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Writing update!

9 Feb

The other day, my husband was at one of his poker games (he’s a poker FIEND and takes part in tournaments and stuff) and someone asked him ‘What does your wife do?’ Without pause, he replied: ‘She’s a writer’ and then apparently reflected for a while on how nice it was to be able to say that.

I’m very touched by this, as I have found that the angst I felt as I wondered ‘Am I a writer?’ was nothing compared to that of my nearest and dearest, who’d apparently been thinking ‘Is she a writer now?’ Typically, I suppose the turning point for him came when I started making more money from my books than my day job as a researcher, which I am now optimistic about being able to leave at some point. And there was me, thinking it was all about being CREATIVE when actually, like seemingly everything else, it’s about MONEY.

I’m now selling around a thousand books a month, which is apparently pretty good for a self publisher and especially one like myself who does barely any promotion. I do sometimes wonder what I could achieve if I had an actual publisher behind me and therefore marginally more klout (hey, I might have sold over 3,000 books now but there’s still people out there who are VERY keen to let me know that I’m not writing ‘real books’ because they are e-books and that I’m not a ‘proper writer’ because I don’t have an agent or a publisher they have heard of, which isn’t technically true as they’ve heard of ME, haven’t they?) in the publishing world but, well, if it’s meant to happen it will and I’m not losing sleep over it in the meantime.

People have started asking if publishers are approaching me now that both my blog and my books are taking off – they are definitely not and nor do I expect them to. My blog gets over 3,000 views a day now, which is jolly nice but I don’t think there’s enough of a cohesive theme to the whole thing to make it of interest to them. I HAVE been approached by a very nice agent though (hello!) and am sending chapters of my Minette novel along to her as I write so she can help me improve them. I’m enjoying this immensely actually as I’ve been thinking for a while now that I wish I had someone who knows what they are doing to tell me what to do and help me with plot tangles and stuff.

I don’t know what will happen once the book is finished but either way, it will almost certainly be a better book for this precious input. It’s also changed the way that I write as, I’ll be honest, I used to try my best to forget that the book was going to be read by other people once I’d finished it. In fact Before the Storm is the first book that I’ve written with the express and full intention of publication. Now though I’m constantly aware that it is being read, nay SCRUTINISED, and that’s keeping me both writing (I can be lazy – it amazes me that people think I am prolific) and also on my toes somewhat.

Anyway, Minette is going very well – I’m writing the fifth chapter at the moment and am enjoying it immensely. Charles I is dead, Henrietta Maria is keen to marry Minette off to her cousin Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de Montpensier is keen to put as many spanners in the works as it takes to prevent that from happening.

Here’s some Writing Tips that I have picked up so far during this book’s conception:

1. You can’t ‘hiss’ a sentence that doesn’t have any ‘s’ in it. Think about it.

2. If you are battling terrible writer’s block, it can be immensely helpful to sit back, listen to music and mentally put together a stonking film trailer for your book that incorporates all the most dramatic or whatever scenes (written or not) that you think really encapsulate your book. For example, for Minette, I have a trailer worked out against the background of What The Water Gave Me by Florence and the Machine and it involves lots of running down corridors, screaming in carriages, floating on a lake while sunlight dapples through the trees overhead and cross looks at masked balls. And that’s my book. Um, okay.

For Whitechapel aka The Secret Keeper, I have worked out trailers to Before I Die by Kidney Thieves and Let The Record Show by Emilie Autumn (did I mention that I am seeing her again in March? I did? Oh well.), which involves um staggering down an alleyway in the dark, cross looks over a dinner table, the flash of a knife, a very painted up girl singing on a music hall stage and um possibly some snogging. Already, you can see that it is a very different sort of book.

Here’s one someone else made earlier cunningly combining Let the Record Show and Sweeney Todd. Obviously, if anyone ever unwisely makes a film from any of my books they have to star Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter (and Aidan Turner, Tom Hardy and Eva Green) or I’m signing NOTHING.

