Of Noble Family (54 page)

The voyage had been uneventful, and Jane was deeply grateful that the motion troubled her not at all. More so, she was grateful that Weymouth harbour was not more than an hour's journey to their own small town in the neighbourhood of Dorchester. Within two hours of arriving in England, she stood in a light fall of snow upon the front sweep of her family's home at Long Parkmead.

The door to the house flew open and Mrs. Ellsworth came out at a run, gown raised and flying. Melody and Alastar followed at not much slower of a pace. With only a bare acknowledgement of Jane, Vincent, and Mr. Ellsworth, she lifted her grandson out of Jane's arms. “What a handsome young man you are. Yes. Such a delight.”

Laughing, Jane met Melody in an embrace, while Vincent and her father were all very correct with Alastar. “How is my nephew?” Jane asked.

“Crawling and managing to destroy everything he can reach. I dread the time when he begins to walk.” Melody rested her hand ever so briefly on her stomach and blushed when Jane raised her brows. “Shh … Mama does not know yet. I can only take so many tonics.”

“I will not tell.” Jane turned to reach out a hand for Amey, who held Isabella. “May I introduce our friend, Mrs. Avril, and her children Isabella, Solomon, and Eleanor.”

Mrs. Ellsworth was too absorbed in her new grandson to pay any mind, but Melody smiled and stepped into the role of hostess without hesitation. “I am so pleased to make your acquaintance. La! But you must be fatigued from your trip, and we are making you stand in the cold.”

Amey laughed. “It's all right. I'm still all amazed at the snow.”

“Oh! But of course, I should imagine it is a rare occurrence in Antigua.”

Mr. Ellsworth broke away from Alastar and Vincent. “Bless me. I was about to forget a promise to Solomon and Eleanor. I have been telling them these past two hours that we should play in the snow when we arrived.”

“Shall I go with you?” Vincent asked.

Alastar clapped him on the shoulder. “Go inside with your wife, and I will keep Mr. Ellsworth company.”

“And I shall make certain you have hot cocoa when you come inside.” Melody clapped her hands. “Oh, but it is so lovely to have you home again.”

By mutual agreement the party divided, some going to Long Parkmead's shrubbery, while the rest entered the house and were soon settled in the front parlour with strong tea and good Stilton cheese. Thomas and Isabella crawled across the carpet, managing to find every small thing that they could stick into their mouths. Amey and Melody sat on the floor with them, retrieving objects from little hands and laughing as they compared notes.

Mr. Ellsworth, Alastar, and the children did not stay long out of doors, as neither child had a proper winter coat. Both men were rosy-cheeked and laughing at the children's delight with the new miracle of snow.

With her family thus around her, Jane settled on the sofa next to Vincent and had the satisfaction of watching her husband and mother coo over her son. She had long wished that he could be easy in the company of her family, and the introduction of young Charles seemed to provide exactly the topic of conversation best suited to them both.

 

 

Epilogue

In London, Jane and Vincent took possession of a house with an enclosed garden for the children to play in. Their plans to work on new commissions came to nothing as they discovered that Queen Charlotte had passed away in November, putting the nation into mourning again.

This made them deeply grateful to accept the invitation to work at the school for glamourists. They were delighted to discover that they both knew the proprietress, though it had been over four years since they had last seen Miss Dunkirk. It took very little effort to persuade their patron to offer a post to Amey as well. Herr Scholes came from Vienna to consult in setting the curriculum, although he was often distracted by Charles and Isabella. Still, the school opened in the autumn of 1819 with much fanfare.

In short order, it became quite the thing for young ladies of quality to be trained at Miss Dunkirk's School for Girls. Vincent advocated for opening an adjoining wing of the school for the education of boys in the art of glamour. Though there were fewer applicants by far, those that did attend were deeply enthusiastic.

Their reputation was further increased with the publication of
A Comparative Study of the Glamour Taught in Europe and Africa, with a Particular Concentration on the Traditions of the Igbo and Asante Peoples, by Jane, Lady Vincent, and Mrs. Nkiruka Chinwe.

