January 14, 2020 by judeknight

Tea with a concerned mother

Eleanor, Duchess of Winshire had known Mia Redepenning since she was a child — a small girl with big eyes much overlooked by her only relative, her absent-minded father. Back when Eleanor was Duchess of Haverford, the man spent six months at Haverford Castle cataloguing the library while his little daughter did her lessons at a library table or crept mouse-like around the castle or its grounds.

Who would have thought, back in the days that Mia first became acquainted with the duchess’s goddaughter during a visit, that she would one day be a connection of Kitty’s and of Eleanor herself, by marriage? Or that, more than twenty years after the first time Mia and Kitty had joined Eleanor for tea in the garden, they met for tea whenever they were both in London?

Not that Mia and her husband Jules spent much time in London. He owned a coastal shipping business in Devon, and they lived not far from Plymouth, but Eleanor suspected that the main reason for their dislike of London Society lay in their three oldest children. And those children, if Eleanor was not mistaken, were the reason for Mia’s call today, and her distraction.

“Yes, I will help,” she said.

Mia, startled, opened her eyes wide.

“You want a powerful sponsor to introduce your Marsha to Society, and I am more than happy to bring her and Frances out together, my dear. Marsha is a very prettily behaved girl, and will be a credit to you and to me.”

Mia laughed. “I was wondering how to work around to the subject, Aunt Eleanor. I should have known you would see right through me.”

“It won’t be entirely straightforward, my dear,” Eleanor warned. “Thanks to that horrid man that kidnapped Dan all those years ago, everyone who was out in Society when you brought the children back from South Africa know what their mother was to your husband. Most people won’t be rude to Marsha’s face, not when she is sponsored by your family and mine. But they will talk behind our backs, I cannot deny it.”

“Talk behind our backs, I can handle,” Mia commented, “and the children all know the truth, so they cannot be hurt by having it disclosed.” She frowned. “But will they really invite her to their homes? Will she have suitors?”

“The highest sticklers will ignore her,” the duchess said. “She might not receive tickets for Almacks. But for the most part, Society will pay lip service to story you tell them, since what you tell them is supported by the Redepennings, the Winshires, the Haverfords and all our connections.” She returned Mia’s tentative smile.

“I have done this before, my dear, and am about to do it again. All the world knows my wards are more closely related to the previous duke than we admit, but as long as I insist that they are distant connections, born within wedlock to parents who died and begged me to take them in, they all pretend to believe it. As to suitors, Matilda married well, and my poor Jessica’s problems had nothing to do with her bloodlines — the match seemed a good one at the time. I expect Frances to also make an excellent marriage.”

Mia shook her head slowly. “They are wards to a duchess. Jules and I are very ordinary by comparison. We can dower our girls, though, and as long as we can protect them from direct insult, we do not wish to deny them the same debut as their cousins and their younger sisters.”

“No need to deny them. The Polite World will accept that Marsha is, as the public story has it, the daughter of a deceased couple that Jules knew while he was posted overseas with the navy. We shall watch them closely to keep the riff raff at bay, and they will have a marvelous time, as shall you and I, Mia.” She held out her hand, for all the world as if they were men sealing a business deal, and after a moment, Mia took her hand and shook it.

Mia and Jules have their story in Unkept Promises, where you can meet Marsha, Dan, and their little sister. Matilda’s love story is coming soon, in Melting Matilda, a novella in Fire & Frost. Jessica is also introduced in that story. Her tragedy will be a sub plot of her brother’s story, the third book of The Children of the Mountain King series. As to Eleanor’s story, it spans that series, and concludes in the sixth novel.

January 11, 2020 by judeknight

Write what you know (and if you don’t know, find out)

Beginning writers soon hear the advice ‘write what you know’. Often, teachers of writing classes interpret this to mean ‘write about the places and activities, and base your characters on the people, in your own life’.

Which sucks for writers of historical fiction, fantasy, or sf.

Even leaving aside questions of time and space, a literal interpretation limits people to writing within their own race, class, age, gender, religion, and physical or mental condition. I totally agree with those who want fiction to be more representative of the glorious and diverse range of human kind. Tribalism is the scourge of civilisation, and those who tell stories have an obligation to show that the differences between people make them interesting, not scary; that difference does not mean wrong.

