The Children of the Mountain King

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Self doubts on WIP Wednesday

Often — perhaps mostly — one of the major barriers my characters face in finding happiness is their own opinion of themselves. Is it the same for you? If so, how about sharing an excerpt where your character experiences self-doubt. Mine is from To Mend the Broken Hearted, the second novel in The Children of the Mountain King. My heroine is explaining her family to my hero.

His question, when it came, was not what she expected. “And your mother? Did she not come to England with you?”

Mami. The queen of their small kingdom and the heart of their family. Sometimes, Ruth could barely remember her face, and then a word or a sound or a smell would bring a memory and it was as if she had just stepped into another room.

“She died twelve years ago,” she told Ashbury. After a moment, she added, “I sometimes wonder if my father might have stayed in Para Daisa Vada had she lived. She always insisted she would not come to England and that Father should not, either. The old duke sent for Father when his second son died and it seemed likely my remaining uncle would have only the one heir and him sickly. He wanted Father to repudiate us all and go home alone.”

“Your father refused.” Ashbury didn’t phrase it as a question, but Ruth nodded anyway.

“After that, though, he kept telling us that we might one day have to come to England, especially Jamie, who might well inherit an English dukedom rather than Father’s kaganate — kingdom, I suppose you would say.”

Father and Mami had argued over Father’s sense of duty, though even as a child, she had understood that their bond was far too deep for any surface sound and fury to do more than ruffle the surface. Almost certainly, if Mami had lived, she would have come to England with Father. She gave a short bark of laughter at the thought of her mother in England.

“If she had come, she would have withered the likes of Haverford with a single glance. My mother was a queen to her fingertips, a warrior of great skill, and harem-raised by my great grandmother, who was an adviser to kings. Father says that Nano was the best politician he ever met, and Mami was nearly her equal.”

“She raised a strong daughter,” Ashbury observed.

At his admiring tone, Ruth’s eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away. “You should meet Rebecca, my older sister. She led her own guard squad by the time she was eighteen. She can outshoot and outride most of the men. When a rival kagan held her hostage, she escaped and kidnapped his son, and they fell in love, wed, and now command the forces of my brother, Matthew, who remained to take over Father’s kingdom. Rebecca inherited a full measure of Mami’s warrior talents, and Rachel, my eldest sister, the queenly ones. Her husband came to learn statecraft from my father, and took Rachel home to Georgia to rule beside him as his wife.”

Four sisters, and three of them exceptional. Rosemary, was a paragon of the womanly arts. She was an exquisite dancer, her paintings and poems were beautiful, and she navigated the fickle politics of the women’s side of the house with ease and tact, so that even the most difficult of females liked her. In the more mixed society of England, she applied the same skills to the gentlemen they met. In fact, even the old duke, their grandfather, made a pet of her, and he hated everyone.

And then there was Ruth. Awkward in company, impatient with polite nothings, always wearing a mask behind which she felt uncertain and out of place. Mami called her ‘my little scholar’,  and certainly as a child she was happiest with her books, though she dutifully took the same training in warrior craft and household management skills as the other girls.

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Tea with the children

Eleanor smiled at the family gathered in her favourite sitting room. Matilda was pouring the tea, and Frances was carefully carrying each cup to the person for whom it had been prepared. Jessica was sitting on the arm of Aldridge’s chair, regaling him with stories about the New Year’s Charity Ball he had missed when he left the house party early. Cedrica sat quietly, as usual, but the distracted smile and the glow of happiness were new, and her thoughts were clearly on her French chef, whom she was to marry in a private ceremony in the Haverford House chapel in just a couple of weeks.

Only Jon was missing. A month ago, he had sailed from Margate in Aldridge’s private yacht, and just this morning, a package had been delivered by a weary sailor, with a report from Aldridge’s captain for the marquis, and a brief note from Jon for his mother. “Married. Safe. More news later.” Which raised more questions than it answered, not least of which was why he’d not had time to write more. Brief though it was, it set her heart at ease as much as it could be, when he was deep in war-torn Northern Europe. Not as war torn as it was when he set out, while Napoleon’s army was retreating in the face of the severe northern winter. Thank goodness that somehow, through the battle-scarred and frozen country, the messenger had managed to get this note back to Aldridge’s captain, anchored of the coast of Latvia to wait for word.