There was a number 3 but I can’t remember what it was. Oh wait, I know:

3. This isn’t a tip, but a response to a question I’ve been asked a hundred times recently – I have no IMMEDIATE plans to write a sequel to the Marie Antoinette novel but if one does emerge it will be rather different from its predecessor and may have a totally different narrator added to the mix, one that I can have a bit of fun with. To be honest, I wrote The Secret Diary of a Princess about four years ago now and am a bit staggered by how successful it has been as it was just a bit of fun and never actually intended for publication. There might also be a short story sequel to both Blood Sisters and Before the Storm as I’ve had a lot of questions about the fate of the main characters…

Anyway, it’s now almost a month since Before the Storm was launched and people have been very kind about it! I think it’s my best work to date and it’s nice that the first few readers seem to have enjoyed it so much…

‘I really enjoyed this book. After reading so many historical romances that circle tightly around the hero and heroine, and where it’s easy to tell who’s going to have a happy ending with whom at the end of the first chapter, it was a breath of fresh air to read about the strong ensemble cast and not to know what was going to happen next. All the settings come to life so vividly, from Bath to London to Versailles to Paris (especially Paris!) I also loved the homages to Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers. Highly recommended!‘

‘Many historical novels set against such a huge backdrop of revolutionary France can lose their way, but Melanie’s skill is to weave together the stories of the main protagonists while zooming in to focus on their intensely passionate (in every sense) relationships. I read a review elsewhere that this author’s greatest achievement is to write so honestly about the way women treat each other – I certainly agree. Here we see women as silly girls, blooming into women or becoming embittered by the vagaries life throws at them; women as sisters, friends and bitter rivals; women supporting or stabbing each other in the back.‘

‘I devoured this book in one sitting. Elegantly written with fascinating, finely drawn characters and a beautifully paced narrative. Recommended to all lovers of historical fiction – and anyone who likes a good yarn!‘

‘Having recently read Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers, I can say that this is a wonderful homage to that novel, which manages the rare feat of being a pleasure to read in its own right. Set in the years leading up to the French Revolution gives this reworking an added urgency. In spite of the precarious situation the heroines often find themselves in, this is a joyful and luscious novel. Melanie Clegg is particularly adept at painting the settings and costumes of the period in technicolour. Sometimes Clegg is in danger of getting *too* carried away with period details, but the excitement and obvious passion she has for the epoque is communicative, so she can be forgiven!‘

Ah, thank you so much! Before the Storm costs less than a decent gin and tonic, an aspirational magazine or a trip to Paris and is available from all good Amazon UK and Amazon US.

If you have enjoyed my books, please please consider leaving a review, no matter how short on Amazon and/or Goodreads (where you can get away with just rating with stars without actually saying ANYTHING, which is a bonus if you hate actually WRITING reviews) to let people know. It really helps and I would love you so much if you did, which may be a threat or a promise. Who can tell?

I’m off now anyway to write, do a little bit of work and also read about St Petersburg as we’re thinking about going either there or Venice for a few days this spring. Have any of you been? What did you think?

  • Picture at the top is used with permission of Denis Severs’ House, Folgate Street, London.

    • Kidneys, Thieves and Donne.

    21 Jan

    Hello! I hope you all enjoyed the plethora of scheduled posts that I arranged for this month so that I could sneak off and attend to some Serious Writing. They’ve run out now though so I’m back again, in body as well as spirit.

    Before I continue, I’d just like to say a very profound and also gleeful THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who bought a copy of Before the Storm in its launch demi-week. It’s been selling brilliantly and the feedback I have had so far has been extremely encouraging! As you can imagine, bringing out a book is more than a bit nerve wracking but you’ve all been so kind, which has made the experience so much less hideous than it might otherwise have been. All it needs now are some reviews on Amazon and Goodreads… *hint hint*

    Oh wait, reviews have appeared! Bless your hearts!