Know what you write

On the other hand, there’s a non-literal interpretation. Every writer I know mines their own life and their own feelings for the emotional energy that goes into a story. They study the people around them to give dimension to their own characters. They research so that the facts they portray are accurate.

I write historical romance, mostly set in places I’ve never been to and involving societies I’ve never lived in. I read historical research and primary sources. I watch documentaries and other videos set in the places my characters travel. (A bike tour gives almost a horse rider’s view of the countryside.) I talk to other people who are studying the same topics. I take classes. I read some more. I stop mid-sentence to check facts, such as the time from the onset of fever to the first appearance of the rash in smallpox.

And I check things out with experts. A battlefield medic and an emergency room nurse read my operation scene in A Raging Madness. I sent the draft of Paradise Regained to the Iranian wife of my cousin’s son. A kura (woman elder) of the people descended from the tribe at Te Wharoa agreed to look at Forged in Fire for me. I’m not going to stop writing about diverse characters, but I’m also going to be careful that my unthinking assumptions don’t trap me into being offensive.

Life is rich, but we human beings have a habit of simplifying it to our own detriment. For example, there are thousands of edibles plant species in the world, and each of them comes in multiple types. We cultivate around 120 today. Three of those crops account for half of all food eaten on the planet.

We storytellers can (and some do) create a Regency society devoid of people of colour, LGBTQ characters, people with disabilities, poor people, people of different faiths. It sure isn’t true to history, and it’s also boring. Those who do write characters that represent such diversity often come from a community that has been marginalised, and they protest at being further marginalised by being blocked from publication and being shoved off into a corner if they are published. The assumption is that people want to read what they know.

I think — I hope — the assumption is wrong.

So let’s be brave

If you’re a reader, choose to read a novel that challenges your assumptions about your favourite historical era. And please, put your suggestions for novels to read into the comments so we all have a chance to try something new.

If you’re a writer, include diverse characters. Go out and learn so you know what you write. Present humankind in all its wonderful variety. Here’s a resource list, courtesy of Louisa Cornell, who says she got some of the list from Vanessa Riley (who writes great novels with black heroes and heroines).

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano; or Gustavu Vassa, the African written by Himself

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by David Livesay

Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina

Britain’s Black Past by Gretchen Gerzina (3/31/20)

A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi. London: Greenwood Press, May 2007.

The Chinese in Britain – A History of Visitors and Settlers by Barclay Price (2019).

The Chinese in Britain, 1800 – present, Economy, Transnationalism by Benton Gomez and Gregor Edmund

Chinese Liverpudlians: A history of the Chinese Community in Liverpool, by Maria Lin Wong. Liver Press, 1989.

Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. by Christopher J. Hawes

The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present. by Humayun Ansari

(And here’s what 31 authors said about Write What You Know.)

January 9, 2020 by judeknight

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.”

January 7, 2020 by judeknight

Tea with youthful memories

The Duke of Haverford slammed the door on his way out, but it wasn’t his temper that left his duchess trembling in her chair, her limbs so weak she could do nothing but sit, her chest hurting as she tried to force shallow breaths in and out. She had grown so used to his tantrums that she barely noticed.

“Your Grace?” Her secretary held out a hand as if to touch her then drew it back. The poor girl — a distant cousin just arrived from Berkshire — was as white as parchment. “Your Grace? Can I get you something? Can I pour you a pot of tea?”

Brandy would be welcome. A slight touch of amusement at Millicent’s reaction to such a request helped soothe Eleanor’s perturbation. “I should like to be alone, Millicent,” she managed to say. A lifetime of pretending to be calm and dignified through grief, anger, fear, and desperate sorrow came to her rescue. “Can you please send a note to Lady Carew to ask her to hold me excused today? Ask her if tomorrow afternoon would be acceptable.”

Once the girl left the room, casting an anxious glance over her shoulder, Eleanor stood and crossed to her desk, stopping before the mantel when her reflection caught her eye. If Millicent had been pale, Eleanor was worse — so white that dark patches showed under her eyes, eyes in which the pupil had almost swamped the iris.

It was the shock. Perhaps she would have that cup of tea before she fetched the box.

She poured it, and then added a spoonful of sugar. Two spoonfuls. She normally took her tea unsweetened, with just a slice of lemon, but hot sweet tea was effective in cases of shock, was it not?