Aldridge looked up from his conversation with Jessica and gifted her with the warm smile he saved only for the women of his family. “Jon has landed on his feet again, Mama,” he told her. He shook his head, his eyes twinkling. “I don’t know how he always manages to do that!”

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Jon’s hasty trip from Margate is mentioned in To Wed a Proper Lady, which also introduces Cedrica and features the house party. His story is all planned out, but has to wait till I have finished The Children of the Mountain King series, of which To Wed a Proper Lady is the first novel. It’s on preorder and will be published 15 April. Aldridge’s story is novel 3 in the series. All going well, you’ll have it in July or August. Cedrica’s part in the house party, and her romance with her French chef, is in the novella A Suitable Husband.

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Work in progress on Wednesday?

I haven’t forgotten you, I promise. I have To Wed a Proper Lady nearly ready to put out to as an advance reader copy, and I expect it to publish on time on 15 April. I’m working on getting the back matter of Paradise Regained up to date, and then I’m going to make it permafree as an introduction to the Children of the Mountain King series, and I’m writing a Paradise Lost companion piece to give away in my April newsletter.

But, in other news, I’ve just got back from a family holiday in Bali, and I have two and half weeks to pack up my house for moving, and less time than that to find a place to move to.

So, apart from what I’ve just listed above, the writing is going on the back burner, and I’m not going to be much around on the blog or online. Wish me luck, folks! See you mid-April.

 

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First Kiss on WIP Wednesday

 

How about a first kiss post for this WIP Wednesday? I have one. It’s from To Wed a Proper Lady. Full disclosure. This seen hasn’t much changed since the novel was the novella The Bluestocking and the Barbarian.

Please share your own work-in-progress first kisses in the comments.

Sure enough, Sophia was alone in the room to which the doddery old butler directed James when he asked after the second parlour. He gave the room a quick and cursory scan before focusing his attention on the woman standing on a ladder and hanging garlands across the huge painting on the window wall. She leaned to her right to reach up to the carved pediment above the window, clutching at the draped maroon curtains to keep her balance.

James was across the room in seconds. “Careful,” he said, steadying the ladder.

Sophia looked down. “Lord Elfingham. What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for something useful to do, Lady Sophia. May I be of service?”

She examined his face and then nodded. “You are between Scylla and Charybdis, are you not?”

James laughed. “You have it exactly. On the one side, the ladies who think it worth the gamble to pull a possible future duke down into their watery vortex, and on the other, the multi-headed monster of innuendo and insult in the company of the gentlemen.”

“Neither ladies nor gentlemen by their behaviour,” his own lady said tartly. “Very well, Lord Elfingham, I will put you to work.” She put one hand on his shoulder to help herself from the ladder. “Bring the ladder, please. I have more garlands to hang.”

James lifted the ladder and followed obediently in her wake. “What are we doing, pray tell?”

“We are having a costume party tonight. You heard?”

James nodded. His wardrobe was limited to what he could carry in his saddlebags, but the duchess had ordered chests of costumes and fabric brought down from the attics, and he had found the means to replicate his festival clothes as a mountain prince, or at least close enough for the audience.

If they wanted a barbarian, he would give them a barbarian.

“We did not decorate in here on Christmas Eve, since we had so much else to do, so I am putting up Christmas decorations. See? The evergreen is a symbol of life in this most holy season. And the holly, have you heard the song about the holly?”

Sophia sang for him, in a light alto, all the verses his father had taught them when he was a tiny child. This European holly was not precisely the same as the holly he had grown up with, but it was similar. For the pleasure of hearing her voice, he kept his counsel.

She went on to explain the other Christmas customs, not just the foliage and ribbons and other materials used in the decorations, but the pudding that had been served at Christmas dinner, the Yule logs burning in various fireplaces around the house, and the boxes that the duchess had delivered the previous day to poor families around the district.

“Cedrica and I, and several of the other ladies, were her deputies,” Sophia explained. “It was wonderful to see the happy little faces of the children, James.”

James had stayed back from the hunt organised for the men in the hopes of spending time with Sophia, and had found out about the charity expedition too late to offer his services. “I am sorry that I missed it,” he said sincerely.

He noted one glaring omission in her descriptions. “Just a decoration,” she had told him, mendaciously, when he asked about the kissing boughs.

