Footnotes on Friday

by

Recipes for Hijinks in A Wallflower’s Midsummer Night’s Caper

Today, my friend Alina K. Field visits us on Footnotes on Friday, with some information about sneezing powder, itching powder and more!

The heroine of A Wallflower’s Midsummer Night’s Caper seizes her first opportunity, a masquerade at her family’s estate, to take revenge on the duke who ruined her first season.

Though the duke has now expressed a desire to court her, she’s not having it. Her first ploy is swapping costumes with her devious younger brother. How embarrassing for the duke at the midnight unmasking when he discovers he’s been romancing a boy!

But she’s planned more. She’ll put sneezing powder (pepper) in his handkerchief, and itching powder in the costume he’s been given to wear. An emetic, syrup of ipecac, available in her family’s still room, can be put in his drink, and the estate’s abundant roses provide shriveled rose hips from which she makes itching powder. However, she puts her foot down at her brother’s plan to dose the hero with the Spanish fly and sweet flag provided by his friend, the local apothecary’s assistant.

Jude has blogged before about the aphrodisiac Spanish fly, made from beetles. Sweet flag, acorus calumus, is an herb with a history of medicinal applications, including aphrodisiac qualities. The plant was introduced to England in the 16th century, so would have been known and available. Besides its healing qualities, it was used by perfumers and as a flavoring agent. My schoolboy character, having learned of the ancient Orientals’ particular use for this herb, is anxious to try it on the hero.

If you’d like to make your own itching powder, there are other choices besides rose hips. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial. Keep these recipes away from the children!

A Wallflower’s Midsummer Night’s Caper

Release Day June 11, 2024

Heat rating: PG-13

As Midsummer Night’s magic unfolds and passions rise, will a repentant duke be well and truly punished, or will a vengeful wallflower be caught in her own game?

A Midsummer Night’s masquerade at her family’s country home presents the Honorable Nancy Lovelace with the perfect opportunity for revenge against the man who ruined her first London season—a man she’s known since childhood, a man she’d once thought she loved. With the help of her crew of younger relatives, she’ll give him his comeuppance.

Thanks to his bad behavior, Simon Crayding is now known to society as the Swilling Duke. When an old school chum invites him for a Midsummer Night’s party, he jumps at the chance to lick his wounds among friends and apologize to his friend’s sister, Nancy, because apparently, he’s done something to hurt her, he just doesn’t remember what.

It soon becomes clear that Nancy will not easily forgive. Never one to resist a challenge—or a beautiful lady—Simon vows to persevere. As the night unfolds and passions rise, will Simon be well and truly punished, or will Nancy be caught in her own game?

First Kiss

Nancy lifted her skirts and tiptoed along the dark passage, willing herself to proceed in a stately manner, with her hem and her hair wreath minding their places.

She had been doing so well, so very, very well, quelling the nervousness twitching through her… Until that first step from the carriage when she’d knocked the poor footman’s wig askew.

She took a long breath and assumed the ramrod posture that was her defense against the busk in her stays—as well as all the other worries unsettling her.

The dancing would start soon, and she would so love to dance the first set.

There’d be no more tripping. No more ripped clothing. No more embarrassing awkwardness.

If only she and Mama were not virtually alone in this crowd of strangers.

Not that the ball guests were all strangers to her mother. Though Mama had been absent from London these last two years since Papa’s death, she’d kept up her correspondence with friends and acquaintances.

Mama would find someone to lead her daughter out. Someone young, Nancy hoped, but not too fashionable. Not eager to wed, because she wasn’t at all ready to spend hours drinking tea or being driven in the park. She could drink tea and go for drives at home, and there were far too many interesting museums and theaters in London to waste time on mere courting. Her friend from school, Sally Simpkins, was in London as well, though Mama had advised restraint about socializing with the daughter of a Drury Lane actress, never mind that the woman was considered respectable.

It had seemed a trifle unfair. Sally was as much a lady as any of the ton, and she’d know exactly how to act with the crowd gathered here, no matter how high the title.

Oh, for a familiar dance partner. Her brother, George, wouldn’t mind if she stepped on his toes; her brother, Fitz, would laugh if she made a wrong turn. The same was true for Rupert and Selwyn.

Or… what about Simon?

Thoughts of him sent emotions spiraling in her, longing twining with annoyance, and strands of hurt and embarrassment befuddling her, so that when she turned a corner, she stumbled against a large body with a startled squeak.

“Here now. What’s this?”

