Backing the Wrong Horse?

In this month's guest spot I'm delighted to welcome Christine Merrill author of the second and final books in the Regency Silk and Scandal continuity. This month Taken by the Wicked Rake concludes the eight-book series and reveals the truth about the mysteries that have threaded through the other seven books. The villain gets his just desserts and Verity Carlow, younger sister of my two heroes, finds her true love.

Christine had to do a considerable amount of research into Romany life and lore for this book, right down to the horses used. But heroes are allowed to be slightly different - aren't they? Over to Christine -

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When we continuistas had to choose a horse for my Gypsy hero, Stephano Beshaley, I remember there was some talk amongst us about the best type. I can’t remember who actually made the decision. Possibly me. I know I was all for it when he got the heroic standard, big, black horse.
I really don’t know much about horses, despite the fact that I live in the country. They walk by the house sometimes. They may be invited into the yard to eat apples. We have boarded other people’s horses, since we have an empty pasture. I have managed to get through the experience without actually learning anything, other than that I like to look out the window at horses. They are pretty from a distance. They are even prettier if they have owners coming daily to feed, water and brush them.

My husband had horses as a teen, and never wants to own another one. He sees them as things that require continual maintenance, and that take a deep breath and blow out their guts when it is time to be ridden, making it impossible to get the saddle properly cinched. And then they laugh when the saddle slips and the rider falls off. And then they run away. And you have to chase them…

Though we started dating in high school, I never got to meet his horses. When I learned they existed, I behaved like a typical teenage girl, and asked if we could go riding.
He said, “No. They don’t like to be ridden.” Apparently, the Merrill horses were only decorative.
It has been thirty years. He bears a grudge. No horses for us.

But I am writing historicals. And all of my heroes should have Andalusians. As stated, I know nothing at all about horses. But my first response, on seeing an Andalusian, was “Oh, God, I want a horse!” They are big and glossy, with flowing hair like an equine Fabio, and extremely proud, arched necks.
I think I can justify them as available and appropriate to the period. They are a centuries old breed from the Iberian Peninsula, and so would be appropriate for any returning war heroes. Regency men had a lot of time on their hands, and a good knowledge of horse flesh. Since Stephano is part English, a world traveler, and definitely of a theatrical nature, I think he would want a showy, good looking, slightly exotic horse.
It would be like having a Ferrari with legs.

But he is also a Gypsy. There would have been a much better horse, considering the fact that I gave Stephano a vardo wagon. I never even considered the more appropriate Gypsy Cob. This is a breed of uncertain bloodlines, but firmly based in the UK, and bred by the Romany. They are piebald or tobiano, with shaggy, feathered legs and are big boned and ideal for pulling wagons. They will graze on what they can find. And apparently, these horses are also sweet tempered, since the Romany sold any horses that weren’t, and bred only the nice ones.
These horses are also called Gypsy vanners. Probably because they pull vans and don’t spook or get tired. If an Andalusian is a Ferrari, a Cob is definitely a station wagon.

There is no alpha hero in the history of romance that would choose a station wagon over a sports car. I rest my case, with apologies to real Gypsy Horses everywhere.

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I found this lovely print by Henry Alken above that is probably the sort of Ferrari horse than Stephano would have liked, although I am sure he would not have had the tail docked.

Louise Allen

A Bumper Month

I can hardly catch my breath this month with three books out!
The seventh in the Regency Silk & Scandal continuity, and my second contribution to the series, is The Officer and the Proper Lady. My hero, Hal Carlow, is a cavalry oficer in Brussels just before the battle of Waterloo and his heroine, Miss Julia Tresilian, a most respectable young lady, is there too, in search of a husband.

Instead of an eligible gentleman, Julia falls for Hal, the worst rake in the cavalry. For once in his life Hal is set on doing the right thing, but when he is left for dead on the battlefield he finds he has underestimated well-behaved Julia, who will do anything to save the man she loves. The story can be read alone but it also brings the series to the point where the old scandal has become lethally dangerous. All will be revealed next month!


Also out in December is the third in the The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters trilogy. Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer's Bride is the story of youngest sister Celina. She has taken refuge from her bullying father in her aunt's brothel but an accusation of theft sends innocent Lina fleeing to the depths of the Norfolk countryside. She thinks she is taking refuge with one of her aunt's elderly ex-clients, but the arrival of his heir, the adventurer and scholar Quinn Ashley, a man with his own demons to fight, plunges her into more danger - and into love.



