “I was surprised at how quickly the news had travelled. He only heard this afternoon.”

“I owe you an apology, Lady Melville. I was very rude when we last met. I was jealous, you see. Alex never looked at me the way he looks at you.” Mrs Fullerton gave a deep sigh. “But one must accept reality. He has eyes only for you, and I was quite horrid. I am ashamed of myself, truly.”

She seemed sincere, her eyes meeting Ella’s, a tentative and apologetic smile just touching the corner of her lips. Ella suppressed the urge to ask how Alex looked at her, and gave way to the impulse not to correct Mrs Fullerton’s misconception about Ella’s and Alex’s relationship.

“We all do things we later regret, Mrs Fullerton. Think nothing of it.”

“You are very gracious.” Mrs Fullerton lifted her glass to her lips. “Bother!” Somehow she had managed to spill quite a large splash of the drink on one shoulder of her gown, a red spreading stain against the pastel green. “Lady Melville, I hate to impose, but could you…”

What could Ella say? She accompanied Mrs Fullerton to the ladies’ retiring room, helped her sponge out the liquid, and waited by the door to the large drawing room while Mrs Fullerton went out to the front hall to retrieve a shawl to cover her shoulders.

She returned with a footman in tow. “Have you tried the punch, Lady Melville? It is strongly spiced, but hot and quite pleasant.”

She collected two glasses from the footman’s tray and pushed one into Ella’s hand.

“Drink up, Lady Melville, and then we shall go and rescue Lord Renshaw.”

It was over spiced, but Ella did not wish to be rude. She took a large sip, and another.

An instant before the drug in the drink hit her, she saw the flare of triumph in Mrs Fullerton’s eyes, and knew she had made a mistake. She opened her mouth to shout for Alex, but suddenly the footman had a hand over her mouth and another under her elbow, and was hustling, half carrying her through the door Mrs Fullerton held open.

“I will give you a few minutes to make it look good,” she said, and whipped out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

Ella was struggling against the footman and the fog trying to close in on her mind, the dizziness that wanted to consume her. She stamped at his foot, kicked back at his chin, but her soft indoor slippers made no impression. She squirmed, trying to jab her free arm as low as possible, and he twisted away with an oath, pushing her from him so that she fell face forward onto a sofa.

In an instant he was on her, tugging her head back by the hair, straddling her torso. “This will do well enough,” he commented, lifting himself enough that he could push up her skirt and petticoats.

Ella fought to retain consciousness, the pain of her pulled hair helping to keep her from sinking into the fog. “Scream,” she instructed herself, as her assailant’s free hand fumbled at her buttocks, and she shrieked as loud as she could.

Doors burst open: the one onto the hall and a double set into the drawing room next door, and the room filled with people.

It was her worst nightmare come again: the indrawn breaths of shock, the buzz of excited comments, the avid staring eyes. The last thing Ella heard before she sank into oblivion was the amused drawl of the man on her back. “Oh dear, Lady Melville. It seems we have been caught.”

October 8, 2016 by judeknight

Running away very very slowly

This is a rerun of a post I wrote for Caroline Warfield’s Highlighting Historical Research blog, several months ago.

I love research. I even love research when I have a perfectly delightful plot that falls apart when research proves it couldn’t have happened. Working out what might be historically probable instead, or at least plausible, has allowed me to drop down many an exciting rabbit hole into research wonderland.

For example, in my current work-in-progress, A Raging Madness, my hero Alex has a leg full of shrapnel, and is currently helping my heroine to escape from relatives who are determined to lock her up in an asylum for the mentally unwell.

Shrapnel? What kind of shrapnel? What munitions carried shrapnel at that time? What battles were they used in? How were shrapnel wounds treated? What was the long term prognosis? How about complications?

It took me a while to find a suitable battle, but eventually I put Alex the right place to be on the business end of a canister shell, a cannon ball with a weak outer shell filled with scrap metal. When the cannon fired, the shell burst apart, and a broad fan of metal caused devastation among the enemy troops. And, in my case, on the body of the assigned escort of a British diplomat who was observing the battle. (And, no, it was not called shrapnel at the time.)

Ella, my heroine, was the daughter of an army doctor, and I figured she’d solve all of Alex’s problems by removing the shrapnel. But not so. Then, even more than now, removing shrapnel or even bullets (unless they are lead) was a very bad idea.

