You wait ages for one Shehanne Moore book and then two come along at once! Hot on the heels of her irrepressible timeslip novel The Writer and the Rake, comes her long-awaited Regency - Splendor - sequel to the fabulous Loving Lady Lazuli. Shehanne has the knack of creating unforgettable heroines set against an authentic historical backdrop. Here she talks about ome extraordinary women on the late 18th/early 19th century.
In
terms of being a wife in ruination only? You can see my latest hero, Kendall
Winterborne, Earl of Stillmore, is following in well-trodden footsteps when it
comes to my heroes. As for Splendor the heroine?
Well, being up to her neck in it, goes with the turf.
I
recently did a guest blog on the pretty awful lot of Georgian Women. This book is set in a slightly later time,
Regency more than Georgian, where the hunt for a husband was a serious business,
families spent a fortune on their daughters,
‘coming out’ and unattached ladies had but one goal, NOT to signal what
that goal was. But what happened when they achieved that goal?
Mary
Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley—and a woman who defied convention-- had
published her Rights of Women in 1792.
It highlighted the ‘means and arts by which women had been forcibly subjugated,
flattered into imbecility and invariably held in bondage’. But contraception,
childbirth etc, did not greatly improve.
For women, chastity before marriage, was often as much a matter of
necessity.
Also
women were still their husband’s property.
Stillmore may be divorced, he certainly got all his wife’s money
beforehand. In fact marrying her saved the family fortunes after his father ran
off with a kitchen maid who bankrupted them.
So,
given all this, you can understand Splendor being glad when Stillmore informs
her that while this ’thing’ he’s asking
her in such polite and patient terms, involves marriage, it will be one in name
only, since he utterly despises and actively fears the institution. In fact he
regards anyone foolish enough to take that trip down the aisle, as he once did,
as an imbecile.
You
can also see, given the only slightly improved lot of women in the early 19th
century, why quite a few of them wanted to be a man. And that is something
Splendor is masquerading as at the start of the book. Not because she especially wants to be a man
but because the prize money in a certain chess completion is much greater in
the men’s part of the tournament, than the ladies. Nine and a half thousand
guineas greater to be precise. Money she needs—badly.
In that respect she’s not the first woman to
decide that going about this as a man was the way to ensure her future as a
woman. Katherine Ferrers—The Wicked Lady anyone—was said to have taken to the
highways as a man in her husband’s absence,
to sort out the little blip in her finances, get them on a more even
keel.
Too
bad that she was apparently shot, exhorting a victim to stand and deliver,
which they did, killing her in the process.
Looking on the bright side, at least her financial worries were at an
end. Something Splendor certainly
considers when she gets challenged to a duel by Stillmore. Just one of the
little drawbacks of entering a man’s world.
Very well, Katherine’s case has never actually been proved but the
idea of women dressing as men is not stupid.
Shakespeare chooses to make his main character in Twelfth Night, Viola,
a cross-dresser. She wasn’t laughed off the stage either. all right she was no
doubt being played by a man dressing as a woman, masquerading as a man.
Why
does Viola cross-dress? Because,
ship-wrecked and needing to find her brother, she is also faced with the harsh
economic reality of finding work and the only opening? Yep, you guessed it. It’s
for a man.
There
are several instances of women cross dressing for that reason.
Christian
Cavanagh, an Irish-born mother, left her children with her mother and a nurse to
pursue her husband who had disappeared, into the army. Christian the subject of
a book by Daniel Defoe, fought in several battles before it was discovered it
was Mrs. Davies not Mr.
Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read never masqueraded as men but they
certainly lived as them.
Catherine
Cavendish, thank you so much, lady and writer extraordinary for asking me to
your wonderful blog today.
And
now? That duel.
Extract from Splendor:
He was an unashamedly driving, look-at-me male. Unless he
knew her body was shaped differently? Did it mean he wasn’t going to shoot her?
She could stay in the tournament? Win the ten thousand pounds? If he knew she
was a woman, he was surely going to say…
“For God’s bloody sake, you’re damn well meant to move,”
Stillmore snarled. “Stop bloody arsing, will you?”
In all of her intimate brush with the Starkadder Sisterhood,
she had never been told to stop doing such a thing, especially not by a man
whose buttocks seemed glued to hers. She felt him turn his head.
“Don’t damn
well add miscounting to cheating.”
“Miscounting? Me? When you—”
“Fram, start the count again. As for you, try to do what he
says this time if it’s not beyond you.”
Despite the fact the pistol felt like ice in her hand, she
gritted her teeth. “Do you somehow think it’s my fault I’m not? Look, Your
Grace—”
“One.”