With the cup set on the table by the chair, she spent a few minutes moving panels of wood in her escritoire, until the secret compartment at the back opened. She had not taken out the box inside since the afternoon of the day Grace and Georgie had told her — oh, some 15 years ago — that James still lived.

James.

Haverford could shout as much as he liked about Winshire’s heir being an imposter, about all the world knowing that the youngest son of the family had died in Persia three decades ago and more. But Eleanor had known almost as soon as Winshire’s daughter and daughter-in-law knew that James still lived. Of course he would come home now, when Winshire’s other heirs had died. She should have expected it. Why had she not expected it?

Words from Haverford’s rant came back to her as she sipped her tea and looked through the few treasures she had kept all these years, sacred to the memory of their doomed courtship. The ribbon she wore in her hair the first time they danced. Winshire says the man is his son. A dried rose from a bouquet he had sent her. The man has a pack of half-breeds that he claims are his children. Several notes and two precious letters, including the one in which he asked her to elope. Barbarians as Dukes of Winshire? Over my dead body! A handkerchief he’d given her to dry her eyes when she cried while telling him that they must wait; that her father would come around. Better to see the title in the hands of that idiot Wesley Winderfield that handed over to some clothhead.

If she had said ‘yes’, what would have happened? He had a curricle in the mews. They could have left that night, straight from the garden where they’d slipped out for a private conversation. Haverford would not have assaulted her on her way back inside. James would not have challenged him to a duel, wounded him, and been exiled a step ahead of the constable. Eleanor would not have been left with her reputation in tatters, refusing to marry Haverford and unable to marry James.

Or if she had stayed true to her memories of him, and had not finally given way to her sister’s pleadings, for Lydia had been set firmly on the shelf because of Eleanor’s scandal. But they told her James was dead, and what did it matter what became of her after that?

They lied. And now James was back in England, and she would need to meet him and pretend that they hadn’t broken one another’s hearts so many years ago.

A few tears fell onto the letters, and then the Duchess of Haverford packed everything away, dried her eyes and returned the box to its compartment.

She had children who loved her, friends, important work in her charities, and a full and busy life. Weeping over the past and fretting over the future never helped.

Her reflection in the mirror showed her complexion returned to normal, and if her eyes were sad? Well. That was normal, too.

James Winderfield senior and his family are introduced in Paradise Regained. His return to England as a widower and heir to the Duke of Winshire, and the subsequent love story of his son and namesake, James Winderfield junior, is in To Wed a Proper Lady, coming in March or April. The stories of his other children and his nieces are in the following books in the series The Children of the Mountain King.

January 4, 2020 by judeknight

The Greatest Killer

In some parts of England, people with communicable diseases such as smallpox were isolated in so called Pest Houses like this one in Findon.

“The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the bighearted maiden objects of horror to the lover.”
T.B. Macaulay

For at least 3,000 and perhaps as much as 6,000 years, smallpox was one of the world’s deadliest diseases. In countries where it was endemic, it was a disease of childhood, killing up to 80% of children infected. A person fortunate to escape infection in childhood who then caught the virus as an adult, had a 30% chance of dying. Either way, those who survived the disease were left with lifelong scars but also with lifelong immunity, so they could neither catch the disease nor transmit it to others.

Transmission was from person to person, including from droplets in the air from sneezing, coughing, or even breathing. Worse, body fluids on things like clothing or bedding could carry live viruses.

In countries where the disease was new, with no such protective pool of survivors, the infection rate was horrific and the death rate catastrophic. For example, in the Americas, it’s estimated that smallpox, measles and influenza killed 90% of the native population. Children and adults were affected alike.

Even in Europe, though, smallpox changed the fate of nations. In Britain, it played a part in the downfall of the royal house of the Stuarts. Smallpox put Charles II out of action for several weeks during a crucial time in the Civil War, and killed his brother Henry. Had this Protestant prince been alive when James II’s Catholicism caused the rift with the people, history might have been quite different. All of the new king’s sons died young, one of smallpox. He was succeeded by his daughter Mary and his son-in-law and nephew William of Orange.

Mary died of smallpox towards the end of 1694. Thomas Macaulay described her death as follows:

That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficient victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid; but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the small pox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. Towards the end of the year 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe. At length the infection spread to the palace, and reached the young and blooming Queen. She received the intimation of her danger with true greatness of soul. She gave orders that every lady of her bedchamber, every maid of honour, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the small pox, should instantly leave Kensington House. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, arranged others, and then calmly awaited her fate.