Powerful hands matched the deep masculine voice and set her back, steadying her. She looked up, astonished, and her heart swelled and threatened to burst. All the mixed emotions evaporated, and joy flooded her. Dark hair spilled over one blue-gray eye and the full lips pursed together in a frown.

He’d come for her. Simon Clayding—Duke of Something now, but he would always be Simon to her—Simon was here.

“It’s you,” she said. “I’m so s-sorry. I’m as clumsy as ever. B-but… you’re here?”

Perhaps he would dance with her. Perhaps she should ask him.

“’Course I’m here.” He blinked, as though trying to focus. “Question is, why are you here looking like a fresh young thing ready for your come-out?”

“S-Simon?”

“Simon?” He muttered a foul profanity she’d heard only on the rarest of occasions spilling from one of her brothers’ mouths. “Demmed Percy told you my Christian name, I suppose, and sent you along. One of his pranks. Well, madam, you’re a pretty thing, and I mean you no offense, but I’m not going to be sidetracked tonight. I’m not interested.”

A wave of misery stilled her tongue and drove the breath from her. She’d loved Simon Clayding since her brother George brought him home from school that first holiday fifteen years ago when she’d been not much more than a baby.

In the dim light of a wall sconce, his gaze darkened and held hers, despite his proclaimed lack of interest.

Perhaps… Simon hadn’t seen her in nine years. He didn’t recognize her. He had her confused with someone else.

Reasoning trickled back into her senses, bringing along the strong scent of brandy.

Of course. He was completely foxed.

She licked her lips, preparing to set him straight, but as she opened her mouth, a spark lit his eyes and turned up the corners of his mouth.

And then he tugged her, pressing his lips to hers, pressing his chest to her… to her…

Breath left her in a whoosh as he angled his mouth over hers, nibbling and then entering her with his tongue, inflaming desire, demanding surrender.

She gripped his broad shoulders but instead of steadying her, their solidness sent heat spinning through her.

Simon was kissing her. Simon. The first man to kiss her. At a public ball. He cared for her. He hadn’t forgotten. He meant to mar…

“There.” He set her back as suddenly as he’d swooped down on her.

A tendril of hair fell over her cheek, the same one that a maid had just pinned.

“That’s all you’ll get from me. Go back and tell Percy we’ve had our tumble, if you will, and demand payment from him. Get you gone before one of the servants sees you and throws you out on your arse.”

He turned her around and smacked her bottom. She staggered against the wall, righted herself, and turned back ready to give him a piece of her mind.

But he’d disappeared.

by

Cornwall and Cornish in Hold Me Fast

The story I’ve just sent to the publisher is at least partially set in Cornwall, so I needed to do some research to make sure I did justice to the county. Tin has been mined in Cornwall for four thousand years, right to the end of the twentieth century. Other metals, too. By the mid-nineteenth century, overseas competition made the Cornish mines less profitable, and so many miners and their families emigrated that the Cornish have a saying. “A mine is a hole in the ground with a Cornishman at the bottom”.

In my research I discovered that Cornish (Kernewek) is one of those languages that has been brought back from extinction in the past fifty years. It is still classified as critically endangered. In the sixteenth century, many people in Cornwall spoke only Kernewek, and objected strongly to the English Book of Common Prayer becoming the sole legal form of worship in England.

The so-called Prayer Book Rebellion was harshly put down. The language declined in the next two centuries, for several reasons, but at least in part because the local gentry adopted English so that they would not be considered disloyal and rebellious.

By the end of the eighteenth century, very few people (and perhaps no young people) spoke Kernewek.

Names are a different matter. Both first names and surnames are passed down through the generations. My hero and heroine have Cornish first names, as do several of the other Cornish characters.

As to the bogs and mires that play an important part in the story, Bodmin Moor has numerous peat deposits, as well as spectacular granite outcrops. Blanket bogs are peatlands that cover crests, slopes, flats, and hollows of a gently undulating terrain. Valley mires are areas of water-logged deep peat in valley bottoms or channels.

Good advice to walkers is to test the depth of any wet or shaky ground before you step on it.

I hope readers who live in Cornwall will enjoy what they recognise and forgive any errors.

by

The Barbary Pirates and coastal villages

The Italian places attacked by pirates between 1516 and 1798. Naturally, people tended to move inland, and to steep places that were harder to attack. Think of that next time you see an Italian village on a steep hill.

In my new release, Hook, Lyon and Sinker, the hero’s life is completely changed by Barbary pirates.

The Barbary states were a collection of North Africa states along what was known as the Barbary Coast. Through until the early 19th century, these states sponsored three kinds of economic activity that other nations eventually ended by force: slave-taking, abduction for ransom, and a protection racket.

