The Baron’s Betrothal: An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance (The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series) (44 page)

“Not Jane I’m worried about. This is serious. But he never takes me seriously, damn it. I should ask your brother Exmoor to sort Seelye out.”

“That will cause more stir, I fear. We must find them before there’s any whiff of scandal. In the meantime, she is quite safe with Burtie.”

“I know that, you know that. But the
ton
will feast on this latest example of Jane’s intransigence and disregard for all sensibility, you mark my words. She’s hopeless.”

“She’s headstrong and principled.”

“Ha! One could quarry rock from her skull rather. And she refuses to acknowledge anyone else’s principles, choosing to run riot according to her own. She will ruin herself and kill Seelye with this latest escapade of hers, whatever it is.”

“We must make inquiries quietly, so please do not go abroad until you are calm, George,” said the duchess in a tone that brooked no argument.

He eyed his wife. “Yes of course, you are right. I shall be the soul of discretion. And so shall the army of Bow Street runners I sic on them, I promise.” He turned his head to address his wife’s belly, “What say you, Bump, draw and quarter him for a quick death? Or shall I torture him for
years
with my sister?” He pressed an ear against her. “Ah, you are a cruel creature.” To his wife, he relayed, “Bump thinks Seelye must take her off my hands.
Even in utero, our Bump has pity for his papa.”

The duchess smiled not really paying him close attention.

“I hope this is a son so I may call him Bump till his majority, by way of a nickname,” the Duke of Bath mused to his wife.

“George, your daughter took exception to ‘Bulge’ once she learned to speak.”

“Mmm. Well.”

“What will you call the child after this? Convexity? No, your pet names stop at birth, I must insist.”

“Didn’t bother Bulge as an infant, happiest little mite.” He smiled at the recollection.

Her Grace eyed His Grace over her needlework.

“Oh, very well, Gert. I shall bid adieu to Bump once he’s born and we shall saddle my heir with some God-awful family name,” he sighed. “I hate George. Everyone’s George. Bump has such a bluff, sturdy ring to it. Nice for a lad. ‘Bump, my boy,’ I’ll say, ‘Fetch your papa’s cup of tea from your lovely mama.’”

“No, George.”

“Hmph. You liked ‘Bulge’ well enough.”

“I only tolerated it.”

“Yes, fine. Seems you females are born with no sense of humor at all.”

Dear readers:

Thank you for coming along so far.

I hope to write Book Three in a year or two.

Best wishes and happy reading,
 

Miranda

Notes

1.
W. H. Auden (1907-73) wrote this long after the baron’s story takes place but what a lovely thought. M.D.

2.
Algernon was typical of the large, muscular gray horses bred from Percherons and Arabians. Not so large as a pure Percheron, still Algernon favored his Percheron sire, and stood at 18 hands, a strapping, huge horse. He was, in other words, in perfect proportion to his massive, muscular master, Lord Clun. Descended from destriers, Algernon was the finest, strongest warhorse on the field of battle, at least, as far as Lord Clun was concerned.

3.
Oops, as the second son of a viscount, Percy has no courtesy title as yet, and thus is the Honorable George Percy. I have corrected my error in this story referring to him now as Mr. Percy and retroactively revised the first book but you’ve probably already read that one. My apologies.
 
-MD

4.
De Sayre, pronounced “de-SAY-er.” Although when Clun says it with his sensual rolling r’s, there’s an extra nuance that is frankly and scandalously sensual.

5.
The building had numerous windows in spite of the king’s window tax, which previous barons groused was a damnable tax on God’s own sunlight and fresh air..

6.
The author also mistakenly identified Seelye as the second son of an earl. His father was the Marquis of Exmoor. So Seelye does enjoy the use of a courtesy title of Lord as such. MD

7.
Prior to his military training at the recently opened Royal Military College at High Wycombe, Clun had had the typical aristocratic classical education with tutors. And he enjoyed referring to the woman who bore him with witty mythological precision. The Erinyes, translated literally as ‘the angry ones’ or Furies, personified vengeful anger. Myth had it that when the Titan Cronus castrated his father Uranus and tossed his man parts in the sea, drops of blood gave rise to the Furies. Certainly given his mother’s lifelong dissatisfaction with his philandering father, the whole castration-vengeful anger scenario seemed perfectly apropos.

8.
As a foundation garment, women wore “lightly boned stays or corsets” in this period. That is not to say the neo-classically inspired muslin dresses and the undergarments made for them were comfortable. “The new short-waisted style of women’s dresses, so deceptively simple in appearance could, in fact, be very restricting and the tight construction of the raised waistline round the rib cage extremely uncomfortable.”
 
From
Jane Austen Fashion
by Penelope Byrde, pg. 28.

9.
First recorded use: 1785-95; from the Latin incandescent, (stem of incandescens), present participle of incandescere, to glow.