And now pretending to be ignorant of these English Christmas customs was about to pay off. One day, when she was safely his wife, he might admit to Sophia that he and the whole citadel had hung on his father’s tales of an English Christmas, that his mother and her maids had decorated high and low, and his father had led the troops out to find a fitting Yule log to carry home in triumph on Christmas Eve. A harder job in his dry mountains than in this green land.

But this was not the time for that story. Not when Sophia was relaxed and about to pass under a kissing bough that retained its full complement of mistletoe berries.

James suppressed a grin. “Look,” he said, at the opportune time, pointing up. “My kaka—my Papa—told me about these.”

She stopped, as he had intended, and with a single stride, he had reached her, wrapped her in his arms, and captured the lips that had been haunting his dreams this past three months.

And she kissed him back. For a moment… for one long glorious moment, while time stood still and the world ceased to exist, Sophia Belvoir kissed him back.

 

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Dastardly villains on WIP Wednesday

 

I do love a dastardly villain, and I quite like what I’ve done with Weasel Winderfield, one of the villains in my To Wed a Proper Lady. How about you. Do you have an excerpt about a villain that you’d like to share? Pop it in the comments.

Mine is at the tail end of a duel, brought about because my villain called my hero’s mother an oriental whore. He’s back in the next book, too, still causing trouble. In fact, I’ve just realised that he had a part to play in the backstory of book four, when he seduced the woman who was quickly married off to my hero’s father as his second wife.

“Good shooting, brother,” James said, clapping Drew on the shoulder.

“Idiot would have been fine if he hadn’t moved,” Drew grumbled. Weasel had shot before the final count and missed. When Drew had taken his turn, he had announced his intention of removing Weasel’s watch fob from the chain that drooped across his waist, and ordered the man to stand still.

At the other end of the field, Weasel was carrying on as if death were imminent. His second, the Marquis of Aldridge, after a brief examination, sent the Winderfield men a thumbs up before leaving Weasel to the ministrations of the doctor. Aldridge was now giving orders to the servants by the carriage that had brought him and Weasel to the duelling grounds.

“Breakfast?” James suggested.

“Good idea,” Drew said. “Let’s collect Yousef and…”

As if his name had conjured him up, their father’s lieutenant appeared from the trees and stalked towards them. Something about his posture brought James to full alert, and Drew sensed it too, stiffening beside him.

“Trouble?” James asked, as soon as Yousef was close enough.

“An assassin in the woods, armed with a pistol like these.” He gestured to the gun that Drew had replaced in its case until he had time to clean it. “You were not meant to walk from this field, Andraos Bey.”

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Fish out of water on WIP Wednesday

Part of the fun of writing is to put your characters into situations they don’t much like, and no one is more fun to torture than a hero who is usually in charge. Do you have an excerpt where your character feels like a fish out of water or the fox in a hunt? Please share in the comments. Here’s mine, from the beginning of To Tame a Wild Rake. It follows on from the piece I used a couple of weeks ago.

“Do not leave my side,” he whispered to Jessica, sternly.

She grinned up at him. “You already threatened the loss of half my dress allowance if I do.”

“Make it the whole dress allowance,” he growled, but she treated the threat with the contempt it deserved, and giggled. He’d never been able to resist any of his half-sisters, and had been putty in Jessica’s hands since she arrived in the nursery, a little infant, too thin for her age and too weak to do more than grizzle. He had put his finger into her little fist, and she had gripped it firmly, smiled at him, and made him her besotted slave from that moment.

“I mean it, Jessie. For your own reputation, even if you don’t care about feeding me to the harpies.”

Her smile slipped and became brittle. “My reputation was ruined before I was born. We cannot all be as fortunate as Matilda, Aldridge.”

He couldn’t help his wince, though the guilt was not his. Though no one risked the wrath of the Duchess of Haverford by shunning the sisters or gossiping in public, everyone knew her three wards were the base-born and unacknowledged daughters of the Duke of Haverford. As soon as Aldridge was duke, he intended to repair what he could, and acknowledge them. It wouldn’t satisfy the high sticklers, but it should help Jessica, and later Frances, to find a match.

At least his eldest sister, Matilda, was now happily married, her husband willing to ignore the scandal for love’s sake.

Jessica ignored his reaction, her mind on her own thoughts. “I will protect you, though, if only because I don’t want to live with a harpy.”