Even today, going in after a splinter of metal might cause more harm than good, and the world is full of people walking around with bomb fragments buried inside. Back then, with no antibiotics and no anaesthetics, the treatment of choice was to leave the mess alone.

Over time, one of three things would happen. The body and the shrapnel would adjust to one another. The body would reject the shrapnel, moving it piece by piece slowly out to the surface. An abscess would form, and the poisons from the infection would kill the patient unless someone acted to drain the abscess.

Hurrah! I had my intervention. Poor Alex developed an abscess.

But escape? Alex can barely walk, let alone ride. Ella is recovering from addiction to the laudanum that her relatives have been force-feeding her. (Another rabbit-hole: what does laudanum withdrawal look like? Feel like?)

I needed a plausible way for two such invalids to escape.

I chose a canal narrowboat for a number of reasons.

The narrowboats were designed at the maximum size to fit in the smallest locks. An inch too big, and they couldn’t go wherever they needed to for the operator to earn his living. The early designers decided on a boat around seven foot wide, up to ten times as long as wide, and drawing about three feet of water when fully loaded.

One: I loved the idea of the villains haring all over the countryside looking for them while they ran away by the slowest form of non-pedestrian transport ever invented.

Two: I’ve always wanted to go on a canal cruise, and this way I got to watch YouTube clips and call it working.

Most of the boat was given over to cargo, covered by canvas. In the cabin at the rear, everything did double service, with fold down beds and tables. Some boats also had a small cabin at the bow.

Three: By 1807, when my story is set, the canal network stretched from the Mersey (with access to Manchester and Liverpool) all the way to London. Travelling by narrowboat was feasible. Canals were a supremely profitable way to move goods in the early 19^th century, and had been for a number of years. At a steady walking speed, a horse could move fifty times as much weight on a boat as it could on a road. The canals provided still water and tow paths to ease the travel, and locks, tunnels, and viaducts to overcome obstacles. Later, canal boats were mechanised, and later still the railways put the canals out of business. But in 1807, Alex and Ella hitched a lift with a charming Liverpool Irishman called Big Dan.

Four: I could put my hero and my heroine in close confines, calling themselves married, for five to six weeks. Not only did they have heaps of time to talk and even to succumb (or nearly succumb) to their

A healthy strong horse was vital. Each horse needed a stall in a stable each night, and copious quantities of high energy food.

mutual attraction, they were also in deep trouble (or Ella was) if anyone found out. They used false names. They stayed away from fashionable places. But even so, their novelist made sure that someone with no love for Alex saw enough to cause trouble.

Five: The time frame let Alex develop an abscess and recover from the operation, all before he needed to be on hand to save Ella when rumours spread about the two of them and their canal interlude.

And down the rabbit hole I went.

October 5, 2016 by judeknight

Danger on WIP Wednesday

I’ve been summarising the scenes in A Raging Madness so that I can map them against the internal and external journey of my hero and heroine, as I did with Revealed in Mist. I came across the excerpt below, and decided to share it with you. A moment of danger for my heroine; and this is only the first in a book of them.

Please share your excerpts showing your hero or heroine putting themselves at risk, whether physical risk, risk of rejection or scorn, or whatever you like. Here’s mine.

As soon as the key turned in the lock, Ella slid out of bed to find the chamber pot, and spit the remaining laudanum into it. She washed her mouth once, twice, three times. She had ingested a little—enough to further fog her brain, but not enough to douse the sharp flame of purpose. She had to get away. She had to escape. She had no idea why her brother and sister-in-law were keeping her alive, but she could not count on it continuing.

The room moved a little, wavering at the edges, and Ella wanted nothing more than to crawl back onto the bed and let the dreams come. Did it matter, after all? What good did it do to struggle?

No one in this village would help her, as she had found when they brought her out to display her before the squire and, on another occasion, the rector. She had been drugged both times, of course. She had been drugged these past four weeks. But when she told them, they patted her hand soothingly, looked at her jailers with sympathy, and went away shaking their heads.

But this evening, standing in the shadow of the curtain peering out to see the funeral goers returning to the house, she had seen him. Major Alexander Redepenning. Alex. Perhaps he was just a dream sent by the opium to torture her with hope, but if he were truly here, he would help her. She had to escape now. Tonight.

Alex was a stubborn, opinionated, arrogant fool—and what he had said to her last time they met still scalded her with shame and anger every time she thought of him. But he had known her since she was a child, and he would not abandon her to whatever the Braxtons planned.

