Following
a botched abduction in which he was wounded, Evelyn, Marquis Finchbury finds
himself embroiled with the determined young runaway Imogen. Short of money but
loath to get attached to a chamberpot heiress, Finchbury spurns the idea of
courting Imogen. Instead he hands her over to his mother’s protection.
As
Imogen turns her hand to sorting out Lady Enid’s problems and rescuing
Finchbury’s illegitimate children from a murderous gypsy and a vituperative
gentlewoman, Finchbury finds himself drawn to Imogen against his will. His
protestations that he is no good for Imogen fall on determinedly deaf ears as
the chamberpot heiress unravels the ghosts of his past and determines to marry
Evelyn.
The background picture is Bath, where Finchbury, travelling reluctantly with Imogen, meets up with his mother and her paramour, and thankfully hands Imogen over to her. Here Imogen makes a social debut, meeting some of the younger inhabitants of the town and trying the baths with Lady Enid, the cause of whose strange malady Imogen is able to guess. However, Enid agrees to go with her son, with Imogen in tow, to his Seat, to decide what to sell, in order to start to recoup his fortunes. We discover a lot about Evelyn's father, all to the man's detriment, and I enjoyed writing the children so much I'm going to work them into another book in the series just for kicks and giggles. This may delay the book involving Letty Grey, as that doesn't take place until early 1815, but it will be coming!
Fortunately I had all my weather research to hand in the writing of this, so the weather, including snow in Bath early in May is accurate, because it was written in the book, and sent to a friend to beta-read, before the Great Data Crash.
It's coincidental that I was involving gypsies at the same time as my friend and editor, Giselle Marks, was writing a book in which Gypsies were a major feature, so we were able to share information. The carts of the time were not the brightly painted vardos of later times, but were more akin to the pioneer carts of the wild west, with carts hooped and covered with canvas. The hoops, often cut from local materials at each stop, were used to make rude tents for living in. I call them vardos for convenience, because the word isn't going to have sprung out of nowhere.
US:
And the UK manages to have both on one page HERE and I'm sorry about the price, costs keep going up with everything... I make 27p per hard copy...