The ships that operated out of their ports attacked ships of other nations sailing in the Mediterranean and out into the North Atlantic and also conducted raids into coastal areas in the Mediterranean, the west coast of North Africa, and what is now Europe.

They took goods, but also people who would either become slaves or–if they had wealthy relatives–be offered for ransom. Some of the slaves were offered for redemption, and various charities were set up in Europe and the United States to collect money to buy these captives out of slavery.

Muslims being forbidden to enslave (or even rob) other Muslims, the corsairs attacked any underprotected European or American ship that strayed into their path, thus combining the religious duty of harrying the infidel with the economic pleasure of making a profit.

Except when those ships came under the third kind of activity. The protection racket was an agreement that their ships would not attack ships showing the flag of a nation or merchant who had paid tribute to stop such attacks.

It was not until France took over Algiers in 1830 that the last of the barbary pirates ceased operating out of those ports.

by

The day a lioness attacked the Royal Mail

A print of the oil painting that commemorates an unusual danger of the road.

If ever there was a time to change the timeline of a story so that I could include a little known snippet of truth is stranger than fiction, this was it. Researching for the journey to London that my hero and his brother make in Hold Me Tight, I came across a story about a danger that the coachmen of the Royal Mail could not have expected. They were prepared for highwaymen, storms, obstacles left deliberately or accidentally on the road, even attacks by dogs. They could not have expected what happened on 20 October 1816.

It was winter, a Sunday evening, and already dark when the mail coach pulled up outside the Winterslow Hut on the outskirts of Salisbury. Before the guard and coachman could deliver the mail, something large attacked one of the horses. The horses began kicking and plunging, and the passengers, alarmed, leapt out of the coach and raced into the inn, locking the door, leaving the driver, and the guard, Joseph Pike, shut outside.

In the dim lamplight, it took the two men a few minutes to figure out what was happening. A lioness had attacked Pomegranate, one of the lead horses, She was clinging to the horse’s throat with her claws dug in, and was raking the horse with her hind feet. Pike reached for his gun, but was stopped by the owner of a travelling menagerie, who begged them to let him and his men try to contain the beast. He sent his dog to draw the lion off. When the large dog attacked, she abandoned the horse to deal with this new threat.

The people from the menagerie managed to chase the lion into a granary and confine her there. A local paper at the time said:

Her owner and his assistants followed her upon their hands and knees, with lighted candles, and having placed a sack on the ground near her, they made her lie down upon it; they then tied her four legs and passed a cord round her mouth, which they secured; in this state they drew her out from under the granary, upon the sack, and then she was lifted and carried by six men into her den in the caravan.

The mail was delayed by a mere 45 minutes.

I’ve been delayed by wondering if I can move my story back three years without overcomplicating things. I didn’t want my hero and his brother (especially his brother) to be old enough to serve in the long war against Napoleon. Ah well. This snippet of history is not going to go away. I’m sure I can use it in another story.

by

Drugs, Sex, and Music

Once again, this time in Hold Me Fast, I’m writing about the use of drugs in the early 19th century. In this case, my heroine has fallen into the hands of a fast set who combine their love of music, poetry and painting with drug abuse and sex.

My heroine is a musician—she sings and she plays the harp. She is also, by the time my hero comes to find his childhood love, solidly addicted.

So what drugs?

Laudanum was legal and easily available. It was sold as the answer to all sorts of things, from sleeplessness and sorrow to toothache in babies. Laudanum is a mix of opium and alcohol. It mightn’t fix what ails you, but you won’t care any more. It is brutally addictive, as many users found to their cost.

The market also contained other “medicines” that contained opium. Dover powder was a mix of opium and ipecacuanha, to be taken in a sweet drink such as a white wine posset. Godfrey’s cordial combined opium with treacle and spices in water.

Opium itself was also readily available, to smoke, chew, or otherwise consume.

In all those forms, the benefit was a euphoric “rush” followed by relaxation. And in all these forms, people became addicted with regular use.

Ether was a new toy for the idle in search of a thrill, too. Sold as a medicine called Anodyne, liquid diethyl ether gave users dissociative effects and a sensation of happiness. Warming it and smelling the vapours worked faster, but ether is highly flammable, which could be problematic in the hands of those high on the effects. Burns were common.

Cannabis and its derivatives weren’t readily available from the neighbourhood apothecary, but its likely that my villain could have found majoun or charas—blocks of cannabis resin—in the docklands, where sailors might well have imported such products for their own use and for sale.