During two or three days there were many alternations of hope and fear. The physicians contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that age. The disease was measles; it was scarlet fever; it was spotted fever; it was erysipelas. At one moment some symptoms, which in truth showed that the case was almost hopeless, were hailed as indications of returning health. At length all doubt was over. Radcliffe’s opinion proved to be right. It was plain that the Queen was sinking under small pox of the most malignant type.

All this time William remained night and day near her bedside. The little couch on which he slept when he was in camp was spread for him in the antechamber; but he scarcely lay down on it. The sight of his misery, the Dutch Envoy wrote, was enough to melt the hardest heart. Nothing seemed to be left of the man whose serene fortitude had been the wonder of old soldiers on the disastrous day of Landen, and of old sailors on that fearful night among the sheets of ice and banks of sand on the coast of Goree. The very domestics saw the tears running unchecked down that face, of which the stern composure had seldom been disturbed by any triumph or by any defeat. Several of the prelates were in attendance. The King drew Burnet aside, and gave way to an agony of grief. “There is no hope,” he cried. “I was the happiest man on earth; and I am the most miserable. She had no fault; none; you knew her well; but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her goodness.” Tenison undertook to tell her that she was dying. He was afraid that such a communication, abruptly made, might agitate her violently, and began with much management. But she soon caught his meaning, and, with that gentle womanly courage which so often puts our bravery to shame, submitted herself to the will of God. She called for a small cabinet in which her most important papers were locked up, gave orders that, as soon as she was no more, it should be delivered to the King, and then dismissed worldly cares from her mind. She received the Eucharist, and repeated her part of the office with unimpaired memory and intelligence, though in a feeble voice. She observed that Tenison had been long standing at her bedside, and, with that sweet courtesy which was habitual to her, faltered out her commands that he would sit down, and repeated them till he obeyed. After she had received the sacrament she sank rapidly, and uttered only a few broken words. Twice she tried to take a last farewell of him whom she had loved so truly and entirely; but she was unable to speak. He had a succession of fits so alarming that his Privy Councillors, who were assembled in a neighbouring room, were apprehensive for his reason and his life. The Duke of Leeds, at the request of his colleagues, ventured to assume the friendly guardianship of which minds deranged by sorrow stand in need. A few minutes before the Queen expired, William was removed, almost insensible, from the sick room.

(In my book To Mend a Proper Lady, a girls school is caught up in a smallpox epidemic, causing my heroine Ruth Winderfield to flee with three girls for whom she is responsible plus two more she promises to deliver home on her way back to London. Of course, she becomes trapped at the home of the girls’ guardian, nursing them and others who fall ill.)

January 2, 2020 by judeknight

New Beginnings on WIP Wednesday

Happy new year, and welcome to my first WIP Wednesday for 2020. It seemed appropriate to post about beginnings. As always, I’d love you to share a start with me from your current WIP – the first paragraphs of a book, or of a chapter. Mine is the first scene from To Mend the Broken Hearted, the second book in The Children of the Mountain King. My goal is to finish this book by the end of the month, and publish it in May or June.

The crows rose in a flock over the tower on the borders of Ashbury land, a cacophony on wings. Val straightened and peered in that direction, shading his eyes to see if he could tell what had spooked them. It was unlikely to be a traveller on the lane that branched towards the manor from the road that passed the tower. After three years of repulsing visitors, the only people he ever saw were his tenant farmers and the few servants he had retained to keep the crumbling monstrosity he lived in marginally fit for human habitation.

He set the team moving again, the plough and seed drill combination creating a row of furrows behind him, but called a halt again when a bird shot up from almost under the horses’ hooves. Sure enough, a lapwing nest lay right in the path of the plough. Val carefully steered around it. He knew his concern for the pretty things set his tenants laughing behind his back, but they didn’t take up much room, and they’d hatch their chicks and be off to better cover.

One more evidence of his madness, the tenants thought, and in his worst moments he thought they were right, when thunder set him shaking or nightmares woke him screaming defiance or approaching anywhere close to that cursed tower froze him in his tracks.

The clouds that had threatened to disgorge all day finally sent a few stray drops his way, portents of more to come, but he had a bare two passes more to make to finish, and Barrow and his son were behind him with hoes, covering in the seed.

Another half hour would see the spring corn planted.