At times, Jane felt that she ought to be doing more when she saw the efforts of their niece Louisa and Vincent's half brother Zachary. With introductions from the Earl of Verbury, the two were soon mixing with company of the first order. Jane and Vincent, in turn, introduced them to the coldmongers, who helped them make connections among the coloured population of London. With steady influence, Louisa and Zachary carefully made the right friends, and in 1824, their combined efforts were instrumental in seeing slavery overturned throughout the United Kingdom.

Jane and Vincent maintained a regular correspondence with Frank, who kept them informed on events back in Antigua. His mother lived to see slavery abolished and her children free. Picknee Town was finally unshrouded from its glamour and all the families who had been separated were reunited. The Hamilton estate survived the abolishment of slavery with little ado, as the steward had already been in the practise of treating the slaves as freedmen.

*   *   *

Though the Vincents' later
life took some surprising turns, we shall leave them with this final scene from not long after the school opened, to reassure you that they received a well-deserved rest. Jane woke in the middle of the night to find Vincent's finger on the tip of her nose. She wrinkled it, eyes crossing to see what he was doing. “Vincent?”

He jerked his hand away. “Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, until someone touched my nose.” She rolled onto her elbow, just able to see him in the dim light of their bedroom. The new gaslights of London cast an orange glow in the room, so unlike the heavy darkness when they had first moved there. “Are you not able to sleep?”

“No, no. I just heard Charles, so I went to look in on him.”

She frowned. They had acquired a nanny after it became clear that Amey's time was better spent teaching than chasing Charles or Isabella. “Mrs. Eccles is supposed to do that.”

“But I like to.” He leaned down and kissed her gently. “I am sorry that I disturbed you.”

“Well … so long as I am disturbed.” She kissed him more deeply, sliding her hand up his arm to find the collar of his nightshirt and undid a button. “And perhaps a little agitated…”

He made a long, shuddering inhalation. “Muse…”

“Rogue?”

“Give me a moment—” He rolled to the side and opened the drawer of his bedside table.

She ran a hand down his back to find the bottom edge of his nightshirt. “Inconceivable.”

“That is the plan.”

They were occupied then and on many nights with duties marital. Jane had found her muse as surely as Vincent had, and both of them, together, discovered that it was possible to receive inspiration from more than one muse. Even if that second muse were smaller and frequently given to interrupting those duties marital.

But that is for a later time. We shall leave them now with the privacy they have earned.

 

Afterword

First and foremost, I need to thank Joanne C. Hillhouse, an Antiguan and Barbudan author, who helped me with the Antiguan Creole English in the novel. By “helped,” I mean “rewrote it.” Let me explain why I decided to do this.

I grew up in the American South—specifically, the Piedmont of North Carolina and East Tennessee. The reason I'm being specific about this is that I grew up in a part of the United States that has very clear regional differences. People talk about “the Southern accent” as if it's a homogeneous thing, but it's really, really not. Accent goes far beyond how the words are pronounced, or the cadences used, and very much into the word choices and sentence structures. Language reflects the culture of the people using it, precisely because we use it to express ourselves.

There are also very distinct class differences in the way English is spoken. This is true everywhere, but the American South is one of the places where it's really clear. A Southerner will often try to scrub the “country” out of their voice to arrive at the “genteel” Southern accent so that people won't think they're uneducated. And, if they move out of the South, where that distinction isn't recognized, that requires scrubbing all trace of the South out in order to not be perceived as a “hick.”

Yet … when I go home, I'll slide back into a Southern accent when I'm in a store so I don't seem like an outsider. It's code-switching at its most basic.

So, when I decided to set a book with a lot of action in Antigua, I knew that I wanted to represent the Antiguan Creole English. I also knew, from having watched people mangle the Southern American English, that understanding the nuances was going to be really, really important and really, really hard.

Harder than making my books sound like Jane Austen?

Yes.

Why? Because Jane Austen has been researched, and studied, and analyzed, so there's no shortage of material available. It's taught in school in the United States. I could grab a representative text and use that as my base. Even when I had characters who were speaking with an East London dialect, I could ask a friend to “translate” it for me. But the primary text? No shortage of material, and it's material that I have been exposed to since a very young age.