She could not run away in her shift, but they had left her no clothes. A blanket? She could wrap a blanket around herself against the chill air.

If she could just open this window without making a noise… So. One obstacle overcome. She dropped the blanket to the ground below. Now she needed to climb from the second floor, dizzy and confused as she was, walk to the village, and find Alex. He would be staying at the inn, surely? He would not have gone on tonight?

She had heard he had been injured; seen the difficulty with which he had descended from his chaise, leaning heavily on his groom. He would not want to travel on tonight. He had to be there at the inn. He had to be willing to help her.

September 30, 2016 by judeknight

Globalisation ancient central Asian style

Not so much a road as a route, and only one of them, at that. Imagine a procession of heavily laden camels, donkeys and carts.

I’ve been fascinated for most of my life by the histories I didn’t learn at school. According to the wisdom I received from my teachers, enlightened thinking began with the Greeks, was codified by the Romans, and was resurrected after the Dark Ages in the Renaissance where it grew into the humanist and democratic beliefs that bubbled up in Europe in the 18th Century and reached its culmination is the set of beliefs and practices widely known as western civilisation.

(Gandhi was once asked what he thought of western civilisation, and said he thought it would be a good idea.)

This view, of course, completely ignores the fact that Europe was a backwater until at least the 16th Century, and all the time inventions and advances and discoveries in the rest of the world laid the foundations upon which Europe would later stand.

Let’s leave for today the great kingdoms of Kush, Nri, Songhai, and Asumite in Africa, the Olmec, Aztec, and Mayans of the Americas, Kutai, Khmer, Dvaravati in South East Asia. In the past months, I’ve been filling my head with the broad swathe of city-states, kingdoms, principalities, and empires that created, maintained, and thrived because of the Silk Road. Not so much a road, but rather a rambling plaided string of trade routes from China and India to the Mediterranean Sea by diverse ways.

This was the mixing ground of cultures, ideas (including religious ideas), new technologies, and products. Above all, products: silk, paper, and spices travelling West; carpets, jewels, drugs, metal, glass, and other trade goods travelling East.

To hear the Venetians tell the story, they started the whole thing. In fact, they were very late into the game. One of the main western arteries did come first, established in Persia. It was the old Persian Royal Road, with postal stations along the route. The pony express was nothing new. The Persian route was established close to 2,500 years ago.

2,250 years ago, an emperor of China, struggling to keep the horse nomads of the north out of his land, sent an envoy west looking for help. Zhang Qian’s expedition led to trade deals to purchase the larger faster horses the envoy found in central Asia. Silk for horses. The Chinese beat of their enemies, and settled down to consolidate the trade, while from the other end the Parthians (who now controlled Persia) were doing the same.

For 2000 years, the Silk Road was how China got its western goods, and places as far distant from China as England got its silks and spices. Then, in the 15th Century, the rising Ottoman Empire blocked European merchants from using the routes, impelling them to find a sea route. Columbus went west, and Vasco da Gama south. And the rest is history.

If you’d like to know more, this 10:30 minute video is entertaining and interesting.

Huh! How about that. I set out to write about the Kopet Dag mountains between Turkmenistan and Iran, and the place of their inhabitants in the silk routes, and I’ve got all excited about ancient history. Another time, perhaps. Meanwhile, feel free to look at the novella I have in the Bluestocking Belles 2016 box set. Called The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, it features as hero a young man who grew up in a small kaganate high in the Kopet Dag mountains. The link is to my book page, which in turn links to the first two chapters.

September 29, 2016 by judeknight

The ‘meet cute’ on WIP Wednesday

‘Meet cute’ is a term from Hollywood that has crept into book publishing. It means that moment in a romantic comedy when the hero and the heroine first encounter one another. The implication is that the first meeting is amusing, entertaining, or charming.

Even if you’re not writing romantic comedy, the term can apply, but today I’m just using it as shorthand for the first meeting in your book. My own current works-in-progress have progressively less and less cute about them. The Bluestocking and the Barbarian comes close, with James swooping down to save a child from the path of racing curricles.

With hand, body and voice, James set Seistan at the child and dropped off the saddle, trusting to the horse to sweep past in the right place for James to hoist the child out of harm’s way.