    You can all add me on Goodreads by the way. If you WANT to, that is. Don’t feel like you HAVE to or anything. Did I sound a bit peremptory there? I do hope not.

    Anyway! I have been busy writing, writing, WRITING this month (and also getting my hair cut, parenting, reading, KNITTING a Kindle case and possibly arranging getting at least one if not two kittens) about Henrietta and also my poor girls from 1888 and it’s been pretty good. I’ve bitterly resented the bits where I have had to attend to my actual day job but as I work from home it hasn’t been as bad as it could have been – especially as my smallest boy started pre-school at the start of the year which means I now get THREE BLESSED HOURS to myself every weekday morning. I’ve been ripping out chapters, adding extra bits and killing off characters before they’ve had a chance to let out so much as a strangulated squeak. Poor things.

    Two things have happened anyway:

    1. The seventeenth century novel is now just about Henrietta Stuart, who is, as an aside, my most delightful heroine to date. She’s just so darn sparky. I’m giving in to my love of metaphysical poetry with this one and have had people quoting Donne, which never fails to make my heart sing. I love Donne, don’t you? He wrote my favourite poem, you know.

    2. I find that I am not very good at writing murder mysteries so have made the decision that the 1888 book is not going to be a whodunnit. Is it possible to write about Jack the Ripper without a bit of sleuthing? Well, we will see. I have already written the last two paragraphs where all or nothing is revealed and now have to kind of rush headlong towards that point. Isn’t that what Agatha Christie used to do? The book has the working title ‘Whitechapel‘, but somewhere along the line it decided that it wanted to be called ‘The Secret Keeper‘. I’m in the dark about what this actually MEANS but the book, as always, knows best, I’m sure.

    RESEARCH is the thing that I love the best though. RESEARCH. I like to be hands on and actually GO to places (remember the incident with Pulteney Bridge when I was writing Before the Storm? Actually making an effort to visit the places that you are writing about avoids all manner of embarrassments) which means that I have to make some trips to London and Paris this year. Oh hardship. One of the trips is to see Hampton Court, which has been facilitated somewhat by an invitation to the press launch of their new exhibition about degenerate seventeenth century courtiers. I’ll also be at the press day for the reopening of Kensington Palace, which will be rather marvellous.

    I also appear to have bought a ticket late last night to the 2012 Jack the Ripper Conference, which is being held in York. I know, I know. WHY is it not being held in Whitechapel? I grumbled a bit about this on Twitter and Facebook and seem to have aroused the ire of various York sorts, who didn’t realise that I wasn’t so much grumbling about WHERE it was being held but where it WASN’T.

    Anyway, yes, on the anniversary of the Double Event, I will be at a formal dinner in York and surrounded by my fellow Ripperologists. It’s like the start of a particularly lively episode of Morse isn’t it? Except in York not Oxford, of course.

    I also have to spend a bit of time in Whitechapel. This will probably involve booking a hotel near the Market and then staying up all night swigging gin, wandering around alleyways and taking photographs. It’s lucky that I have NERVES OF STEEL, isn’t it? I used to do that sort of thing rather a lot when I lived in London, slinking around alleyways and inhaling the sickly sweet scent of decay, bubblegummy joss sticks and spices…

    Mmm, poignant decay.

    Right, I should be off now to write some more while listening to Kidney Thieves ‘Before I’m Dead‘ on repeat because that, apparently, is how I roll. Or write. Or something.

    I love insane lip synching fan videos on YouTube.

    Oh wait, did I tell you all that I am going to see Emilie Autumn again this March? I did? Oh well. That constitutes research as well, right? I’m already planning my outfit…

    Before the Storm, my homage to Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is available for Kindle and its associated apps from Amazon UK and Amazon US for less than the price of a pint of GIN or an aspirational magazine or a REALLY nice tub of ice cream.

    Before the Storm is out now!