I should choose a wife and be done with it. Without his volition, his eyes scanned the room until he saw her. He had known she must be here; the hostess was, after all, her cousin. The musicale was a benefit to provide medical services in one of the poorest parts of London, or at least to provide the rental for rooms and a salary for a doctor. Lady Ashbury was rumoured to be a healer, and was certainly patroness of the proposed doctor’s clinic.

Lady Charlotte Winderfield sat with her sister, the pair of them somehow an island of serenity in the sea of ferment that was Society at its endless posturing.

“Lady Charlotte won’t have you,” Jessica observed. He glanced down into hazel eyes very similar to his own. She touched his hand. “She swears she will never marry, Aldridge. She has refused every offer, and resisted even when her father and grandfather tried to bully her.” A fact Aldridge well knew, since he had made one of the earliest of those offers, and reluctantly withdrawn it when he discovered the pressure she was under to accept.

He pulled back over himself the cover of the insouciant ducal heir. “There are others who may suit. But I am in no rush to put on shackles, Jessie. “ Not that he could fool Jessica with the part any more than he had deceived Lady Charlotte. She had been able to see through his mask since they first met. She had still been a child in the schoolroom, only fifteen. He had been twenty-seven and sozzled to the gills, nearing the end of three months of drinking and wenching that had failed to dull the edges of a loss he still shied away from considering.

He had known from the first time she scolded him for allowing his pain to make him stupid that he wanted her for his duchess. But by the time she was old enough to court, she’d grown past the friendship they’d forged that long-ago summer, and learned enough about him to reject him out of hand.

He needed to accept his dismissal like a gentleman. But that didn’t stop his yearning.

“They are about to start,” he pointed out to his sister. “Shall we find a seat?”

Lady Ashbury had hired professional musicians to entertain her guests, which was both good and bad. Good, because he didn’t have to suffer through the mediocre performances of debutantes hawking their accomplishments. Their proud mothers must all have cloth ears, or perhaps they hoped that some patron of the musical arts might marry one of them just for the right to forbid them from every playing or singing in public again.

Bad, because the dullards in the audience saw no need to pay the performers the courtesy of their attention, and insisted on chattering the whole way through.

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Setting the scene on WIP Wednesday

Today I’m thinking about how to provide information without doing an information dump. How much do people need to know? Can I get it out in action or conversation? Show don’t tell, but then, if it is important but would be boring at length, tell it and get on. How do you set the scene? Do you have an excerpt you can share? Here’s a rather raw piece from To Tame a Wild Rake.

Why on earth had he agreed to escort Jessica to a musicale?

In the vicious hunt most debutantes and their mothers made of the marriage mart, a title, wealth, acceptable looks and amiable disposition marked a gentleman as a prime quarry. The Marquis of Aldridge, heir to a duke since birth, regarded the scene before him in near despair.

He would retire to the country to become a hermit, if he could. The business of the duchy required him to be social and in London, but the risk of being saddled with a wife he hadn’t chosen required constant vigilance.

He defended himself with his abysmal reputation, constant watchfulness, and the willingness to be ruthless when required. Even so, the inevitable gossip about his father’s swift decline and approaching demise sent the hunt into a frenzy.

He went nowhere without first considering how to avoid any traps that might have been laid. If forced to attend a ball, he eschewed the dance floor for the card and billiards rooms. He ventured outside of these rooms, and to other entertainments, only in the company of his mother or one of his sisters. He’d not been to a house party in over a year, and the last one was under his mother’s own roof, and had required him to administer a sharp lesson to a particularly rapacious debutante.

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Tea on the Ice

UPDATE: The prizes for the blog hop have been awarded, but please read on for flash fiction and historical tidbits. Prizewinners names at the bottom of the post. Comments always welcome.

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It was going to work!

Maddie Forrest had called in so many favours and promised more, that if she’d been wrong, she’d be ruined in all the ways a disgraced former lady’s maid could be.

“The ladies will want somewhere they can sit down and warm their hands around a proper cup of tea,” she’d told her brother Will.  It was the first Frost Fair in a generation, and Maddie was sure they’d all come.

Will had scoffed. “Them proper ladies won’t even come down ’ere. Think they want to rub shoulders with the likes of us? Leave it to me, Maddie. This is our chance to make some real money.”