One mighty heave, and they were back in the saddle. James’ shoulders would feel the weight of the boy for days, but Seistan had continued across the road, so close to the racers that James could feel the wind of their passing.

They didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. In moments, they were gone.

The boy shaking in his arms, James turned Seistan with his knees, and walked the horse back to the gates of the big house. A crowd of women waited for them, but only one came forward as he dismounted.

“How can we ever thank you enough, sir?” She took the child from him, and handed him off to be scolded and hugged and wept over by a bevy of other females.

The woman lingered, and James too. He could hear his father and the others riding toward them, but he couldn’t take his eyes off hers. He was drowning in a pool of blue-gray. Did she feel it too? The Greeks said that true lovers had one soul, split at birth and placed in two bodies. He had thought it a nice conceit… until now.

In Revealed in Mist, David and Prue parted in anger in the Prologue, and meet again for the first time in months in the first chapter. Prue has just saved a young lady from rape.

She put the girl behind her with her free hand, then pulled the door closed. Something thrown banged against it on the other side.

“We must get you to safety,” she told the girl, a very young debutante in a torn white gown, her honey blonde hair falling from its careful coiffure, the delicate oval of her face streaked with tears.

“I cannot… I did not… Everyone will think…”

“Take the child to Lady Georgiana.” Prue started at Shadow’s voice and the girl yelped and clutched at her for protection. Fussing over the girl gave Prue time to catch the breath that had escaped at his sudden appearance. He was leaning against the next door down, half concealed in the doorway. “There’s a small sitting room along there.” He pointed down the passage towards the far end, seemingly unaffected the meeting, while Prue was torn between spitting in his face and throwing herself at his feet to beg him to forgive whatever offence she had caused. “Half way to the corner. Lady Georgiana is in there. She’ll take care of your maiden, and I shall see to the assailant. Who is it?”

And A Raging Madness has the least cute meet of all, as Ella flees confinement and abuse in her in-laws house to beg help from Alex, who she knew long, long ago.

The couch faced the fire, its back to the bed chamber door. The occupant was invisible until they stood right over it, and then there she was, lying on her back, wrapped tightly in a scruffy grey woollen blanket, heavily mired at one end with dried mud. All they could see of the woman was her head, and that was somewhat the worse for wear. Her face was far too thin, with dark patches under the eyes and bruise over bruise along her jaw, as if she had been gripped too hard time after time, week after week. She lay in a tangle of long brown hair, escaped from the plait to which it had been confined.

As they watched, she opened her eyes. For a moment, she stared at them, confused. Then she seemed to recall where she was, and sat up in one convulsive movement, clutching the blanket to her with a bare arm as it fell, but not before Alex had seen she wore nothing but her shift.

“Alex, thank God. You must help me. Please.”

“Lady Melville.” Alex bowed as well as he could, leaning heavily on his stick, hating to show weakness in front of her of all people. But her eyes did not leave his, and she displayed no signs of noticing his infirmity.

“Please,” she repeated, just as someone knocked on the door. She shot off the couch, clutching the blanket, and retreated to the wall, her eyes wide. He had seen such a stance before, people under threat finding a wall for the back, animals at bay, almost dead from fear, but still searching for escape.

“It is just the major’s breakfast, my lady,” Jonno said, soothingly. But a male voice in the hall belied his reassurance. “Knock again,” it said, loudly, authoritatively. Braxton.

“Please,” Ella begged, one more time.

September 26, 2016 by judeknight

Tea with Prue

Eleanor, Duchess of Haverford, feels a strong sense of obligation to today’s caller. Not that she will say so. Her Grace has engineered a dozen meetings in the past five years, and not once has Miss Virtue raised the connection between them. Perhaps she is unaware of it? No, surely not. But if she wishes to ignore it, then the duchess will comply. The young lady is entitled to her privacy.

The butler escorts Miss Virtue into the conservatory, where Her Grace and her guest can enjoy the autumn sun and the splendid views of the gardens without suffering the chilly breeze. The duchess rises in greeting.

“Miss Virtue. How kind of you to come.”

Her caller curtseys gracefully, without comment, and seats herself when the duchess invites her to do so. For a few minutes they discuss courteous nothings: the weather, the number of people in Town, the War on the Continent, how Miss Virtue would prefer her tea.

But once she has a fine bone china cup in her hands, Miss Virtue cuts directly to the point in the way the duchess has come to expect and admire. “But I do not wish to take up too much of your valuable time, Your Grace. How may I be of service to you.”

