Talk Sweetly to Me (16 page)
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Authors: Courtney Milan
Tags: #courtney milan, #historical romance, #enemies to lovers, #victorian, #victorian romance, #sexy historical romance, #doctor, #african heroine, #interracial romance
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Talk Sweetly to Me
is a companion novella in the Brothers Sinister series. The books in the series are
The Governess Affair
, a prequel novella,
The Duchess War
,
The Heiress Effect
,
The Countess Conspiracy
,
The Suffragette Scandal
, and
Talk Sweetly to Me
. I hope you enjoy them all!
Other Books by Courtney
The Worth Saga
Coming late 2014
Not in any series
The Carhart Series
Author’s Note
T
HE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK
came from two places. The first was a course in quantum mechanics that I took way back in 2001, one taught by Dr. Jerzy Cioslowski. Dr. Cioslowski was the sort of person who told a million extraneous stories as he taught. One of his stories was of Hartree, one of the early giants of quantum mechanical computations. His main advantage, Cioslowski said, was that his father was a computer: He would calculate all his sums for him, leaving Hartree free to do most of the work.
Once, he told us, the computer was a person. In fact, computers were often women. He said this—leaving half the (female) class sputtering, and then went on blithely.
There isn’t much known about the history of female computers. They came into prominence in World War II, when female computers served in the Manhattan project, and helped crack the German’s Enigma code. But they existed before that. Very little is said about the computer, either male or female, so I’ve had to interpolate.
The other source of inspiration for this was a real woman. Her name is Shakuntala Devi, and she was known as the human computer for her ability to calculate complex cube roots in her head in a matter of seconds. Her roots were modest—her father was a circus performer—but not only was she a mathematical genius, she also wrote cookbooks, nonfiction on homosexuality, nonfiction on learning mathematics, and novels (many of these are available as ebooks today). She even ran for office.
In terms of the work Rose was doing, I ended up deleting a lot of astronomy and mathematics from this book as written. (I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.) One of the things I deleted was a reason why she’d be using the law of gravitation to calculate the Great Comet’s trajectory. This was actually a huge open problem in astronomy at the time: everyone knew that comets didn’t purely obey the laws of gravitation in their trajectory around the sun, and nobody could figure out
why
they didn’t. It was a source of some serious disagreement. People came up with all kinds of theories as to the source of the discrepancy. The real answer—asymmetric outgassing of cometary materials as the comet approached the sun, and a few relativistic effects—was not known for many years yet. Rose’s goal in her calculations would be to try to fit the theory of gravitation with the other known theories to see which of those theories best approximated reality.
Yes, there was once a lengthy explanation of this in the book. Yes, I deleted it.
As for Patricia’s husband, the brief account that Rose gives is also accurate. Africanus Horton, the first black doctor in England, was sponsored by the editor of the
African Times
. Thereafter, several others were sponsored regularly, many of whom married women in England (some white). While we don’t have statistics of this by race, by 1882, Britain had probably trained at least as many black doctors as there were dukes. There were also a number of middle-class black families like the one Rose comes from—shopkeepers, lawyers, and the like. I don’t pretend there were many of them as a proportion of the population as a whole, but especially in the areas of the country that were near the major ports—Liverpool, London, Manchester and the like—there were known concentrations of people of color. I’m indebted to the book
Black Victorians, Black Victoriana
for their work in peering into the historical record on this point.
Finally, a brief note on the transit of Venus. Just about everything Rose says about the transit of Venus is true. I made one alteration to reality for the purposes of the story. In reality, the snow on December 6th started before the transit did, and so the transit was not visible at all in London. I moved the storm back a few hours, and gave Rose that first glimpse of the phenomenon. I hope you’ll forgive that tiny alteration.
Acknowledgments
Some books have a natural story to them, one that takes me almost no effort to write. Others require substantially more work on my part to uncover. This was a book that I thought I understood…until I started writing it and found that the story I’d hoped to tell was not at all the one that showed up on the page. It took me longer to put together than I had hoped.
But I had promised my husband that, for the first time in five years, when we took a vacation, I would not have a pending deadline. (The number of times he has gone out and entertained himself while I struggled with a manuscript back at the hotel room is huge. It’s happened in —in London, Hawaii, Chamonix, New York, Chicago, while visiting his parents, while visiting my parents…) The people who helped me with this book did so under extraordinary deadline pressures: Robin Harders, Keira Soleore, Martin O’Hearn, Martha Trachtenberg, Maria Fairchild, Rawles Lumumba… All of them got this book and turned it around in absolutely record time.
This is the final book in the Brothers Sinister series, and it feels strange to let it go. This series has found me thousands and thousands of new readers, has allowed me to quit my day job. It seems overly dramatic to call it
life-changing
—but what else do you call something that changes your life? To everyone who has enjoyed this series: thank you for changing my life. Thank you for everything.
I hope I can do my next series justice.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Talk Sweetly to Me: © 2014 by Courtney Milan.
Cover design © Courtney Milan.
Cover photographs © | shutterstock.com.
Digital Edition 1.0
All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.