    17 Jan

    Yes, that’s right! My third novel, Before the Storm is available to download to your Kindle or Kindle app from Amazon US and Amazon UK right now!

    ‘Unable to attract suitably aristocratic suitors in London, a group of beautiful, wealthy and extremely ambitious English heiresses decide to try their luck in Paris instead. Although they initially take the city of light by storm, they soon discover that the glittering facade of social success hides a multitude of sins and iniquities while their own dark secrets could well destroy everything that they have worked so hard to achieve…

    Based on The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, Before the Storm is a tale of passion, betrayal and true love set against the backdrop of the opulent and often treacherous worlds of Georgian London, Versailles and Revolutionary Paris…‘

    And that’s not all! The first ten people to download a copy will receive a beautiful print of Before the Storm’s gorgeous cover art by Lisa Falzon. All you need to do is email me the Amazon receipt to prove your purchase (I’ve looked at mine and the only sensitive information will be your address, which I need anyway to be able to get the print to you) and I will send one out to you!

    Anyway, it’s taken me a year to get from the first tentative beginnings of this book to publication and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I really hope you all like it and please don’t forget to let me know what you think once you’ve had a chance to read it!

    Before the Storm, 18th January 2012

    14 Jan

    Just a quick announcement that Before the Storm, my third novel of iniquity and POSH DOOM in eighteenth century England and France will be released for Kindle on Wednesday, 18th January! I’ll be celebrating the release with a very special giveaway!

    Based on The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, Before the Storm is a tale of passion, betrayal and true love set in a period of dramatically shifting social change and follows a close knit group of English friends, Venetia, Clementine, Eliza and Phoebe as they navigate the opulent but often treacherous worlds of Georgian London, Versailles and Revolutionary Paris.

    ‘It was a blissfully warm day. The worst of the heat wave was now over and a light flower scented breeze blew leaves into the pavilion where the party drowsily lazed against cushions, idling listening as Eugène d’Aigueville played his guitar, his eyes fixed on Venetia, who smiled lazily back at him.

    Comte Edmond reclined in between Phoebe and Eliza, none of them spoke but the air around them shimmered with tension as both girls subtly did their best to claim his attention for themselves. Phoebe had long since realised that she was fighting a losing battle though and that although he very much enjoyed flirting with her, it was Eliza that he looked for first whenever he walked into a room.

    Eliza did not share this view though and kept thinking about Venetia’s wedding day when Phoebe, radiant with sexual confidence had told her that she wouldn’t let her chastity stand in the way of making a good match for herself. She curled her hands into fists every time Comte Edmond and her friend left the room together and tried not to think about what they might be doing. He’d tried to kiss her once, but she’d shoved him away. Perhaps that was a mistake? She looked across at him now as he gazed up at Phoebe and her heart sank.

    ‘Who is that woman?’ Phoebe said suddenly, shielding her blue eyes as she looked back towards the house.

    Venetia followed her gaze and gave a nervous laugh. ‘It’s your landlady, Eliza,’ she said, with a quick look at Edmond, who immediately sat up and automatically began to retie his loosened cravat. ‘Madame de Saint-Georges.’

    They all stood up and instinctively, Eliza, Phoebe and Venetia stood close together as Corisande de Saint-Georges hurried across the lawn towards them. She had dressed to impress in a shimmering, rich lace trimmed blue and white striped silk gown, with wide skirts pulled back from flounced flower sprigged white silk underskirts. A huge muslin fichu was arranged around her shoulders and on her elaborately curled, ringleted and backcombed powdered hair was a vast ribbon and flower bedecked white straw hat.

    ‘Goodness me, she really means business,’ Venetia murmured as they watched this vision of elegance and high fashion approach. She looked back over her shoulder at Edmond, who was standing uneasily behind them, looking as if he desperately wished he could run away. ‘I wonder what she wants?’ — Before the Storm.

    Before the Storm cover!