Her Grace suppresses a sigh—will the child never trust her? “I have a commission for you, Miss Virtue, if you are free to undertake it. My godson, the Earl of Penworth, appears to have gone missing…”

Prue Virtue is a spy for the Crown, but occasionally undertakes freelance commissions. The following excerpt is from The Prisoners of Wyvern Castle, a novella in my free book Hand-Turned Tales (click here for buy links). Prue, disguised as the nurse Miss Tyler, is here on the duchess’s errand, looking for the Earl of Penworth. She finds that he has acquired not only a prison but also a wife.

Prue is also the heroine of Revealed in Mist, coming in December 2016.

Several minutes passed, and all remained quiet. This might actually work! First, she needed to find a boat small enough for her to handle. Hugging the walls, keeping to the shadows, she began to circle the courtyard toward the deeper darkness that signalled the passageway through the walls. Beyond, the road led down to the docks.

She was nearly there when a woman’s voice spoke behind her. “Do not be alarmed, Lady Penworth.”

Madeline spun around, one hand to her chest to hold her pounding heart in place.

“Who is it?” She could see a vague shape in the darkness, but no details.

“A friend.”

It was not Lady Wyvern, nor—from the accent, which was aristocratic—one of the servants. As she froze, trying to decide whether to run or speak, she heard footsteps and voices approaching from the other end of the passage.

“Quick. This way.” The woman took her hand and pulled her through a doorway, into the room beyond. Just in time. Pressed against the wall inside the door, she could hear them clearly: several men arguing in hushed voices.

“It was the White Lady, I tell you.”

“Rubbish.”

“She was coming out that window. I saw her with my own eyes. It was like a long coil of smoke, twisting in the wind.”

“A long coil of smoke. Listen to him. Next, you’ll be telling us she’s off to join her husband in the dungeon.”

A chorus of guffaws.

“You’ve heard what the islanders say, same as me,” the first voice insisted.

“Yes, and right fools they are, too.” The speaker pitched his voice in a falsetto. “Ooooh! Moaning in the dungeon. It must be the ghost!” Then, reverting to his own low rumble. “Silly tossers. A good thing Her Ladyship sent the whole lot of them packing.”

The first voice began, “If you ask me…”

Another man interrupted. “You can stand around talking about ghosts all night if you want. I’m for the kitchen and a tot of something hot and strong. Securing those boats was cold work.”

She could make out no more. They were across the courtyard and… yes, they had gone down the steps into the servants’ area Rupert had pointed out from their window.

“Come,” her companion said. “Lord Wyvern is awake and wishes to speak with you.”

“Let me go,” Madeline pleaded. “Now, while the courtyard is clear.”

“I will help you, my lady. That is why I am here. But first, we need to share information. Come with me and see Lord Wyvern.”

“Who are you?” Madeline asked, but the woman gave her no answer, just moved away, surefooted in the dark.

After a moment, Madeline followed her. They climbed the stair until they reached the room where Lord Wyvern lay, propped up on pillows, looking—by the light of the lamp at his bedside—more alert than he had earlier in the day.

The light allowed Madeline to recognise her companion. “You are the nurse. Miss Tyler. You work for Lady Wyvern.”

“I work for Lord Wyvern,” Miss Tyler corrected. “I am here to rescue him, and you and the earl.”

“Lady Wyvern took the earl away. I don’t know where.”

“Dun… jin,” Lord Wyvern said, and Miss Tyler nodded. “They were keeping Lord Wyvern in the dungeon when I was brought here to care for him. I expect that is where they have your husband and the other two men.”

Lord Wyvern was a frail shadow of the hearty man Rupert had described, and pale enough to have been in a dungeon these six months. Madeline didn’t understand how his own servants could have allowed such a thing.

“Why did your people let it happen?” she asked him, but it was Miss Tyler who answered.

“His Lordship had an apoplexy. Lady Wyvern saw her moment and removed anyone who might object to her regency while he was ill. Then, when he began to recover… well, she made sure to keep him bedridden. And she hid him, so those loyal to him would not know what she was doing.”

“How could the Ice Dragon hope to get away with it?”

Goodness. She was so used to Rupert’s name for his sister that she said it without thinking. But Lord Wyvern was laughing silently, and even the nurse was smiling.