The gig from the inn went by beyond the hedge that bordered the lane. What was so important that it couldn’t wait until the housekeeper made her weekly trip to the nearest village? No matter. If he was needed, his manservant knew where to find him. He guided the team into the tight turn that would begin the second-to-last pass.

The rain thickened by the time he turned into the last row, and by half way down the field it’d soaked into the ground enough to make heavy going.

“Just a bit more,” he coaxed the horses, “just a bit more.”

He was half aware of the inn’s gig passing back along the lane in the direction of the village. Had it been making a delivery? His housekeeper had not mentioned any lack. His mind on the ploughing, he’d almost forgotten the gig by the time they at last reached the end.

“That’s it done, then, milord, “Barrow said, wiping his face which was as wet again a moment later.

Val agreed, habituation allowing him to hide his wince at being addressed with his brother’s title. Three years had not been enough to stop his reaction, but at least no one needed to know. “Get these boys home and give them a good feed,” he said, giving the lead horse a firm pat. “They’ve done well, and just in time.”

“That I will, milord. And you get yourself indoors, sir. Thankee,” Barrow said.

Did the man think Val too stupid or too far gone to go inside out of the rain? Well. No point in staying wet just to prove he was his own master. Val left Barrow to his son and horses, and set off to trudge back through the fields to the house, running the last few hundred yards through blinding hail.

Crick, his manservant, fussed over his towel and his bath and his dry clothes, and Val allowed it. This kind of weather was too much like Albuera for Crick’s demons, immersing him back into the confusion and the pain. Val told himself that he kept the old soldier out of compassion. During his worst moments, he feared his motivation was more of a sick desire to have someone around who was worse than him.

By the time Val was warm and dry again, the thunder had started. He sent Crick off to bed. There’d be no more sense out of the poor man tonight, nor much from Val, either. He refused the offer of dinner and shut himself up in his room so no one would see him whimpering like a child.

It was not until the following day, after the thunderstorm had passed, that he remembered the gig. Mrs Minnich, the housekeeper, remembered that it had delivered mail, and thought Crick had taken it, but what happened after that no one knew, least of all Crick. He had got roaring drunk and surfaced late in the day with a bad headache, a worse conscience, and no memory of the previous day at all.

The inn might know who it was from; even what it was about, since they’d sent someone out with it despite the weather. Val sent a note with Mrs Minnich on Friday, her regular day for shopping. She came back with the message that the gig had brought several letters, one of them marked urgent. It was from the school to which his sister-in-law had sent the girls before she absconded with the contents of the jewel safe shortly after she was made a widow, weeks before Val got word that he was now earl, and months before he got home.

The girls. He thought of them that way to avoid calling one of them his daughter, though the elder possibly was. The younger had been claimed by his brother, but not, in the end, by his brother’s wife. If the countess were to be believed, Val’s own lying wife was mother to the second child as well as the first. Perhaps even she had not known whether his brother had been father of both.

Whoever engendered them, the situation wasn’t the girls’ fault, but he still didn’t want to see either of them. He put the girls and the identity of their parents out of his head with the ease of long practice, along with any curiosity about the message. There were fields to plough, repairs to be made, and animal breeding to plan. If what the school wanted was important, no doubt they would write again.

December 30, 2019 by judeknight

Holiday reading in the spotlight

Are you looking for some holiday reading? I have some novellas and some collections for you. Click on the title to go to more information plus buy links.

Jude’s Christmas books

Paradise Regained

In discovering the mysteries of the East, James has built a new life. Will unveiling the secrets in his wife’s heart destroy it?

If Mistletoe Could Tell Tales

Wanted: love stories for a carriage-maker’s daughter, an admiral’s child, the unwanted wife of an earl, a nabob’s heiress, a duke’s cousin, and a fanatic’s niece

This 2017 collection has four novellas and two Christmas-themed short stories. Each of the novellas is also published separately, so you can buy individually if you have some of them and want the others without buying the collection.

A Suitable Husband (novella)

The cousin of a duke, however distant, can’t marry a chef from the slums, however talented. But dreams are free.

All that Glisters (story from Hand-Turned Tales)

Rose is unhappy in the household of her fanatical uncle. Thomas, a young merchant from Canada, offers a glimpse of another possible life. If she is brave enough to reach for it.