    12 Jan

    I am just too excited about this to keep it to myself but HERE at last is the front cover art for my next novel set during the French Revolution, Before the Storm, which will be out next week!

    How utterly beautiful is this painting? I was seriously stunned when I opened the email and saw it. I love the detailing on Clementine’s peach silk dress and look at Venetia’s scarlet hair! I also adore the mist that seems to envelop the landscape behind them.

    Thanks so much to the extremely talented Lisa Falzon for all her hard work! I’m beyond thrilled with the results!

    St Germain en Laye

    11 Jan

    I hope you’ve been enjoying the history posts that I scheduled for this month while I crack on with writing my novel about Henrietta Stuart! I think that I may have gone a teensy bit overboard, but I hope you’ll all forgive me for that.

    I’ve been really enjoying writing this novel as it means I can write about the English Civil War, Charles II and the young Louis XIV, who is a bit of an enigma really. Henrietta makes a splendid heroine too.

    ‘They arrived at the small town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the outskirts of Paris in the early afternoon and Lady Dalkeith looked impatiently out of the window as they slowed down and rolled along narrow cobbled streets lined with trees and well tended honey coloured stone houses whose residents stared at them curiously as they went past. There were two royal châteaux in Saint Germain – the older was an imposing, unfriendly grey structure vaguely reminiscent of Venetian palaces, which rose ominously above the surrounding houses, while the newer one, the Château Neuf which had been built by Henri II and his wife Catherine dei Medici was a harmonious red and gold brick miniature summer palace made for pleasure with a celebrated series of sweeping tiered terraces with several inventive little grottos that led down to expansive, beautiful gardens beside the Seine.‘ — from Minette by me.

    In my most recent chapter, I had to write about the two châteaux of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Louis XIV and his brother, Philippe were born and which, along with the Louvre and Fontainebleau was the centre of French royal power before they all scuttled off to Versailles.

    Sadly, as with Oatlands, the other royal palace that has featured so far in my story, not much of the Château Neuf at Saint-Germain-en-Laye exists any more as it was demolished during the French Revolution. It must have been beautiful in its heyday though, as demonstrated by the paintings that still exist and also descriptions of its beautiful terraces and grottos.

    ‘Henri II… commissioned Philibert de l’Orme to design the ‘Chateau Neuf’, a sort of annexe to the castle on the very edge of the high ground which would command the view directly from its windows and the terraces of its gardens. Seen from the river it dominated the colline du Pecq and clothed its slopes with masonry. Beneath the actual château the ground was cut back into two perpendicular faces, adorned with arcades and pilasters. Each of these two faces was traversed by an enormous ramp.

    It was along the terraces thus formed that Henri IV created his grottoes. They give an insight into the mind of the seventeenth century, with their moving figures and changing scenery. One was particularly remarkable — the Grotte de la Demoiselle qui joue des Orgues. The lady’s fingers were activated by water so that she played a music (so claims a document of 1644) “hardly inferior to the best of concerts“‘. — from Louis XIV by Ian Dunlop.

    The Château Neuf must have been a lovely place, but Louis XIV doesn’t seem to have been all that keen, oddly enough and after ruining it in 1680 by getting Mansard to add long blocky wings to the sides he promptly abandoned it to move into Versailles. Prior to this, he had, as a child, graciously turned the building over to his aunt Queen Henrietta Maria of England and her children for use as a summer palace (they were usually housed in an apartment in the Louvre) and therefore the château would have been very familiar to his cousins Henrietta, Charles, James and Henry in their youth.

    Later on, he would turn the older château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was his birthplace and which he personally preferred of the two (and would make his primary residence immediately before the court’s move to Versailles), to his cousin James II and his family and loyal courtiers (and some spies) when they had to leave England in a bit of a hurry at the start of 1689. They spent their exile at Saint-Germain, which subsequently became something of a haven for exiled Jacobites on the run, including at least one of my own ancestors who followed Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile.