The third book is a complete departure for me - non-fiction. I love walking in London to locate places and people, often long gone, sometimes, surprisingly, still to be found. When I looked at my notes I realised that I had the makings of a walks book that would allow me to share this pleasure with enthusiasts for the period and so Walks Through Regency London was conceived.

There are ten walks - I had to stop somewhere! - taking in the St James's area; Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens; Mayfair North; Piccadilly and South Mayfair; Soho North; Soho South to Somerset House; British Museum to Covent Garden; Trafalgar Square to Westminster; The City from Bridewell to Bank and Southwark and the South Bank.

I used illustrations from my collection of Regency prints to illustrate the book in full colour - some fashion prints, some sporting, but mainly views of London from Ackermann's iconic Repository. Along the way I found places and objects I never expected - a startlingly lifelike waxwork of Nelson in Westminster Abbey; the location of Warwick House where Princess Charlotte escaped from her father to run away to Princess Caroline; Napoleon's "nose" and the surviving columns from Carlton House. I have drunk beer in Tom Cribb's own pub and in the only galleried coaching inn left in London; seen the scales that Byron and Nelson were weighed on; looked at a cell door from Newgate and admired the first public male nude statue in London.

The cover illustration is St George's Hanover Square in 1812.
For more information and how to get a copy see http://www.louiseallenregency.co.uk/ or email me at louiseallen.regency@tiscali.co.uk

A very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year to everyone!

Louise

Thief Takers - and Their Unlacing of Innocent Misses!

I'm delighted to welcome Margaret McPhee to the guest spot to talk about Unlacing the Innocent Miss, the sixth of the Regency Silk and Scandal continuity. Margaret's dark and very Alpha hero, Wolf, is a thief-taker and here she shares some fascinating background to the story -

Before the second half of the eighteenth century there was no police detective force in existence. If victims of theft wanted the return of their stolen goods or the thief brought to justice they often resorted to offering a reward. This was done by word of mouth, by the local town crier, by the distribution of handbills to local pawnbrokers, or by advertising in newspapers. Thief-takers came into being to provide a service to meet this need.
In terms of catching thieves the reward was only paid if the suspect was convicted in a court of law by a magistrate, so thief-takers often obtained confessions to be used in evidence or traced character witnesses to speak against the suspect. Professional thief-takers therefore frequented magistrates' Public Offices and the court room itself.

A Corrupt and Dangerous World
The nature of thief-taking was a dangerous one, which necessitated working with criminals who could be violent in the extreme. Thief-takers straddled the polite world of the judicial system and the murky underworld of crime, with contacts in both.
The reward/compensation system was open to abuse and many thief-takers were corrupt (just as some magistrates were too). The infamous "Thief-taker General", Jonathan Wild, ran a profitable business claiming the rewards for the return of goods his gangs were responsible for stealing. Wild was hanged at Tyburn in 1725. A variety of new laws were passed in an attempt to counteract the corruption and it became a capital offence to accept a reward for assisting a person in the recovery of their stolen goods. Nevertheless thief-taking continued.

The Forerunners of Police Detectives
In 1748 the novelist, playwright and magistrate, Henry Fielding, took over the Bow Street Public Office and set about recruiting men who would detect and bring to justice the perpetrators of crime. Just like thief-takers, "Mr Fielding's People" earned their money mainly from the rewards offered by victims and the courts but the difference was that they were also paid a wage from the public purse. The wage was paltry but, in effect, its payment meant that Fielding's men were the first publicly funded thief-takers. They were the forerunners of what were to become known as the Bow Street Runners, the first London police detectives.
As well as runners, or detectives, the Bow Street Office developed a preventative police force in the form of a Foot Patrole and a Horse Patrole. In 1815, the time of Unlacing an Innocent Miss, there were a total of eight such police offices in London, each manned by three magistrates. This is in addition to the existing old traditional system of Parish policing, a large force that included beadles, constables and night watchmen. Parish police were in place to keep the peace rather than pursue thieves or recover stolen property. The constables were unpaid and were obliged to fulfill their parish duty.
In Unlacing the Innocent Miss, Will Wolversley, also known as Wolf, is a rugged ruthless thief-taker operating in London. When quiet and respectable dowager’s companion, Miss Rosalind Meadowfield, turns thief and escapes to Scotland, Wolf is sent to retrieve her.

Even though Bow Street Runners were in operation in the City at the time of the story Rosalind’s employer chooses not to use them because of the extreme sensitivity of the stolen item. He opts, instead, for a safer option and one with a better chance of success: Wolf.