“A good name for her,” Miss Tyler said. “She is an arrogant woman, Your Ladyship. She makes her plans and assumes the rest of the world will fall into line. She must have been horrified when the King sent Lord Morpeth to see what was happening here, but she and Sir James decided to bully their way through.

“They sent most of the islanders away, to keep complaints and rumours from reaching Lord Morpeth’s ears. That may yet work to her disadvantage, since they are now on the mainland and will be talking to all their friends and relatives. Word will reach the ears of the gentry sooner or later, and people with authority will start asking questions.”

“I cannot wait for that,” Madeline said. “I need to rescue the earl now.”

“Plan?” Lord Wyvern asked.

“Yes, my lady. What was your plan? Do you have a helper? Somewhere to go?”

Madeline shook her head. She and Rupert had no one to help them. But they had a plan, of sorts, and she intended to carry it out.

Miss Tyler saw her hesitation. “Lady Penworth, you are wise to be cautious, but you can trust us. Lord Wyvern, as you know, is as much a victim of the conspirators as you and your husband. And I have been sent by the earl’s godmother to find out what is happening and help if I can.”

September 21, 2016 by judeknight

Reflection characters on WIP Wednesday

‘Reflection’ character is Michael Hauge’s expression. I’m still processing his full-day Story Mastery workshop from the RWNZ Conference, but have already strengthened Revealed in Mist by applying his inner and out journey methodology to the hero and heroine.

The reflection is the person that shows the protagonist when they are acting according to the armour they’ve built around their woundedness, and when they’re reaching into the real person they’re meant to be. As always, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

In The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, the heroine’s sister holds up a mirror to her just before this scene, set at the Costume Party.

Sophia frowned at Felicity, who was ostentatiously ignoring her from the other side of the room. They had had words, especially when Sophia had realized Felicity had deliberately sought Lord Elfingham out, accosted him in the garden, rejected him for herself, and sent him to Sophia. Sophia was not taking her sister’s leavings, and so she told her. Felicity, of course, claimed that Elfingham wanted Sophia all along, but Sophia did not believe that for a moment.

Oh, dear. He was coming this way. He stopped to speak to the Persian king, and Sophia took the opportunity to hurry away, putting as many people as possible between herself and her suitor.

He could not possibly be serious, and besides, she had her life all planned. She would never marry. She would be content with her studies and her work for the disadvantaged. She would be an aunt to Felicity’s children and one day to Hythe’s. If Hythe married someone she did not care for, she had money enough to hire a companion and set up her own establishment. She would be free and independent.

Why did such a life suddenly sound dreary?

September 16, 2016 by judeknight

Holly and Hopeful Hearts

Today is the day, people. At last we’re ready to reveal the box set the Belles have been working on for so many months. I give you:

When the Duchess of Haverford sends out invitations to a Yuletide house party and a New Year’s Eve ball at her country estate, Hollystone Hall, those who respond know that Her Grace intends to raise money for her favorite cause and promote whatever marriages she can. Eight assorted heroes and heroines set out with their pocketbooks firmly clutched and hearts in protective custody. Or are they?

Read about all eight novellas, and find pre-order links, on the Bluestocking Belles Holly & Hopeful Hearts page.

Today, meet my hero and heroine, James and Sophia.

James must marry to please his grandfather, the duke, and to win social acceptance for himself and his father’s other foreign-born children. But only Lady Sophia Belvoir makes his heart sing, and to win her he must invite himself to spend Christmas at the home of his father’s greatest enemy.

Sophia keeps secret her tendre for James, Lord Elfingham. After all, the whole of Society knows he is pursuing the younger Belvoir sister, not the older one left on the shelf after two failed betrothals.

An Excerpt from The Bluestocking and the Barbarian

Chapter One

A country road in Oxfordshire
April 1812

They heard the two curricles before they saw them, the galloping hooves, the cacophony of harness and bounding wheels, the drivers shouting encouragement to their teams and insults to one another.

The Earl of Sutton turned his own horse to the shoulder of the road and the rest of the party followed his lead. As first one racing carriage and then the other careened by, James Winderfield murmured soothingly to his horse. “Stand, Seistan. Stand still, my prince.”

Seistan obeyed, only a stamp of the hind foot and muscles so tense he quivered displaying his eagerness to pursue the presumptuous British steeds and feed them his dust.