    The ‘Vieux’ château, which I think a most unappealing structure devoid of any grace or charm, still exists and now houses the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale of France and it is still vaguely possible to get a sense of how it must have been in its glory days as you wander around. Queen Victoria, ever the sentimentalist where her Stuart ancestors were concerned, made a pilgrimage there in 1855 to see where they had ended up.

    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ve also been having fun writing about the Louvre as it would have been in the seventeenth century when it was still a royal palace and was a warren of galleries, state rooms and small apartments, rather like Versailles would end up but rather more compact.

    In other news, I’ll have a bit of an announcement soon about my third novel, Before the Storm, which is out very, very soon…

    1,000 books sold

    30 Nov

    I was quite excited to discover today that I have now sold over 1,000 books on Kindle. I know this is very VERY small fry to some of you, but I’m really quite pleased with myself right now!

    I’m especially pleased as I’ve had to put up with a lot of miserable sods since I first decided to publish my books myself with even people that I consider to be friends saying things like ‘I won’t buy a copy now – I’ll wait and see if other people think it’s any good first’, ‘Do you actually know anything about the French Revolution? Have you made it all up?’ and ‘You do realise that most self published books only sell about 10 copies and all of those will be to YOUR MUM’.

    Which is nice.

    Not to mention all the bizarre snobbery of people who told me that NO ONE will buy books written by people who didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge (poppycock!) or who don’t live in London (nonsense!) and that I was DEFINITELY mistaken if anyone would want to read historical fiction written by someone who doesn’t have a History PhD.

    So you’ll forgive me, I am sure, if I count my first thousand sales as an immense IN YOUR FACE to all the doubters and an even bigger THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who took a chance on a lowly Russell Group educated Art History graduate who lives well beyond the M25 and especially those who liked my books enough to leave a review. Thank you!

    The Secret Diary of a Princess: A Novel of Marie Antoinette is available for Kindle from Amazon UK for £1.72 and Amazon US for $2.76.

    Blood Sisters is available for Kindle from Amazon UK for £1.71 and Amazon US for $2.75.

    You can download a sample of both books and even look inside on the Amazon site before you buy AND you don’t even need a Kindle to read them, just a Kindle app on your phone or tablet thing.

    My third book, Before The Storm should be out by the end of the year and I am hard at work on the fourth, Minette. I find that I really love writing about the English Civil War so am thinking that my sixth book may well come back to it for a bit of a family epic. I’m thinking Downton. With beheadings.

    Also available at Barnes & Noble, with possible savings.

    Just keep writing, just keep writing…

    24 Nov

    It’s always a thing of joy when you write a novel set at Louis XIV’s court and Madame de Montespan makes her first appearance. She’s a bit of a scene stealer – even from a distance.

    I’ve been furiously writing this week and also trying to get over my really bad habit of editing as I go along, which means that getting words onto the page seems to take twice as long as it should do. I’ve been using Scrivener in the hopes that it would make me more organised and less prone to scrolling back and making changes, but on the contrary, it only seems to have enabled this behaviour because now all the chapters are saved separately which makes hopping between them even easier.

    I’ve also had a bit of a tussle with the Henrietta sections of the book, which were originally supposed to be in the first person but are now in the third. I love writing in the first person as it means you can really get under the skin of a character and have some fun with them but on the negative side it automatically turns said character into a socially inept eavesdropper who lingers in rooms for longer than they ought to or is often to be caught hanging about hedges or closed doors so that they can hear what the other characters are up to and report back to you, dear reader.

    So I changed it around a bit as I didn’t think Henrietta would be into that sort of thing.

    I love this painting of Henrietta’s eldest sister, the Princess Mary.

    I’m also getting ready for next year’s research jaunts which need to take in Hampton Court, St Germain en Laye, Fontainebleau and Versailles for the billionth time so that I can take a LOT of photographs. My husband has decided that he probably won’t be accompanying me this time so this means I’ll be going alone. I don’t know if I can be trusted in Paris on my own! I’ll almost certainly spend ALL my money in Sephora and the Louvre shop on the first day and then have to live on bread crumbs for the rest of the week. Actually, as a vegan, I’ll be living on breadcrumbs anyway so c’est la guerre, she said with an arch look and a gallic shrug.