Maddie refused to listen. Will’s ideas about getting his hands on some cash were shady at best and mostly downright criminal. If she’s was going to get herself and little Nan out of London before Will found himself imprisoned or worse, she needed money, and the Frost Fair was her chance. Maddie knew what ladies liked. She’d been a favourite until she fell for the false promises of a black-hearted gentleman.

That, she thought, as she smiled a welcome at yet another group of fashionably dressed ladies as they entered her booth, was her biggest remaining risk, now that the Duchess of Haverford had made all her dreams come true by bringing some huge ton event onto the ice. She was counting on no one knowing her from her former life and spreading around the gossip that the hostess of this discreet and convenient booth was a fallen woman, dismissed without reference when found to be with child.

The chance was low. No one looked at servants. As she served tea and plates of tiny tarts and cakes, the ladies in their fine gowns and warm coats huddled around the braziers that she had begged from a friend in the Night Watch and ignored her, except to speak orders to the air with every confidence that their desires would be met.

A gentleman entered, escorting two ladies. Maddie took their cloaks and showed them to a table. The tent had come from the pawn shop, and she shuddered to think of the payment the pawnbroker would have demanded had she not made its hire fee in the first day on the ice. Yes, and enough to pay for the tables and chairs, too.

“I’ll think of something a fine woman like you can do for me,” he’d told her, his leer leaving no doubt about his meaning.

She didn’t need to worry about the pawnbroker now. She already had his fee wrapped in a package and hidden under her bed. And she’d arranged for her landlady to give it to the man the day after Maddie and Nan got on the stage and left town.

“What is your pleasure?” she asked the ladies who had just taken their seats. She rattled of the types of tea she had available; the foods that local bakers were supplying for her to sell on their behalf, with a small commission sticking to her pocket with every sale.

She was also being paid for supplying the booth two doors up, where the Ladies Society was giving pamphlets about the plight of those returned, and the families of the dead and injured. Yes, and the fortune teller’s booth, and the book tent. She was even making a few extra coins selling tea out the back of the tent made from the great folks’ leavings, with each steep fetching a progressively lower price. Even the chestnut seller could afford to bring her own mug to Maddie’s friend who was serving out the back, for a weak brew that cost her a farthing.

Maddie’s grin at her own success won an answering smile from the gent. He was a handsome fellow for an old man. “Can you also take tea – strong, black and sweet – to my two men outside the tent? They’re the ones in the red coats and large hats.” He handed over a half crown, and for that she would have served half a regiment. Maddie offered him change and her heart sang when he refused.

She poured the ordered tea into mugs for the lesser folk, and carried them outside. Her eyes widened. The men were barbarians of some kind, in red coats like banyans, almost knee length and richly embroidered, and bushy hats made out of sheep’s wool.

“Your master asked me to bring you this,” she told them. They thanked her like civilised beings, but her heart still thumped in her chest as she retreated inside, stopping in the entrance to allow a veiled lady to go first.

Before she could show the lady to a table, the gentleman with the barbarian servants stood and pulled out a chair for her.

“Thank you, Your Grace,” the lady said. His Grace? The gentleman was a duke? He must be the Duke of Winshire, then. Maddie should have realised. The papers had been full of him for nearly a year, ever since he arrived back in England with an army of barbarians, including his own foreign born children. And there were some of the barbarians right outside her tent!

She crossed to the table to ask for the lady’s order, hoping she would lift the veil. Surely she knew that voice? She was to be disappointed. But as she turned away to make the ordered Oolong, the Duke of Winshire leaned forward and used a finger to lift the veil aside. “How is it?” he asked.

Maddie had a bare moment to catch sight of the lady’s face. The Duchess of Haverford herself sat in Maddie’s tent with the Duke of Winshire, one side her face a massive bruise discernible even through powder intended to conceal.

There must be a story there. Perhaps Maddie could tell the Teatime Tattler, which had a booth several Frost Fair streets over? But no. She’d done all sorts of things to win the funds she needed to give her and Nan a fresh start, but she’d never hurt another person. Whatever the duchess was up to meeting her husband’s greatest enemy, it was nothing to do with Maddie or the Teatime Tattler.

