Grenford half-sisters

by

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.

by

Tea in the schoolroom

Eleanor paused in the doorway of the schoolroom, where her three foster daughters were drawing under the supervision of their governess. The subject was a collection of objects: a flower in a rounded glazed bowl, a trinket box open to display a set of coral beads that trailed over the edge onto the polished surface of the table, a delicate statuette of a gun dog, with proudly pointing muzzle.

A difficult composition for such young girls, though little Frances was talented, and the older two girls competent enough. At thirteen, Frances had inhabited the Haverford nursery floor for eleven years, and by the time of her debut, in three or four years, the scandal of her existence was likely to be minimal. Especially since she, least of the three, resembled their shared father.

Matilda would face the ton first. At sixteen, she was as much a beauty as her mother had been, with the dark hair and stunning figure that had made her mother a reigning beauty of the ton, despite a less than stellar birth and lack of fashion. The combination was lethal, for the girl had died in childbirth, and the grieving furious grandmother brought the baby to Haverford House, to the man the dying mother named as father. An identification the grandmother had no hesitation is spreading.

It was just chance that Haverford was away on , and that Eleanor had just been arriving home. Or an intercession of the divine. Haverford would have turned his full ducal rage on a scion of the local gentry, and denied everything. But Eleanor took the baby in her arms and fell in love.

She smiled as she watched the three heads bent in concentration. It had taken His Grace nine months to realise that his nurseries were once again occupied, and by then Jessica, some six months younger and the daughter of an opera dancer, had joined her half-sister. No-one could doubt her parentage. She and Lord Jonathan, Eleanor’s second son, were as alike as male and female could be.

Haverford, of course, denied that he’d sired them, and ignored them completely. His solution to the unfortunate results of his careless whoring was to blame the female, a bag of coins (carefully measured to their social position) the only assistance they could expect.

Thank goodness she had been strong enough to hold out for the right to keep the children. As long as he never saw them, was not expected to acknowledge them in any way, and provided nothing extra for their support, he chose to treat her fostering as an eccentric hobby.

Eleanor loved the three girls with all her heart, loved them as fiercely as she loved the two sons she had borne her husband. And she could not regret bringing them into her home, selfish of her though it was. She had learned better, especially after the disastrous end to David Wakefield’s time under the Haverford roofs. For years now, she had been quietly settling her husband’s by-blows in less scrutinised households, carefully supervised to ensure they had the love and care she wanted for those who shared blood with her sons.

As for the three sisters, their origins and the prominence of the family meant they would face many barriers in a quest for a fulfilling life. If only they did not so strongly bear the Grenford stamp! Still, with her support and that of her sons, all would be well. She hoped. She prayed.

Time to announce her presence. “Miss Waterson, is this a good time for an interruption? I have come to take tea with the young ladies.”

This is a little bit of backstory to my historical world. The sisters are first mentioned in Revealed in Mist, and will appear in later novels. In Never Kiss a Toad, the early Victorian novel that I’m writing with Mariana Gabrielle (being published episode by episode on Wattpad) I’ve just been working on a chapter that mentions Frances’s wedding, and another that touches on the tragedy of Jessica’s death. I don’t know Matilda’s story, yet.