Candle’s Christmas Chair (novella)

Love blossoms between a viscount and a carriage maker’s daughter. Can they bridge the gap between them?

Gingerbread Bride (novella)

She runs away from unwanted complications and into disaster. Saving her has become a habit Rick doesn’t want to break.

Lord Calne’s Christmas Ruby (novella)

One wealthy merchant’s heiress who spurns fortune hunters. One impoverished earl with a twisted hand. Add one sweet aunt and one villainous rector, and stir.

Magnus and the Christmas Angel (story from Lost in the Tale)

Scarred by years in captivity, Magnus has fought English Society to be accepted as the true Earl of Fenchurch. Now he faces the hardest battle of all: to win the love of his wife.

Hearts in the Land of Ferns: Love Tales from New Zealand

Escape to beautiful New Zealand to enjoy tales of lovers who win against the odds.

A collection of Jude Knight’s New Zealand stories: two historical and three contemporary suspense.

All That Glisters: In gold rush New Zealand, they seek the treasure of a true heart (from Hand-Turned Tales)

Forged in Fire: Forged in Fire, their love will create them anew (from Never Too Late).

A Family Christmas: She’s hiding out. He’s coming home. And there’ll be storms for Christmas. (from Christmas Babies on Main Street)

Abbie’s Wish: Abbie’s Christmas wish draws three men to her mother. One of them is a monster (from Christmas Wishes on Main Street).

Beached: The truth will wash away her coastal paradise… (from Summer Romanceon Main Street ).

Christmas anthologies with other authors

Authors of Main Street

Contemporary romance. Most of the novellas are set in small town United States. My four (listed below) are set in New Zealand.

Bluestocking Belles

Historical romance, mostly Regency or close.

The Bluestocking and the Barbarian in Holly and Hopeful Hearts
Forged in Fire in Never Too Late
Paradise Regained in Follow Your Star Home

December 28, 2019 by judeknight

The Seeds of Destruction

I was an omnivorous reader of history long before I started researching and writing historical novels. Indeed, it was that love for the stories of the past, and for what they can teach us in the present, that led to my current writing focus. Those who don’t learn from history, the old saying goes, are doomed to repeat it. In my books, I try to cast a spotlight on issues that are relevant today by showing them through the lens of a different place and time.

I write about a time when Napoleon had built an empire that had absorbed most of Europe as well as their colonial outposts, when the British empire was just beginning to flourish, when the nascent empire of the United States was less than half a century old as an independent political unit, when the empire of China was attempting to retain autonomy against the encroaching western newcomers. I try to write about real people facing eternal issues against genuine backgrounds.

The world has seen many empires rise and fall. Like the humans that build them, they’re all different and at the same time, all share common characteristics. They’re based on power and economic inequalities that allow some people to accumulate more wealth and leisure than others. This wealth and leisure permits a flowering of art, literature, and science that those in power celebrate as the result and evidence of their manifest worthiness. They exploit others, both inside and outside of their borders, to maintain their uneconomic lifestyle. They justify this exploitation by dehumanising and blaming those exploited. Over time, the gap between the poor and the wealthy grows until it become untenable. The Vandals pour over the borders. The colonies rebel. The sans-culottes storm the barricades.

(NOTE: I’m using the term empire to mean a sovereign political entity and its subsidiary nation states, including client states rather than those directly ruled. By this definition, I’m calling the hegemony of the United States an empire. Its boundaries shift and morph as nation states move in and out of client status. Empires also have a cultural impact far beyond their borders. As far as I can see, most empires have happily used their cultural influence for political and economic gain.)

The unworthy poor

Empires, then, thrive on two factors–wealth accumulation through exploitation, and institutionalised discrimination against the exploited–and these two factors will eventually (within two or three hundred years, commonly) pull the empire to pieces. This is how predatory capitalism (defined as economics for the benefit of a few) is inevitably linked to racism or some other form of discrimination by stereotype.

Think of the British Empire: one of their management strategies was to demonise the Irish as poor, shiftless, and unworthy; the Chinese as crafty and near-demonic; the natives of the Indian sub-continent as lazy, stupid, and child-like. But never fear, oh inadequate people of the world. The British Empire was prepared shoulder ‘the white man’s burden’, and take over those places, stripping them of their resources and reducing said sub-human lifeforms to tenants in their own land (or worse).