Wolf has a reputation as the best thief-taker in the business. He and his sidekick, Campbell, are tough, strong men, both physically and mentally, with a network of shady connections within the criminal world, and, unlike their competitors in the profession, they are strictly not open to corruption. Wolf can afford to be picky about the cases he accepts and he charges a high price, which is, of course, only payable upon a successful recovery. He would have taken this particular case even were the reward not so very generous, for he is a man with good reason to despise women like Rosalind. But neither Wolf nor Rosalind has anticipated the attraction that ignites between them or the “unlacing” that is to come.

Thank you, Margaret, for a fascinating insight!

Louise Allen

Getting Married With the Fashionable Set

Welcome to Annie Burrows, author of The Viscount and the Virgin, the fifth in the Regency Silk & Scandal continuity, out this month.

Annie has set a wedding scene that is romantic and yet laugh-out-loud funny in that most fashionable of churches for Regency weddings, St George's Hanover Square. Over to you, Annie -

St George’s church in George Street, just south of Hanover Square has long been a coveted venue for society weddings, both in fact and in fiction. Since I gave the hero of my latest book, “The Viscount and the Virgin” a house in Hanover Square, it was the obvious place for him to get married, too!

In order to be able to give an accurate description of the interior of the church, for the wedding scene, and to be able to stage the action outside convincingly, I needed to find out quite a bit about the appearance of the church, as it would have been in early spring of 1815. Since the church still stands today, and is still in use as place of worship, I was lucky enough to be able to visit their website.

St George’s became such a sought after venue for marriage, because of where it is located, right in the heart of the most fashionable part of London. London had grown rapidly during the eighteenth century, engulfing the surrounding villages and farmlands. Though the merchants and tradesmen tended to live and work as close to the centre as possible, the nobility and gentry moved westwards. Hanover Square was the first of the West End squares to be built, between 1716 and 1720. In 1711, Parliament had passed an act for the building of fifty new churches “in the Cities of London and Westminster or the Suburbs thereof”, to provide for the spiritual needs of those who dwelt in the new districts. Money to pay for the churches was to be raised by a tax levied on coal. The new inhabitants of Hanover Square successfully petitioned the Commissioners for Building New Churches for a convenient place of worship. General the Hon. William Stuart, Queen Anne’s Commander-in-chief in Ireland, offered a plot of land at the nearby junction of Maddox Street and George Street, and the contract for its design was awarded to John James, on the condition that it should cost no more than £10,000.

Compared with other churches of this period, St George’s is rather plain. James may have been influenced by his early contact with Sir Christopher Wren, under whom he served an apprenticeship. Wren thought visibility and audibility were of paramount importance when designing Anglican churches. James is certainly quoted as saying, “the Beautys of Architecture may consist with the greatest plainness of the Structure.”

St George’s is bounded on three sides by busy streets, and on the fourth by a narrow passage. There is no large churchyard to enable people to admire the building from any great distance, but James managed to make the west frontage look sufficiently imposing by having a portico jutting into the street. The pediment is supported by six great Corinthian columns, which I found extremely useful as a place of concealment for Stephano, the villain who turns up to try and wreck my heroine’s wedding.

In the 1870’s changes were made to the interior, but I did manage to find a sketch made of a wedding which took place in 1840, which shows the original box pews, the upper galleries on three sides, the canopy over the pulpit, and the huge, “double decker” reading desk to the left of the altar, which helped me describe the action which took place in the interior.

Only thirty wedding ceremonies took place in St. George’s first year, but numbers steadily increased until by 1816, which was a record year, there were one thousand and sixty three, nine of which were carried out on Christmas Day.

Joseph Grimaldi, the famous actor and clown married there in 1798. And again, in 1802! (After his first wife died.) The poet Shelley married Harriet Westbrook there on March 24th 1814, the novelist George Eliot (real name Mary Anne Evans Lewes) married John Walter Cross there in 1880, and on December 2nd, 1886, the politician Theodore Roosevelt, the future president of the United States, married Edith Carow.

Since the church was in the heart of fashionable London, many famous people must have attended services there as a matter of course. But the parishioner I was most fascinated to read about, was George Frederick Handel. He came to live in Brook Street in 1724, just before the church was consecrated, and was consulted about the suitability of the organ. He provided a piece of music to test the powers of the candidates for the post of organist, had a pew in the church, and was, apparently, a regular worshipper there. Handel became a British citizen in 1726, and it was in his house in Brook Street that he composed the “Messiah”.

