She straightened her spectacles. “Have I not?”
“No. In this one, I am the wicked seducer. I corner you in a dark part of the garden.” He led her to a corner of the boudoir. “I twirl my mustachios and say, ‘At last, fair maiden, I have you in my clutches,’ and you say . . .” He waited.
She put up her hands in a theatrical gesture of terror. “Oh, no, somebody save me!”
“Nobody will save you. It’s too late. You’re mine.” He pulled her into his arms.
Olympia pretended to fight him. “No, no, a thousand times no!”
“You can’t fight me. I’m too strong.”
“Oh, dear, it’s true.” She grasped his upper arm. “You are, indeed. Too big and strong. Such . . . muscles.” She stroked his chest. “So manly. Wicked but manly.”
“You’d better give in.”
“Must I?”
“Of course you must. It would be the practical and sensible thing to do.”
He kissed her, and being a practical and sensible girl, she did the practical and sensible thing, and let herself be ruined. Again. And again, that night, and on many, many other occasions thereafter.
Author’s Note
Pounds, shillings, pence, and other old money
Money equivalents: Until 1971, English money wasn’t based on a decimal system. It went like this:
Twelve pence in a shilling (bob, in slang).
Twenty shillings in a pound or sovereign.
Twenty-one shillings in a guinea.
There were numerous smaller and larger units of these denominations, such as:
Ten shillings in a half sovereign.
Five shillings in a crown.
For more, please see Wikipedia’s article on “Coins of the Pound Sterling,” under “Pre-Decimal Coinage.”
Attire
My characters’ dress is derived mainly from early nineteenth-century ladies’ magazines available online (with guidance from the Tailors, Milliners, and Mantua Makers of Colonial Williamsburg). Olympia’s first bridal dress appeared in several publications of 1833, including the Magazine of the Beau Monde, where it was labeled an evening dress and colored yellow, though the lady holds a prayer book. However, it was common for magazines to plagiarize each other. In this case, the dress was copied from the Petit Courrier des Dames. The Ladies’ Cabinet copied it, too. The original and the Ladies’ Cabinet show it in white and label it a wedding dress. Given the number of different English publications in which it appears, it must have been a hit.
Contrary to popular belief, which gives Queen Victoria credit for starting the fashion for white wedding dresses, white was customary well before she married Prince Albert in 1840. By the 1820s at least, brides wore white, as fashion plates and other sources show.
Special License
Some of my British readers have written to me about my various characters getting married in houses at odd times. As one reader pointed out, “weddings in England and Wales can only take place in authorized or licensed premises, so not in your own home. Following the Marriage Act of 1836 weddings could take place in a licensed ‘Registry Office’, but before that they could only be performed in places of worship.”
True, unless you married by special license. This allowed a couple to wed wherever and whenever they wished. A special license was very expensive, and had to be obtained from Doctors’ Commons. A great many members of the aristocracy married that way: In the Marriages listings in the various periodicals, we find the daughter or son of Lord This or That or Sir Thus & Such married at the family home.
In The Law Dictionary (1810 and later editions) we find this: “But by special licence or dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Marriages, especially of persons of quality, are frequently in their own houses, out of canonical hours, in the evening, and often solemnized by others in other churches than where one of the parties lives, and out of time of divine service, &c.”
You can see an 1852 Special License in The Etiquette of Courtship and Matrimony: with a Complete Guide to the Forms of a Wedding, which can be found online as part of the British Library’s archives on Google Books.
On my website blog (http://www.lorettachase.com/blog) as well as at Two Nerdy History Girls (http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com), where Susan Holloway Scott and I blog on historical fashion and other matters of social history, you can expect to find posts explaining many of the historical references in my stories.
When it comes to historical details, though, a picture can be worth a thousand words. This is why you might want to take a look at my Pinterest page (https://www.pinterest.com/lorettachase), which offers fashions as well as other illustrations for my books. If you want to see the difference between a hackney cab and a hackney coach or a landau and a curricle, that’s the place to look.
If you encounter other historical puzzles in my story, please contact me via my website, www.LorettaChase.com. While my response time can be hideously slow, especially when I’m in the throes of a work-in-snail-like-progress, I do answer eventually, and some readers’ questions have inspired blog posts and/or contributed to future stories.