I’m not picking particularly on the British. All empires do it. But I’m five generations from British ancestry, and those attitudes came down to me through my cultural ancestry. I had the good fortune to be born to a man who was a reverse racist; who collected people of all races to flaunt them as part of his rebellion against his family, and who insisted that all men (I choose the pronoun advisedly) were equal. I grew up with a much broader range of acquaintances than most white middle-class females of my age. Even so, I have spent a lifetime shedding preconceptions that I picked up from my elders and from the books made available to me.

To take just one example, my people were colonists. It was to their advantage to believe that they were on the side of the angels in New Zealand’s Land Wars. My elders were certain that Maori deserved to be on the bottom rung of our society because they were poorly educated and unsophisticated. It took more than a 100 years for New Zealand as a political entity to acknowledge that the government and the colonists were the aggressors in the Land Wars, and that repeated racism at every level of society, including in education and health, had maximised the impact of the theft of land by blocking any opportunity to succeed except by becoming a pseudo white person. (This is another standard strategy. Allow a few carefully selected individuals to fight their way into white positions and then blame everyone else for not doing so.

The Waitangi Tribunal provided a venue for hearing historical injustices. For all its faults, it has performed sterling service. Nearly 50 years on, we are still working our way towards reconciling the two views of history; that of the oppressors and that of the oppressed; but we’re trying.

Ancestral guilt

I’m inclined to think that guilt underpins our reluctance to believe in the ills of the past, or to deny their impact on the present. I’m not guilty of the casual racism of my ancestors and successive governments that ruled before I was born. I can’t take responsibility for things I can’t change. I am guilty of actions of my own that display unconscious bias. I am guilty if I support others in their bias. I can do something about those, so they are my responsibility.

Is this the reason why discrimination and racism are often strong in those cultures whose ancestors practiced the worst forms of chattel slavery? Ancestral guilt? The link between predatory capitalism and slavery is obvious. History tells us to expect slavery to be justified as being economically necessary and, in any case, for the good of the slaves. Justifying the last means regarding the slaves other and less; claiming that they are less than human, less than adult, dangerous to ‘normal’ people, morally defective, and so on and so on. The greater the guilt, the stronger the justifications that come rippling down through the centuries into the hearts and minds of descendants.

(Ironically, in both the United States and South Africa, DNA tests indicate that many who consider themselves both white and superior have unrecognised slave ancestors. But that’s another story.)

Where to from here?

Anger is growing, and so is fear. Is it too late to learn from history? We’re well into the decline. Is the fall inevitable? What do you think?

November 18, 2019 by judeknight

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Is it ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’? Or ‘out of sight, out of mind’?

You may have noticed I haven’t been around much. We’re selling our house and buying a new one, and my life is teetering on the edge of out of control. I’ve been proofing the Bluestocking Belles’ next anthology, Fire & Frost so we can get the ARC out. Add to that, I’ve other books to finish, grandchildren to cherish, and a day job.

Furthermore, we’re off on a road trip (organised months ago) a week today, so things are unlikely to improve for a while.

Received wisdom in the writer community is that we need to be constantly engaged on social media to keep people thinking about us, and buying the books we’ve written so we can afford to pay our bills for the books we want to write. If that’s true, I’m in trouble!

However, I won’t disappear entirely. I’m still promoting the Bluestocking Belles’ next anthology, Fire & Frost. I’ve written a short story for my newsletter, and will get that out before I go away. I’m about to put up the publication date for my novel The Darkness Within. (I’ll do a preorder on Smashwords which will feed back to the retailers it serves, but leave Amazon till I’m confident, because their punishment for getting it wrong is a year without preorder, and my life could spiral completely out of control at any moment.)

I also need to decide whether I’m going to publish something on 15 December. I’ve done so every year since Candle’s Christmas Chair came out in 2014, and I hate to miss a year. Options are a version of Chasing the Tale, my collection of newsletter subscriber short stories, and Paradise Regained, the prequel to the series I’m publishing next year, Children of the Mountain King. Let me know what you think!

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the next newsletter subscriber story, which may (or may not) be called The Delinquency of Lord Clairmont. My heroine has waited years for her husband to return to England. When she learns from the gossip columns that he has done so, but is remaining in the south instead of coming home, she decides to retrieve him.

She would not apologise for making sure he came home to lands and investments that were more profitable and in better heart than when she took them over. Surely, even the most selfish of men must see that she had a vested interest in securing the future of her children.