Whether it was her fault or not, the shock she got at
hearing the word yet again and the difficulty of forcing her feet to move,
meant she took a giant step forward, almost sliding on her said arse on the wet
grass. These damned boots of Gabe’s were too large and thin as milk dribble on
the soles. But so long as Kendall Winterborne didn’t think this was another
trick on her part to delay the action, it would be all right.
“Two.”
Another step. She could barely keep hold of herself as she
took it. But, count her blessings, her senses weren’t being accosted by the
feel of him. The man…good God…who might kill her.
“Three.”
A drag of air into her tortured lungs. All she had to do was
get off one round. How hard was that? Her finger tightened on the trigger. What
if she killed the earl? Was he so black-hearted he deserved to die?
And all because he’d undermined her when she’d meant to say,
I’m a woman. You can’t shoot me. Or had she undermined herself, precisely
because she was a woman?
“Four.”
For God’s sake, was it five paces or six? Seven even? She
could not remember for the mist snaking into her nostrils. And she needed to
remember. As surely as her name was Dora Malachi whom everyone called Aurora
Splendora, she needed to remember. She would be shot in the back otherwise.
Then…then she’d be dead.
“Five… Six…”
But there was no sharp retort, no searing agony, no impact
of a bullet tearing cloth and flesh, so obviously, obviously, when it came to
how many paces, it wasn’t, five, or six. It couldn’t be. It must be…
“Seven.”
The word wasn’t even
out when she seized a breath and swung on her heel, managing just to keep her
balance in the dew. Her fingers squeezed the trigger. She should have aimed,
but it wasn’t as if she could see, so it made no difference. The crack
ricocheted through her head, reverberating around every cavity in her eardrums.
Crows rose like a screeching blanket from the ground. It was nothing to the
noise Kendall Winterborne, the Earl of Stillmore, made as he hopped on one
foot.
“Jesus bloody Christ. Jesus suffering bloody Christ.”
Nothing to the way he limped about, blackening the air with
curses as she stood trying to look knowledgeable either. The buzz in her ears
swelled. Starkadder and his silver watch fob chain she never got to polish, she
hadn’t hit him, had she? How on earth she had managed to get that shot off, she
had no idea. How it had blasted him in the foot either. But she had blasted
him. Oh God, oh God, oh God. She had fired. He hadn’t. It meant one thing.
Even the somewhat large, staggered first pace she’d taken
had not substantially increased the distance between them. For that she’d have
had to bolt. So now…now he didn’t just stop hopping, he stopped dead center in
the space opposite, the space he’d occupied just before she’d shot off her
pistol, the smoking pistol that slithered from her palm, making a funny
thudding noise as it struck the soft grass.
He raised his arm. Raised one eyebrow too. Her gaze widened
in an involuntary spasm, so she saw the drizzle-sprayed mist, and his eyes
primed on her like flintlocks above the shining barrel of the gun. The one now
leveled at her breast, so carefully aimed, he could not miss.
A shudder shook her as his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed.
His finger fastened slowly on the trigger.
Then he drew it slowly, deliberately toward his chest.
The
only thing he hates more than losing at chess is marriage…
For
Splendor, former servant to the London’s premiere jewel thieves, pretending to
be someone else is all in a day’s work. So when she learns of a chess
tournament—a men’s chess tournament—with a ten thousand pound prize, pretending
to be a man is the obvious move. The money will be enough to set her fiancé up
in his own business so they can finally marry, and more importantly, it’ll pay
off her bills and keep her out of debtor’s prison. But she doesn’t plan on her
opponent, the rakish Kendall Winterborne, Earl Stillmore, being a sore
loser—and a drunken one, at that. But before she can collect her prize, she
finds herself facing the most merciless man in London across a pair of dueling
pistols at dawn. Chess may be Splendor’s game, but she’s never fired a pistol.
And dressed as a man with ill-fitting shoes on the slippery grass and borrowed
glasses that make it hard to see, she’s certain she’s finally tipped her own
king.
Bitter
divorcee Kendall Winterborne, Earl Stillmore, is the ton’s most ruthless
heartbreaker. And he’s got three pet peeves: kitchen maids, marriage…and
losing. So when he realizes the “man” opposite him has entered the chess
tournament under false pretenses, he’s in the perfect position to extort the
little chit. But that’s before the exasperating woman begins to slip beneath
his skin, and soon all he can think about is slipping beneath her skirts. But
the confounded woman is engaged to someone else, and worse—she’s nothing but a
former kitchen maid, just like the one that lured his father into the marriage
that ruined the family name. And his ex-wife taught him more than he cared to
know about why marriage was the worst kind of checkmate of all…