Besides, she owed the Duchess of Haverford for the success of her booth, and for the idea that had just entered her head. She’d taken home one of the pamphlets from the Ladies Society last night, and read it, too. All about the plight of those hurt by the wars over in France, where that fiend Napoleon was trying to scoop up all the countries over there before coming for England. Injured soldiers had a hard time, and so did their families. But widows and orphans were even worse off.

Maddie could be a widow. Why not? Start again where nobody knew her. Perhaps get work in a shop, or even – if the Frost Fair lasted long enough and the crowds remained as large – rent a shop: one that dressed ladies. Who better? Maddie almost sang as she tidied up tables and served more customers.

The Duke of Winshire came to talk to her after the veiled lady left. “I think you recognised the lady who joined me at my table,” he said.

“Discreet and comfortable, it says on the sign, Your Grace,” she told him. “I saw nothing and I know nothing. You can count on me, Sir.”

He examined her face, and must have been satisfied, for he smiled again. “Be sure that you speak of this to no one,” he advised, and she nodded.

He pressed something into her hand then turned away and unhurriedly joined his companions, who were waiting by the door.

Maddie watched him go before looking down. She knew it was a coin by the shape and size of it, but a spade guinea! She could get 27 shilling for that, easy. Why, even as a maid, she’d not made that much in a month! She hadn’t had any idea that keeping secrets could be so lucrative!

For the rest of the day, Maddie hummed as she worked. If just a few more people came to the tea booth seeking a place to hide their secrets, she and Nan would be in clover.

Comment to win

Tea was not the only beverage on sale. No doubt coffee and hot chocolate had their place, too, and all kinds of hot and cold alcoholic beverages. What would you want to drink and eat if you were attending a frost fair. Comment on this post, each of the other four, and the page on the Belles’ website to go into the draw for the main prize in the blog hop, a $50 US Amazon card.

All comments on this post will go in a draw for an e-copy of one the four earlier Bluestocking Belles’ collections, plus a copy of my Paradise Regained, the prequel to The Children of the Mountain King.

Next up: Anna’s Hot Roast Chestnuts!

Could ladies get a discreet cup of tea on the ice?

I don’t have any evidence that the 1814 Frost Fair included a tent where ladies of refinement could escape from the crush of the common people to purchase a good cup of tea, but why not? The ice offered entertainment for all classes and of all kinds, and not everyone enjoys mulled wine and copious quantities of ale.

My tea lady’s experience with the ton was not uncommon. A maid seduced or raped by a so-called gentleman was assumed to be of loose morals and carried all the consequences, while the gentleman was forgiven, because everyone knew that the lower classes were asking for it, and men couldn’t be blamed for taking what was offered.

The secret meeting touches on the matters in my series, Children of the Mountain King, but the main action here and in the rest of the blog hop is Fire & Frost. Don’t miss our five tales of love in a time of ice.

Fire & Frost

In a winter so cold the Thames freezes over, five couples venture onto the ice in pursuit of love to warm their hearts.

Love unexpected, rekindled, or brand new—even one that’s a whack on the side of the head—heats up the frigid winter. After weeks of fog and cold, all five stories converge on the ice at the 1814 Frost Fair when the ladies’ campaign to help the wounded and unemployed veterans of the Napoleonic wars culminates in a charity auction that shocks the high sticklers of the ton.

In their 2020 collection, join the Bluestocking Belles and their heroes and heroines as The Ladies’ Society For The Care of the Widows and Orphans of Fallen Heroes and the Children of Wounded Veterans pursues justice, charity, and soul-searing romance.

Celebrate Valentine’s Day 2020 with five interconnected Regency romances.

Melting Matilda by Jude Knight – Fire smolders under the frost between them.

My One True Love by Rue Allyn – She vanished into the fog. Will he find his one true love or remain lost, cold and alone forever?

Lord Ethan’s Courage by Caroline Warfield – War may freeze a man’s heart; it takes a woman to melt it.

A Second Chance at Love by Sherry Ewing – Can the bittersweet frost of lost love be rekindled into a burning flame?

The Umbrella Chronicles: Chester and Artemis’s Story by Amy Quinton – Beastly duke seeks confident woman who doesn’t faint at the sight of his scars. Prefers not to leave the house to find her.

Congratulations to Cheri, winner of the overall prize for the blog hop, and to Kimberly, who has won two ebooks: her choice of one of the Bluestocking Belles’ earlier collections (Holly and Hopeful Hearts, Never Too Late, Follow Your Star Home, or Valentines From Bath), plus a copy of my Paradise Regained.