    In other news, here’s Lisa Falzon’s first proof of what will be the cover for my next book release, Before The Storm. I love it already and can see that it’s going to be a beautiful piece of work.

    I don’t know when Before The Storm is coming out but will announce it here as soon as I have a date. For those who have just joined us and have the good fortune not to have been putting up with me while I was writing this epic, BTS was inspired by my favourite Edith Wharton book, The Buccaneers and is set in London and Paris between 1786 and 1793. Here’s a little snippet for you…

    ‘It was a gloriously warm spring evening. Too warm in fact, reflected Mrs Garland as she frantically fanned herself with an entirely inadequate painted paper fan that smelled unpleasantly of lacquer. She tried in vain with subtle coughs and flutterings of her hands to catch the eye of a nearby sallow complexioned footman to implore him to bring her another glass of sadly lukewarm lemonade but he was just as equally determined to ignore her. He lounged insolently against the wall, keeping his small piggy eyes fixed firmly ahead, plainly on the look out for far bigger fish than the ignored, overweight wife of a London businessman. Mrs Garland was well known amongst the gossipy Bath servants to be a mean tipper despite reputedly being possessed of an enormous fortune so he knew there was no benefit to being of service to her.

    She had been sitting at the side of the Assembly Room for three hours now, sweltering in her new, slightly too small blue Spitalfields silk dress and watching with a disconsolate eye as her eldest daughter, Eliza was partnered through the dances by a series of unprepossessing young men. It was particularly galling as not one of them, in her biased opinion, was in any way worthy of this signal honour thanks to a general lack of rank, wealth or good looks.

    Mrs Garland looked slowly around the elegant dove grey and white ballroom, where the flushed faces of the dancers and the exquisite diamonds (‘probably paste’, she thought to herself with a smug look down at the real and very expensive diamond and sapphire necklace that twinkled across her ample bosom) worn by the ladies shone and glittered in the mellow light of the huge crystal candelabras that hung overhead. In just one cursory glance she had noted in the midst of the throng at least thirty men of good fortune and property, half of whom had titles. Yet if any of them had taken the slightest bit of notice of her lovely Eliza, who everyone said was an uncommonly pretty girl then they gave not the slightest sign of it.

    ‘Miss Eliza looks to be in fine looks this evening,’ a passing acquaintance murmured over the din of the music and rhythmic thud of the dancers’ feet. They gave a smile and appreciative glance towards the dance floor where that young lady was currently energetically storming through the steps of a country dance, hand in hand with the dark haired, ruddy faced son of a wealthy farmer. Her long corn coloured tresses which had looked so elegant at the beginning of the night in a style that her maid had copied as best she could from a print of the French Queen Marie Antoinette were beginning to escape from their pins and blue silk ribbons and fall down about her neck. There was also a hectic red flush to her cheeks that owed nothing to the paltry dab of palest petal pink rouge that her Mama had fondly allowed her to apply before leaving the house. ‘Such a pretty girl! You must be very proud.’

    Mrs Garland graciously smiled and nodded. After twenty years of marriage to her charming but somewhat errant husband, there wasn’t much in her life to give her any feeling of pride other than her eldest child and, to a far lesser degree, her younger daughter. Miss Clementine Garland was just fifteen and so was deemed too young for the crowded and occasionally raucous evening balls in the Assembly Rooms. She’d been left unwillingly behind at their ruinously expensive rented house on Milsom Street, where she was probably at that moment sitting up in bed, reading one of Miss Burney’s books by candlelight and eating pilfered preserved ginger biscuits while getting wax and crumbs all over the sheets, much to the chagrin of their fearsome housekeeper.’

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