From their position at the top of what these English laughably called a hill, James could see the long curve of the road switching back at the junction with the road north and descending further until it passed through the village directly below them.

One of the fool drivers was trying to pass, standing at the reins—legs broadly astride. James hoped no hapless farmer tried to exit a gate in their path!

Seistan clearly decided that the idiots were beneath his contempt, for he relaxed as James continued to murmur to him. “You magnificent fellow. You have left us some foals, have you not, my beauty? You and Xander, there?”

The earl heard his horse’s name and flashed his son a grin. “A good crop of foals, if their handlers are right. And honors evenly divided between Seistan and Xander. Except for the stolen mares.” He laughed, then, and James laughed with him.

Once the herd recovered from the long sea voyage, many of the mares had come into season. Not satisfied with his allotment, Seistan had leapt several of the fences on the land they had rented near Portsmouth, and covered two mares belonging to other gentlemen. And most indignant their owners had been.

“They did not fully understand the honor Seistan had done them, Father,” James said. Which was putting it mildly. When James arrived, they had been demanding that the owner of the boarding stable shoot the stallion for his trespass.

The earl laughed again. “I wish I had been there to hear you explain it, my son.”

A thirty-minute demonstration of Seistan’s skills as a hunter, a racer, and a war horse had been more convincing than any words of James’s, and a reminder of the famous oriental stallions who founded the lines of English thoroughbreds did the rest. In the end, he almost thought they would pay him the stud fee he had offered to magnanimously cut by half.

But he waived any fee at all, and they parted friends. Now two noblemen looked forward to the birth of their half-Turkmen foals, while James had delivered the herd to his father’s property in Oxfordshire and was now riding back to London to be put to stud himself.

“Nothing can be done about his mother, Sutton,” his grandfather, the Duke of Winshire, had grumbled, “but marry him to a girl from a good English family, and people will forget he is part cloth-head.”

The dust had settled. The earl gave the signal to move on, and his mount Xander took the lead back onto the road. James lingered a moment more, brooding on the coming Season, when he would be put through his paces before the maidens of the ton and their guardians. One viscount. Young, healthy, and well-travelled. Rich and titled. Available to any bride prepared to overlook foreign blood for the chance of one day being Duchess of Winshire.

Where was the love the traveling musicians spoke of? At least his cousins had adamantly turned him down. Not that he had anything against the twin daughters of the uncle whose inconvenient death had made his father heir and him next in line. But they did not make his heart sing.

The racing curricles had negotiated the bend without disaster and were now hurtling towards the village. Long habit had James studying the path, looking to make sure the villagers were safely out of the way, and an instant later, he put Seistan at the slope.

It was steep, but nothing to the mountains they had lived in all their lives, he and his horse, and Seistan was as sure-footed as any goat. Straight down by the shortest route they hurtled, for in the path of the thoughtless lackwits and their carriages was a child—a boy, by the trousers—who had just escaped through a gate from the village’s one large house, tripped as he crossed the road, and now lay still.

It would be close. As he cleared one stone fence and then another, he could see the child beginning to sit up, shaking his head. Just winded then, and easier to reach than lying flat, thank all the angels and saints.

Out of sight for a moment as he rounded a cottage, he could hear the carriages drawing closer. Had the child recovered enough to run? No. He was still sitting in the road, mouth open, white-faced, looking as his doom approached. What kind of selfish madmen raced breast to breast, wheel to wheel, into a village?

With hand, body and voice, James set Seistan at the child, and dropped off the saddle, trusting to the horse to sweep past in the right place for James to hoist the child out of harm’s way.

One mighty heave, and they were back in the saddle. James’ shoulders would feel the weight of the boy for days, but Seistan had continued across the road, so close to the racers that James could feel the wind of their passing.

They didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. In moments, they were gone.

The boy shaking in his arms, James turned Seistan with his knees, and walked the horse back to the gates of the big house. A crowd of women waited for them, but only one came forward as he dismounted.

“How can we ever thank you enough, sir?” She took the child from him, and handed him off to be scolded and hugged and wept over by a bevy of other females.

The woman lingered, and James too. He could hear his father and the others riding towards them, but he couldn’t take his eyes off hers. He was drowning in a pool of blue-gray. Did she feel it too? The Greeks said that true lovers had one soul, split at birth and placed in two bodies. He had thought it a nice conceit, until now.