I think any organist must have been extremely nervous about performing with such an outstanding musician in the congregation!

A Tribute to Female healers

I'm delighted to welcome Gayle Wilson, another of the Regency Silk & Scandal authors, to Historical Romance UK.
Gayle's book, Claiming the Forbidden Bride is the fourth in the series and tells the story of returning soldier Rhys Morgan and his encounter with Romany beauty Nadya Argentari, her tribe's healer. I was fascinated by the Romany lore Gayle had researched for the book and here is her insight into the world of a female healer.


From prehistoric times man has used substances derived from plants to treat or prevent disease. It is possible that the impetus to do so originally came from watching animals, some of whom seem to know instinctively which flora should be eaten in order to alleviate their ailments. The plants they choose at such times are invariably rich in phytochemicals, now recognized to possess antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal properties.

Ancient civilizations including those of Egypt, China, and India were well aware of the healing properties of plants and other natural substances such as honey and garlic and used them to treat illnesses and to heal wounds. This valuable knowledge was passed down in both the writings of physicians like Hippocrates as well as in the oral traditions of so-called natural healers.

Although female healers were frequently targeted by the Inquisition as practicing witchcraft, much of their wisdom survived into the modern era. Perhaps the best known examples of plants used by these healers as well as by modern, conventional medicine are foxglove, from which the heart regulator digitalis is derived; willow bark, the original source of the analgesic, fever-reducing, and anti-inflammatory miracle drug aspirin; and the opium poppy, which produces both morphine and codeine.

In Claiming the Forbidden Bride, the Romany heroine Nadya Argentari was trained in such medicinals by her grandmother, and her knowledge of herbal remedies plays a major role in the story. Rhys Morgan, the hero, suffers a recurrence of the malaria he contracted during his military service on the Iberian Peninsula. Nadya successfully treats him with a tea made from bark and castigates the English medical community of the time for persisting in the use of other less effective treatments—such as bleeding, purging or blistering—for the disease.

The fact that the bark of the South American cinchona tree, which contains alkaloid quinine, has the ability to cure malaria was well known in much of the world by the early 19th century, but the antimalarial was not widely used in England. The bark does not cure fevers other than malaria, so doctors dismissed its healing properties altogether. Also, the fact that the Catholic Church, and particularly the Jesuits, touted the bark’s effectiveness worked against its acceptance in Protestant England, as did the teachings of the Greek physician Galen, then considered the ultimate source of medical knowledge by many European doctors.

The nomadic Rom would almost certainly have encountered cinchona bark, which had been imported into Europe as early as the 17th century. Nadya’s grandmother, who was the drabarni or wise woman before her, would undoubtedly have been familiar with the effectiveness of the so-called Peruvian bark against malaria and would surely have passed that knowledge down to her granddaughter.

By featuring these two fictional healers in my novel, I hope in some small way to have paid homage to the tradition of natural medicines and to the women who helped preserve the herbal knowledge of the ancients, even in the face of persecution and scorn from their “educated” peers. We all owe them a great debt.

Thak you for the insight, Gayle! The illustration is by WH Pyne and shows a group of early 19thc Romanies by their camp fire.

Louise Allen

Pepper Cove and Ralph's Cupboard: Some Cornish legends

This month, I'm delighted to introduce as guest blogger Julia Justiss, author of the third in the Regency Silk & Scandal continuity. Julia's book, The Smuggler & the Society Bride, takes the disgraced Lady Honoria Carlow and plunges her into the midst of danger when she is exiled to a remote Cornish village. Here Julia shares some of her research into the legends of Cornish smugglers. Over to you, Julia!

An area that for more than two centuries was synonymous with a dangerous, illicit trade generates many myths and legends. As I discovered when I researched the background of the smuggling coast of Cornwall, locale for THE SMUGGLER AND THE SOCIETY BRIDE, even place names whisper of its smuggling past.

Pepper Cover, north of Porthcothan, was named for the boatloads of the spice that used to be landed there. North of Hayle, the coast road to Portreath passes Ralph’s Cupboard, where openings in the rock were used to store contraband. Hayle itself was also a landing point; tourists can visit a house, once a youth hostel, in which a sloping trench leads from the ground floor down to an arched tunnel that runs north toward the coast.

At Lelant, an old granite cottage (now a private home) used in the 19th century as a “kiddlewink” (beershop) had a cave excavated beside it for storing contraband, and it’s said the church at Lelant itself was used to store illegal spirits.