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Tea with the man who wasn’t there

Eleanor was alone. Aldridge had left for Haverford Castle that morning. Matilda had already visited and was now busy about the house. Eleanor had instructed her dresser to allow no one else into her private rooms. She didn’t want to give the servants anything more to talk about, and she certainly didn’t want to worry her wards with her current appearance.

It was boring to be confined, though. With one eye swollen nearly shut by a large purple bruise and her head aching from the blow she took to the back of the head, she couldn’t read or attend to her correspondence.  She tidied the embroidery box that she seldom used, but that task took only a few minutes. She went over in her mind the list of tasks to be done before the charity auction and ball in less that a week’s time, and had to concede that her deputies, particularly Matilda, Cecilia, and Georgie, had it well in hand. What excellent young women they were!

When His Grace attacked Matilda yesterday! Eleanor shuddered at the memory. Thank goodness for young Charles. Would they make a go of it? Clara, the boy’s mother, seemed to think so, and Eleanor couldn’t doubt that Matilda had a tendre for Charles. But he had hurt her badly a year ago, and she didn’t trust him.

Eleanor shut her eyes and leaned back against her cushions, but her bruises ached too much to let her sleep. Her dresser had advocated taking some of the laudunum the doctor had left. Eleanor was not a fan. Perhaps a half dose?

A soft noise from the doorway. Her dresser coming to check on her well being, though she’d sent the woman downstairs to the servants hall not ten minutes ago. She was hemmed about by people who fussed over her, and on days like today she found it hard to be grateful. Without opening her eyes, she said, “I am well, Matthewes. Go and have a nuncheon. I will not need you for at least an hour.”

“She has gone, Your Grace,” said a voice that had become familiar again in the last year. Her one working eye flew open and she sat up so quickly that her head spun and she was forced to rest it back on the cushions while it settled.

“James!” What was the Duke of Winshire doing in her private rooms? In fact, what was he doing in Haverford House?

He crossed the room and crouched before her, peering at her eye, his lips compressed and his nostrils flaring.

“It looks worse than it is,” Eleanor insisted. “James, what are you doing here?”

“I had to see for myself.” James took one of her hands and lifted it to his lips. “Eleanor, I know I should not be here, but no one saw me. I came in through Aldridge’s wing. He gave me keys when he saw me last night.”

Eleanor couldn’t make sense of that. “Aldridge visited you? Why?”

“He told me what happened. He wanted you well protected while he was away, and for that protection to be invisible.” The man’s beloved lips quirked in a slight smile. “No one will see my men, Eleanor, and if they do — who would imagine that the Winshire retainers were protecting the Haverford duchess and her wards?”

Eleanor’s head! If only it did not pound so much, this might make sense. “Protected? From what?”

James shrugged. “I am not sure he knows himself. I suspect he is a little overwrought, Eleanor, and who can blame him? But I am glad to do you this service. If his instincts prove to be true, then we will make sure no harm comes to you. If not?” He shrugged. “My men will enjoy the novelty of another house to protect. But let us no concern ourselves with that. What can I do to make you more comfortable? Something to drink? Something to read? Another pillow?”

Eleanor decided to leave the mystery of her son’s actions and enjoy the moment. “Sit and talk to me, James. Tell me about your new granddaughter. And Sophia. Is Sophia well? How is young Sutton? I like your son a great deal, James.”

“I am coming to like yours, my dear,” James answered, settling himself on the floor at her feet, her hand still captured in his.

They had an hour till the dresser returned. All of a sudden, the head did not hurt nearly as much.

***
Her Grace is injured in Melting Matilda. Buy Fire & Frost before release date on 4 February to find out how and why.

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New Year’s goals on WIP Wednesday

 

So what are your writer goals for 2020? Can you share an excerpt that relates to those goals? One of mine is to publish at least the first four novels in The Children of the Mountain King.

Paradise Regained, the prequel, went out in December. Melting Matilda, an associated novella, is in the Belles’ box set Fire & Frost, published on 4 February. And I hope to have the preorder for To Wed a Proper Lady up by the end of the weekend, with publication early in April.

As always, put your extract in the comments. Mine is from the next Mountain King novel: To Mend the Broken-Hearted.