Which brought Seffie to the reason why she, Anna, and the servants were about to descend from their coach at a manor owned by one of Clairmont’s dissolute friends. Children. She would be twenty-four in a few days, and she was not waiting another twelve years for her errant husband to at least make the attempt to get her with child. Not another year, nor a month.

Given what she’d heard about the nature of the parties held in this rather pleasant-looking country manor house, Clairmont may have one or more other entertainments already at hand, but Seffie was prepared to do whatever she needed to oust them and take their place. Surely a man whose name had been linked with women all round the world would not refuse to bed his lawfully-wedded wife?

Seffie nodded to her footman, giving him the signal to rap the door knocker. Let battle commence.

The footman knocked twice more before the door opened a cautious crack to allow an elderly maid to poke her beaked nose around the edge of it.

Seffie stepped forward, and footman pushed the door fully open, overcoming the maid’s brief resistance. Not a maid. The bundle of keys at the woman’s waist indicated the housekeeper. She stepped backward at the aristocratic advance and curtseyed.

“I am Lady Clairmont,” Seffie said. “Announce me to your master.”

The housekeeper shook her head, cringing as if she expected a blow. “’is lordship be asleep,” she whined. “Them all be asleep. Even Mr. Barton, who be the butler. All night they was up, and be as much as my life to wake ’uns.”

Seffie gave a short nod. She should have expected this. “Show my cousin and my maid to a parlour where they can wait, and send someone to conduct me to Lord Clairmont’s room,” she commanded. She added instructions for refreshments to be brought to her and her cousin, and told William to stay with the other two women. They might need a stout defender in this house, though perhaps they could all retreat to a nearby inn before the other denizens woke up.

“Should you be alone, ma’am?” Polly ventured, and Anna agreed. “We could send for another of the men to go with you.”

What Seffie had to say to her husband was best said in private. “I shall be safe in Clairmont’s room,” she insisted, and followed another servant, this one still straightening her cap and tying her apron, up the long curve of the stairs.

It wasn’t until the housekeeper put a hand up to knock on the door that it occured to Seffie that her husband might not be alone.

“Don’t knock,” she said, hastily. Should she enter, or not? She had come this far, and she did not like to retreat.

She tried the handle. Locked. “Open it,” she insisted.

The housekeeper frowned but obeyed.

“That will be all, Mrs… ?”

“Barton, my lady. I’ll bring thy tea.”

“Do that.”

Seffie waited until Mrs. Barton retreated back towards the stairs before opening the door enough to slip silently into the bedchamber. A large four-poster bed dominated the room. To Seffie’s relief, the man sleeping in it was alone. She was less comfortable with his attire—or lack thereof. He lay sprawled on his front, his face turned away from her, the sheet pushed down to show his bare back from his broad shoulders to his narrow waist.

Seffie froze in the doorway. He was no longer pudgy; nor was the glorious expanse of skin marred by pimples or any other blemish. She gave herself a shake, stepped inside, and closed the door. She might be a virgin, but she hadn’t lived in a box for all the past years. Being married didn’t stop her from admiring a male form, and she knew desire when she felt it. She had never acted on it, and she could ignore it now. She wasn’t here to lust after her husband. Actually, that wasn’t quite accurate—if they could resolve the distance between what she wanted and what he apparently wanted, lust would be appropriate and useful in gaining her the children she yearned for. Provided he felt the same about her.

For a wild moment, she was tempted to undress and climb under the sheets with him, but she resisted the impulse. The maid would return with the tea. Besides, they should talk first; negotiate a way forward. In truth, despite her unexpected physical response, she was a little afraid. He was a stranger, and she had only the most general of ideas about what to expect of the marital act. It sounded like something better done with a friend, or at least a more than casual acquaintance.

She took a seat in the window bay, and pulled the book she had been reading from her reticule. From here, she could see his face. She would have walked past him in the street, except that she was very familiar with certain elements of his face. That square cleft chin appeared in a number of paintings at Clairhaven; that strong nose and those arched eyebrows in others. The boy of fifteen was still there, too, when she examined him closely, pared down, toughened, more square and decidedly formidable. In repose, he was not classically handsome, but he was attractive.

Her husband. She whispered it, to see if it felt more real when voiced aloud. “My husband.”

Jude Knight Storyteller

Creating determined heroines and the men who appreciate them