Perhaps because they would be less likely to be searched by zealous revenue agents, churches were sometimes put to use in the trade (with or without the knowledge of the local vicar.) South of Mylor, at Penrhyn, local legend claims that a tunnel led from the coast into St Gluvias' Vicarage. At Gunwalloe, caves along the beach were said to be linked by a tunnel leading to the belfry of a local church.

Mullion Cove in Mounts Bay was another favorite landing place. In fact, it’s said that the area residents were once so incensed when a government brig captured the cargo of a local smuggler that they raided the armoury at Trenance, opened fire on the brig, and recovered the smuggler’s illegal goods!

It wasn’t the only attack. At Prussia Cove, one member of the famous Carter smuggling family set up a small battery of cannons on the cliff to warn off revenuers; on one occasion, he fired on a cutter when it approached too close to his storage sites.

Caves were the most popular hiding places, but farms and outbuildings were also used, sometimes with “false walls” behind which contraband was concealed. The sunken road leading to Penpol Farm at Sunset Creek near Truro made that farm, with its caves and woods, a favorite haunt of area smugglers.

Reverend Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, wrote many tales about the smuggling in his parish. One tells of the “Gauger’s Pocket” at Tidnacombe Cross, on the edge of the moor near the sea. Into this crevice, overgrown with moss and lichen and sealed by a moveable piece of rock, smugglers would drop a bag of gold for the local revenue agent in exchange for his cooperation in “keeping the coast quiet” during their run. (The picture on the right is of Morwentstow church seen from the sea.)

Near Padstow, another tale claims a farmer carrying goods inland, spotting a distant exciseman approaching, lifted a nearby gatepost from its socket, dropped the brandy tub into the hole, replaced the gate and greeted the king’s agent cheerfully when he passed by a few minutes later.

For more tales of Cornish smuggling, see http://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/country/smugglers.shtml and the Smuggling Museum in Polperro: http://www.polperro.org/museum.html

I’ve always loved stories and legends (any wonder why I became a writer?) In Annapolis, where I grew up, there were several colonial-period houses with resident ghosts. My favorite has a mischievous spirit who, after the family were seated for dinner, would make a noise at the front of the house; when the family rushed out to investigate, he would blow out the candles in the dining room.

Are there any legends or tall tales associated with your area or home town? Houses where things go “bump in the night” or notorious deeds were done? Please share!

Read more about The Smuggler & the Society Bride at Julia's website www.juliajustiss.com/

Louise Allen

The Continuity Continues -with help from a clothesline

I am delighted to welcome Christine Merrill as a guest today. Christine is one of the Continuistas - the six authors who together have produced the eight books of Regency Silk & Scandal. Find out more about Christine at http://christine-merrill.com/

Last month I told you about the first in the series - my The Lord and the Wayward Lady. Christine's book, Paying the Virgin's Price, is this month's title and here is the gorgeous UK cover.

Christine, who writes one of the funniest blogs I have come across (http://doublecheese.livejournal.com/), shares this insight into her working methods. Over to you, Christine -

I was a bit daunted in trying to come up with a good topic for this blog. My research for Paying the Virgin’s Price was kind of a lost cause. I did plenty of it. But for many topics, I would just have to write “And then I asked Louise Allen…” Which is actually a really short post.

While I also read a lot about Regency gambling, I will admit to being a horrible card player. I cannot seem to grasp the strategy involved in modern games, much less historical ones, and will always be the one at the table who is forgetting the difference between tricks and trumps, and cannot seem to guess the contents of her partner’s hands based on cards played.

This general cluelessness kind of plays into what I can tell you about. Some people are natural card players, outline projects, file notes, and read spread sheets. They also have clean desks and good senses of direction. Some people, like me, do not. I cannot tell you whether I am naturally left or right brained since I sometimes have trouble telling left from right. I am also convinced that left and right have something to do with compass points. This has resulted in my saying things like “If you are coming from the North, turn East. But if you are coming from the South, turn West…” (and circumnavigate the globe, apparently). It is an endless source of amusement to my family, who are all males with natural compasses.

So when we sat down to layout the entire plot arc for Regency Silk and Scandal, it got pretty confusing for me, pretty quickly. Since I was still learning the names of the other authors, and the accompanying pseudonyms, remembering fictional people was kind of a stretch for my limited brain cells. And there were a lot of characters, on a twenty year time line. We had a back story cast of eight or so, most of whom were dead by the time the books started. And these people all had several children, and in some cases, a second spouse and an illicit affair. And friends. And servants. And wards. And some of those had died as well. And then a few strangers wandered in to fill out the eight heroes and heroines.