“James!” His father’s voice broke him out of his trance. “James, your grandfather expects us in London.” The earl lifted his top hat with courtly grace to the woman, and rode on, certain that James would follow. Not the woman; the lady, as her voice and clothes proclaimed, though James had not noticed until now.

A lady, and by the rules of this Society, one to whom he had not been introduced. He took off his telpek, the large shaggy sheepskin hat.

“My lady, I am Elfingham. May I have the honor of knowing whom I have served this day?”

She seemed as dazed as he, which soothed him a little, and she stuttered slightly as she gave him her name. “L-L-Lady Sophia. Belvoir.” Unmarried, he hoped. For most married ladies were known by their husband’s name or title. And a lady. He beamed at her as he remounted. He had a name. He would be able to find her.

“Thank you, sir. Lord Elfingham.”

“My lady,” James told her, “I am yours to command.”

For more of our stories, see our individual blogs:

A Suitable Husband, by Jude Knight (this story links the others and is featured in the Teatime Tattler)

Valuing Vanessa, by Susana Ellis

A Kiss for Charity, by Sherry Ewing

Artemis, by Jessica Cale

The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, by Jude Knight

Christmas Kisses, by Nicole Zoltack

An Open Heart, by Caroline Warfield

Dashing Through the Snow, by Amy Rose Bennett

September 15, 2016 by judeknight

Unequally yoked? Love across the boundaries on WIP Wednesday

Do you have a pair of star-crossed lovers? If so, what makes their union impossible? Different classes? Different races? Different faiths? Feuding families? Warring countries?

Today on Work-in-progress Wednesday, I’m looking for excerpts in which characters show the chasm they must bridge before they can be with their loved one. My piece is from my story in the Belles 2016 holiday box set.

Ah. Here was his goddess, approaching across a generous entrance hall that appeared at first glance to be full of people, though in truth he counted eight, not including the pair blocking his way inside.

“Felicity, you put me to the blush.” She turned from her sister to address the girl in spectacles. “Allow me to present Lord Elfingham, Miss Ellison.” Then she regarded him with wary eyes. “Have you come for the house party, Lord Elfingham?”

James gathered the wits that had scattered at Lady Sophia’s approach and told his tale of a lame horse and the need for shelter until he could diagnose and fix the problem. The other ladies and gentlemen stopped their work of hanging ribbons, garlands, and wreaths from every available vantage point, and gathered around to be introduced to the scandalous barbarian suddenly in their midst.

James smiled, nodded, and exchanged pleasantries, moving farther into the hall, his back prickling as he found himself surrounded by these polite strangers.

“There is a horse in the forecourt, and it will not move. Odd looking beast. Small head and too long in the back. And one blue eye! Whoever heard of a horse with blue eyes?”

James turned toward the voice at the door, and met the eyes of Nathan Belvoir, Earl of Hythe.

For all his youth—Hythe was three years Sophia’s junior and seven years younger than James—he was head of the Belvoir family, and James would prefer to have his blessing to court the man’s sister. From the hostility in young earl’s blue eyes, it would not be forthcoming.

“My horse,” James explained mildly. “Seistan.”

“The horse is lame, Hythe,” Lady Felicity told her brother, “so Lord Elfingham cannot travel on tonight.” She turned to the young woman in spectacles who had entered behind Hythe. “Will you inform the duchess, Cedrica?” The girl nodded and went back outside.

“He cannot stay here, either,” Hythe declared, his brows almost meeting as he frowned. “You should have stopped in the village, Winderfield, or whatever your name should be. The duchess will not want your sort mixing with her guests.”

James schooled his face to show no reaction. At least two insults in as many sentences: the denial of his title and his legitimacy, and the “your sort” comment. Sophia would doubtless be displeased if he challenged Hythe, or simply punched him.

Or punched Wesley Winderfield, who was grinning like a loon at Hythe’s elbow. Weasel Winderfield was some sort of a distant cousin and had been heir presumptive to the Duke of Winshire after the untimely deaths of the duke’s three sons one after the other, and then of his eldest son’s heir, his only known grandson. Weasel was most disappointed when Winshire’s third son proved to be not nearly as dead as reported, the inconvenience of his return compounded by the tribe of offspring he presented to his father when he arrived in England.

Weasel’s presence here was unfortunate but not unexpected. He was an acolyte of the man most determined to prove James a bastard: the man who owned this house, the Duke of Haverford.

Jude Knight Storyteller

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