Trying to find a representative text of Antiguan Creole English written by a native speaker in 1818? Welcome to colonialism.

The next best choice was to read a lot of work written by contemporary writers. (I recommend the works of Jamaica Kincaid, Joanne Hillhouse, and Marie-Elena John.) It was very clear to me that I could come up with something that a reader unfamiliar with the Caribbean region would accept. And it was also clear that I would completely screw up the nuances.

So I hired Joanne Hillhouse to translate the dialogue. I also rewrote sections because she made suggestions about places where the communication would be nonverbal. Language is complex and not simply what is said, but also what is unsaid.

Dialect, likewise, isn't just people talking funny. It's a reflection of culture.

While doing so, I knew that it would make parts of the dialogue harder for many of my American readers to understand. While I could have made the dialect less thick, it would have also contributed to erasing the culture of the Antiguan population. In the “A Note on History” section, I'll have some recommended reading, if you'd like to know more about dialect and Antigua.

Justin Roberts's dissertation “Sunup to Sundown: Plantation Management Strategies and Slave Work Routines in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia, 1776–1810” was invaluable in understanding how a working plantation ran. More on that in the “A Note on History” section.

Megan Eccles mentioned on Twitter that she had named her son after Vincent. I was at a point where I needed Vincent's full name so I asked what her son's middle name is. One of those … one of those names is his.

Michael Livingston (for the longtime readers, yes, that's the man I named Captain Livingston after) is a medieval literature professor who I turn to when I need help with archaic language. In this case, it was attempting to come up with a term for ultraviolet light. In real history, UV was recognized in 1801 by German physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter as “oxidizing rays.” So, theoretically, I had a perfectly good period word to use. But … but, my theory was that in a world where glamour works, people would have known about ultraviolet much earlier. After tossing around a couple of different ideas, Michael offered “porphyry” as a possibility. This was perfect, because it corrupted so easily into “poorfire,” which was a great word for a light that makes things glow.

My husband, Rob, who is my muse, has been wonderfully supportive and lets me talk through plot problems when I am stuck. He doesn't offer answers, but he knows all the right questions to ask.

My agent, Jennifer Jackson, and first reader, Michael Curry, deserve especial thanks this time. During the research process, I realized that the ending I had planned was
not
going to work. Not in a billion, billion years. We sat over dinner and hashed out possible alternates. Jenn pointed out that the thing I keep returning to in these novels are the personal stakes and relationships. Rather than making the conflict larger, I made it smaller and more personal. Otherwise, you would be reading about a rebellion.

Likewise, my editor, Liz Gorinsky, always makes my books better, but with this one, when I was at the mid-point, I realized that my new ending would also
not
work. She helped talk me through the reasons that it was a problem and figure out what I needed to do to fulfill the promises I'd set up at the beginning.

Many thanks to my assistant, Beth Bernier Pratt, who keeps me from double-booking myself and generally makes the world a much better place.

Thanks also to my beta readers: Alycia, Amanda Jensen, Amber Hancock, Andy Rogers, Annalee Flower Horne, Anne, Beth Matthews, Bonnie Fox, Caroline, Carrie Sessarego, Charlotte Cunningham, Chloe, Chris M., Chris Russo, ChristonJP, Darci Cole, David Wohlreich, Denelian, Elizabeth Lefebvre, Faith, Furecha, Gloria Magid, Halley Ruiz, Hilde Austlid, Hope Romero, Jessica James, Jill, Joan, John Casey, John Devenny, Jon Marcus, Julia Rios, Justin Clement, Karen, Kassie Jennings, Katherine Boothby, Kathleen Ladislaus, Katie, Laura Christensen, Lilia Visser, Mark Lindberg, Mary Alice Kropp, Matt, Melissa Tomlin, Mrs. Arkban, Nina Niskanen, Nonny Blackthorne, Norma, Pat, Patrick, Rae Nudson, Ryan LeDuc, Sally, Sara Couture, Sara Glassman, Serge Broom, Siddhartha, Stephanie McDaniel, Tanya Kucak, Terry, Tracy Erickson, Trish E. M., and Tyler Kraha.