Talking about them was like going to the reunion of a large family, and sitting down after a couple of rounds of drinks to try to remember exactly how many children Aunt Mabel had, who they had married, and which one of them got stung by the bee? (or in the case of our stories, married a Gypsy…)

Actually, it was like being a spouse at the reunion, and having knowledge of these people without having actually met any of them. Not only were these people imaginary, they could be the product of someone else’s imagination: literary second cousins, once removed from our own characters.

There were outlines and spreadsheets, family trees and a compendium of e-mail notes in the Files section of a Yahoo group. All the information was there, plain before me. And yet, I was still pretty fuzzy. Someone told me that the chronically left or right brained people have a different sort of organizational style, which is why they tend to leave things in piles on the desk, instead of neat folders. It looks like a mess, but really it isn’t. They want to see everything, at all times, to know it’s still there. Once it is filed, it is forgotten.This is definitely me. And I looked it up. I am right brain dominant. Creative. But spacey.

So I created my version of a multi-dimensional spreadsheet by cutting apart some of our existing organizational documents, and taping them to a white board, adding colored pins and strings to show relationships. Hey presto! It all became clear to me. The families were an interconnected organism, and the relationships balanced neatly once I could see them all at once. At the point I made the board in the attached picture, we were still coming up with names for some of the principals. A left brained person would have filled those in. But I stopped, the minute I had gotten what I needed from it. The goal was to create a working document that would keep me on track, not an archival history of the whole project.

I cannot show you the desk filing, research system, since I took it down. But imagine a seven foot long, bright orange clothesline, tied between two book cases, and hanging about 10 inches above the computer monitor. Now imagine a lot of printer paper attached to it by binder clips. At any given time, I had pictures of heroes, heroines, Gypsy camps, Rom vocabularies, Newgate and the Official Table of Drops for hangings (not in use for the Regency, but nice to know), floating just above my head, where I could find them on days when I remembered to look up.

If you try something similar, you will find that it clears up a lot of desk space for empty soda cans, breakfast dishes and cats. It will also prove to your family that you are hard at work, and seriously organized, and not just sitting at a messy desk and playing computer solitaire all day, as they might secretly suspect.

Thank you, Christine! I for one, am going straight out to buy a clothes line. Does it have to be orange?

Louise Allen

Shipboard Romance - and a Regency Continuity

Does anyone else wake up at 5am worrying about their characters? I'm working on a trilogy where the three books are linked by the wreck on the Isles of Scilly of an East Indiaman homeward-bound from Calcutta. The other morning, brooding on my heroine, I moved to the spare bedroom at so I could drink tea and mutter without disturbing my DH.

Still not getting anywhere, and restless, I got out of bed and looked at the bookcase.

There was a slim green volume with no dustjacket that I did not recognise: Sophie Cassmajor by Margery Sharp, published in 1934. I must have bought it second hand ages ago and never read it. When I opened it there was this enchanting sketch of a Regency lady leaning on a ship's rail. I dived back into bed and read avidly while my tea went cold.

Sophie - young, innocent and obedient - is on board ship - heading for India and an arranged marriage, just as the heroine on my second book was doing, but in the opposite direction. Her maid languishes from a broken heart, but Sophie, her emotions never touched by love, does not understand - until she meets one of the passengers, a handsome young man...

I won't give away any more of the plot of this beautifully written, atmospheric and enigmatic novella, although Sophie's story is still haunting me. I wish I could follow her to India and find out what happens to her. When I Googled Margery Sharp I discovered that she is the same person as the author of many children's books, including The Rescuers, as well as numerous novels for adults. The gorgeous drawings are by Anna Zinkeisen.

So now my East Indiaman has been wrecked and my cast of characters are - literally - all at sea and at the mercy of the fates and the Cornish rocks.

I should be writing but I am seriously distracted by the arrival of all eight volumes of the UK edition Regency Silk & Scandal, the continuity for which I wrote books one and seven (The Lord & the Wayward Lady and The Officer and the Proper Lady).

The Lord and the Wayward Lady is out in June and here is the full set, spine out, showing the lovely covers. The Uk edition is also special because each volume has additinal material from our researches - from the streets of fashionable Mayfair, to recipes for a Regency picnic on the eve of Waterloo to gypsy lore.

Louise Allen