Ruth roused from a doze in the small dark hours after midnight, though she hadn’t known her eyes had closed until a sound startled her awake.  Something out of place, it must have been, alerting the sentinel in her brain that she’d developed when she and Zyba were out in the field. They had served her father and honed their skills by dressing as boys and riding with the guard squads assigned to escort caravans through bandit country in the mountains and deserts of her homeland.

There it was again. A metallic scrape. Silently, she uncurled from her chair, reaching through the slit in her skirt for the dagger in the sheath strapped to her thigh. Against the gray of the night, a blacker shape climbed onto the window sill, pausing there to whisper. “Lady Ruth?”

Assassins do not usually announce themselves. She could probably acquit the intruder of malicious intent, which meant he was more in danger from the illness than she and her charges where from him.

“Go away,” she told him. “This room is in quarantine. We have four cases of smallpox.”

The man moved, coming fully into the room so she could see hints of detail in the far reaches of the candle light. He was tall, with broad shoulders. A determined chin caught the light as he pulled something from his pocket and sat on a chair by the window. The light also glinted off a head of close-cut fair hair.

“I am aware. Four patients, one of them my responsibility. One exhausted doctor. You need help.” As he spoke, he lifted one bare foot after the other, rolling on a stocking each and then tucking the long elegant foot into a soft indoor shoe.

“I don’t need more patients,” Ruth objected, less forcefully than she might if he had not moved closer so that the light touched half of his face, making the rest seem darker by contrast. What she could see was lean, carved with grief. Dark eyes glinted in the shadows cast by firmly arched brows. His gaze was intent on hers.

“I have had the smallpox, my lady, and I am not leaving, so you might as well make use of me. I’m no doctor, but I can follow instructions. You need sleep if you’re to avoid illness yourself.”

Her tired brain caught up with the comment about his responsibility. “You are Lord Ashbury,” she stated. “You cannot think to nurse the girls.”

“What prevents me?” Ashbury demanded. “My amputation? I have one more hand than you can muster on your own. Their modesty? Leaving aside that you and the maids can manage their bathing and other personal matters, I can free you to look after them by lifting and carrying for you. My dignity? I work my own fields, my lady. I am not too exalted to fetch and carry for the woman who intends to save my niece’s life.” She turned, then, and looked straight at him, and he moved so that the lamp shone directly on his face. A long jagged scar skirted the corner of his eye and bisected his cheek and then one side of his mouth, trailing to nothing on his chin.

“You are not qualified,” she told him.

Ashbury shrugged. “True. I daresay half the world is better qualified than I. But I have done some battlefield nursing and I am here.”

“You cannot stay. I am an unmarried woman. You are a man.” A ridiculous statement. Here, isolated from the foolish scandal-loving world of the ton, who was to know. Besides, she would never put something as ephemeral as ‘reputation’ ahead of the needs of her patients.

He took another meaning from her objection, spreading both hands to show them empty, and saying gravely. “I will do you no harm. I give you my word.”

Of course, he wouldn’t. Even if he were so inclined, he would not get close enough to try. Something of her thoughts must have shown in her face, because one corner of his mouth kicked up.

“I suppose you are a warrior after the fashion of that fiercesome maiden you have guarding the quarantine. You are three-times safe then, my lady, with my honour backed by your prowess and reinforced by the knowledge that any missteps on my part will anger your champions.”

Her spurt of irritation was prompted by Lord Ashbury’s amusement, not by the unexpected physical effect of his desert anchorite’s face, lightened by that flash of humour. “I was more concerned about the impact on our lives if it is known we’ve been effectively unchaperoned for perhaps several weeks.

He raised his brows at that and the amusement disappeared. “My servants are discreet and yours would die for you. Besides, you have your maid with you at all times, do you not? And I have my—” he hesitated over a word; “my charges,” he finished.

His niece and his daughter, Ruth thought, wondering what story explained his reluctance to say the words. No matter. He was determined. He was also right; she needed someone else to share the nursing, and now she had a volunteer. Her attraction to him was undoubtedly amplified by her tiredness. She would ignore it, and it would go away.

She would sleep. At the realisation she could finally hand her watch over to someone else, her exhaustion crashed in on her, and it was all she could do to draw herself together and say, “Come. I will show you what you need to do, and explain what to watch for.”