Nitrous oxide parties also fall within my time period, with gatherings to inhale the product held as early as 1799. The idea that laughing gas might have medical applications wasn’t picked up for another forty-give

Spanish fly, a preparation made from blister beetles, was used as an aphrodisiac. It caused a rush of blood to the sexual organs, and was highly toxic. As was Fowler’s preparation, a solution using arsenic for the same purpose.

Were psychotropic mushrooms in use in England at the time? We know that in 1799 a family picked mushrooms in Green Park, cooked them up, and ate them. The father and four sons experienced spontaneous laughter followed by delirium. This was in the news at the time. You can, if you wish, take the view that idle dilettantes like my heroine’s patrons would read about such an event and decide that mushrooms were a step too far. But I’d be willing to bet that some of them had a go. Certainly, my rotten lot did so.

And when all else fails, there’s always alcohol. I’ve written before about the huge quantities consumed as a matter of course at all levels of society. Yes, glasses were much smaller than they are today, and so were bottles. But still, the reported volumes downed in a night are astounding.

The folk tale that inspired Hold Me Fast is Tam Lin, in which a faithful sweetheart is determined to rescue her love from the fairy queen. She is told that she can get him back if she recognises him when the fairy horde parade by, pulls him from his horse, and turns into one horrible and dangerous creature after another.

As soon as I began to think about the mechanics of a fairy tale world with the underlying viciousness and cold-hearted hedonism of the fairies in the oldest tales, I knew I had a group of selfish entitled aristocratic men with too much money and too little conscience. And what is more likely than that a person recovering from drug addiction is going to be changeable, near mindless, and dangerous?

by

1792 in England

The book I am about to send off to the publishers is set in 1792–a bit out of my usual era.

Most of my books are set in the Regency, broadly speaking. Technically, the Regency ran from February 1811, when the Prince of Wales was named Regent for his father the King, to January 1820, when the King died and Prince George inherited the Crown.

In common practice, the term is used to mean a longer period, from somewhere around 1795 until the start of the reign of Queen Victoria, in June 1837.

So The Sincerest Flattery isn’t covered by even the longest definition.

It was three years after the storming of the Bastille, but at the time of the story, the King of France, his wife, and his children were still alive, and not yet in prison. The French National Assembly, set up in 1789,were still debating the shape of government, with those who support some form of constitutional monarchy unable to find common ground with one another, let alone those who want a republic. This impasse ended in August 1792, after the events in my story, with the arrest of the king for treason. In January 1793, he was tried and executed.

After the king’s execution, declarations of war poured into France from various European powers and the United Kingdom (who at the time would not have thanked you for considering them European–the more things change, the more they remain the same). From then until the end of the Napoleonic era, France was at war for all but a couple of short respites.

In June 1793, the extremists took over. They ordered more aristocrats to the guillotine. The Reign of Terror had begun. It looms large in historical fiction and historical romance, but lasted around a year.

Political instability continued the Directorate was formed in 1795, their power supported by the army which was now led by a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1792, the fashionable Englishwoman was not yet wearing what we think of as Regency fashion. Nor was she wearing the huge ornate gowns and towering wigs fashionable at time her mother made her debut. Instead, waists were still on the natural waistline–though by 1795 they had crept up to the Empire line (so-called because it was favoured by Josephine Bonaparte, and therefore by the women of the French court). They wouldn’t head back towards the waist again for another twenty-five years.

She wasn’t powdering her hair, though, or wearing a wig. Hair powder had already become unpopular with the most fashionable before the British government put a tax on it.

 

by

Heirs apparent and heirs presumptive

Cousins and nephews of the title holder can’t be heirs apparent

The heir apparent is the person who

  • is first in the order of succession, and
  • cannot be displaced from inheriting when someone else is born.

A cousin or a nephew would normally be an heir presumptive, which is a person who is currently first in the order of succession, but who can be displaced if the current titleholder has a son (or, rarely, depending on the inheritance conditions of the title, a daughter). It doesn’t matter if the title holder is old, celibate, unmarried, or even medically impotent. As long as he lives, the rules presume he can father a child of his own.

Only heirs apparent get to use one of the title-holder’s lesser titles. The title holder doesn’t get to decide who gets the title. The order of succession is set up in the papers that established the title. Usually, heirs male of the body, which means the first-born son in a direct line.

The title-holder can’t give away lands that are entailed to the title, either. An entail leaves the lands to a future title holder, with the current title holder having right of possession. You cannot give away or sell what you don’t own.