10.
Macaroni: an 18
th
century term used by the older generation for a fop or fribble.

11.
Carreg is Welsh for stone. The de Sayre lords replaced the original timber motte and bailey castle with a stone structure by the close of the 13th century, as was common on the Welsh borderlands as Norman Marcher lords prospered.

12.
The British Museum opened in 1759 dedicated to human civilization throughout the world and especially the British Empire.

13.
According to the late housekeeper who raised her, the unmistakable signs of a man’s affection were: possessiveness and/or jealousy, protectiveness, chivalry, admiration, desire and selflessness. Not that a man would exhibit all of these signs, but if a fellow demonstrated almost all of them, chances were, he was in love.

14.
The Furies were at times depicted as having snakes wrapping their waists and eyes that dripped blood. In a similar fashion, the Gorgons had snakes for hair and their accursed gazes turned men to stone with a glance.
 
Clun used the terms the Fury and the Gorgon interchangeably when pondering the subject of his mother.

15.
Henry Paget, second Earl of Uxbridge commanded the cavalry, including the Household Cavalry, under Wellington. He was personally acquainted with and charmed by Clun and his friends, Lords Seelye and Maubrey (later tenth Duke of Ainsworth) and the Hon. George Percy, giving the cavalry officers the sobriquet the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
 
He repeated his witticism with delight to all and sundry until newspapers began to follow their exploits against Napoleon’s forces.

  
In the Battle of Waterloo’s last hours, a cannonball shattered the earl’s leg.
 
Perhaps an apocryphal tale, but it was said, he was near enough to Wellington at the time to cry out, "By God, I’ve lost my leg!"
 
To which, Wellington supposedly replied, "By God, sir, so you have!"

16.
After his leg was amputated above the knee, Uxbridge purportedly said,
 
"I have been a beau these 47 years and it would not be fair to cut the young men out any longer."

17.
Before running away, Elizabeth misinformed Washburn, Nettles and Mrs. Dawes about her upcoming plans, saying only that she would be with Constance to prepare for her nuptials and that under no circumstances should they disturb her, it being an exhausting endeavor. She also gave her lady’s maid a ‘surprise’ holiday, as she would be redundant at the Traviston’s. Recalling her maid was simple, too, for Elizabeth was a dab hand at forging her father’s signature. By franking the letter, she obscured its Shropshire origin. Quite clever, she thought.

18.
The letters patent creating the barony
dated almost to the Conquest. At William the Conqueror’s behest, the first de Sayre built a wooden mote and bailey castle near the Welsh border to help secure the Norman kingdom’s western reach. Following generations of Marcher lords replaced it with a sprawling stone castle and continued to amass wealth. To date, the barony was still in its first creation. Every de Sayre lord managed to beget at least one surviving son to beget another and so forth in a feat of serial procreation few other noble houses achieved. Indeed, all their begetting and fruitfulness had quite the Old Testament ring to it.

19.
As a fourth-generation tea merchant, Mr. Richard Traviston was the purveyor of fine teas to royalty and the peerage. So, there was no stink of trade in the Travistons’ unique case. Rather, about this mercantile family was the cosy scent of a custom-blended cup of tea from exotic, East Indian sources to which previous Travistons achieved exclusive rights of trade.

20.
Classical Latin, not Freud, friends. Defined as
libīdō
(genitive, libidinis, f, 3
rd
decl.) meaning: pleasure, inclination, fancy, passion, lust, sensuality, etc. Yeah, I know it’s a Freudian term now, but in the 19th. century it was a perfectly good, familiar
 
Latin noun for desire.
 
Freud borrowed it from Latin, after all, because of its meaning. So loosen up and calm down.

21.
See
The Duke’s Tattoo
, Book One in The Horsemen of the Apocalypse series.

22.
Advent can fall any day from Nov. 27 to Dec. 3 and marks the start of the Christmas season.

23.
The Waits falls on December 10, or about a fortnight before Christmas

24.
It was rumored Lady Petra’s friend had made a lasting impression on a young gentlewoman she met in Kent years ago. This Miss Austen, it was rumored, subsequently became “A Lady” who authored first
Sense and Sensibility
then
Pride and Prejudice
, both to much acclaim. Having read the latter novel when it came out several years ago, even Lady Petra was moved to tease Lady Wesley of Miss Elizabeth Bennett’s striking resemblance to her, with her fine eyes, her playful wit and her wealthy, proud husband. Lady Wesley demurred. Lord Wesley’s name happened to be D’Arcy Fitzwilliam, true, but he’d been satisfactorily smitten with her from the outset and therefore perfectly amiable ever after.

25.
See The Duke’s Tattoo by Miranda Davis, publ. 2012

26.
Lord Seelye’s father was misidentified in The Duke’s Tattoo as the Earl of Exmoor. My bad.

27.
In 1816, Beau Brummell famously fled England to avoid debtor’s prison and lived in France for the remainder of his life. He lived first in Calais.