To Seduce a Stranger
Page 28
Naming Matthew Markham as steward of Ravenswood had been one of Edward’s first official acts as Earl of Beckley. She had never doubted it was the right decision. But right now, the state of crops was the last thing on her mind. “I will—ah—let him know, when I see him. First thing.”
Peg tilted her head to one side. “You feelin’ yourself, ma’am? You look a bit flushed.”
“Oh. I’m fine. Just . . . oh. A bit tired, yet, I suppose. Perhaps I’ll close my eyes for a moment more.”
“As you wish, ma’am.” She hesitated. “But you should know Mrs. Markham came along wit’ her husband. Went right into the kitchen and made herself t’ home.” The Rookery had long since been repaired to accommodate the Markhams’ little family, which more than occupied Mari’s time—whatever was not taken up by her duties as midwife to the rapidly growing village, that is. But none of those changes had altered her sense of possessiveness where Ravenswood’s kitchen was concerned. “You know how Cook feels about—”
“I’ll take care of it, Peg. Momentarily.” She could not keep the note of impatience from her voice—or perhaps it was just the familiar tension Edward’s caresses were building in every part of her body.
“Very good, milady.” With a curtsy, she slipped out the door, and this time, Charlotte waited until she heard the click of the latch.
“Edward Cary,” she gasped, twitching the covers away, “just what do you think you’re doing?”
He looked up at her with those summery blue eyes and a wicked grin. “If you don’t know, we haven’t done it often enough.”
“After four children, I think I have some idea of how it works.”
Her words seemed to take a moment to penetrate. Suddenly scrambling free of the coverings, he rose up until they were face-to-face. “Charlotte?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you say . . . four children?”
“I did.” At his wide-eyed expression, she laughed. “Come, come, my lord. I have heard Mr. Markham claim that he’s never known a man so skilled at tallying figures in his head.”
When she held up four fingers and waggled them, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to each one in turn. “Four. Well. If we’re going to have another mouth to feed, perhaps I’d best go meet with Markham about that wheat field right away,” he teased. “No time to waste.”
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she wriggled her hips until their bodies were perfectly aligned and pulled him closer.
“Maybe a little time,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to hers. “But first, I’m going to lock that door.”
Historical Note
In Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, historian B. W. Higman says that “the ultimate aim of the British sugar planter [was] to return home once he had amassed his fortune.” Despite their wealth, that homecoming was not necessarily an easy one. In this book, I consider how time spent in the violent world of the West Indies might have shaped the return to life in Great Britain.
Of course, British planters were not the only ones whose lives were transformed by a journey across the Atlantic. The Africans who came to England—some free, some enslaved and traveling with their owners—faced their own challenges. Mari’s romance in this book was inspired by the interracial marriage between an English farm girl and a former slave from Jamaica in Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel, Belinda. The plot point was deemed so shocking by Edgeworth’s father that he insisted she take it out. It does not appear in the 1810 edition of the work.
The frequent mention of the West Indies in the work of an Anglo-Irish author is one sign of the pervasiveness of discussions of slavery and abolition in Britain at the close of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth. Edgeworth’s personal stance is somewhat ambiguous; like many of her contemporaries, she seems to have opposed the slave trade, but remained skeptical of efforts to abolish slavery. An antislavery boycott of West Indian sugar, and the proposed substitution of honey as a sweetener, inspired her to ask (in a 1792 letter to her friend Sophy Ruxton), “Will it not be rather hard upon the poor bees in the end?”—a remark I give to Charlotte’s heartless aunt in this story.
Finally, the character of Charlotte, a refugee from the French Revolution, draws on the work of another late-eighteenth-century novelist, Frances Burney. Evelina (1778), a novel in letters, traces the coming of age of a young woman of uncertain birth (and French extraction) who has the temerity to fall in love with an earl. Some details of Charlotte’s story were suggested by the case studies in historian Lawrence Stone’s Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A love affair with historical romances led SUSANNA CRAIG to a degree (okay, three degrees) in literature and a career as an English professor. When she’s not teaching or writing academic essays about Jane Austen and her contemporaries, she enjoys putting her fascination with words and knowledge of the period to better use: writing Regency-era romances she hopes readers will find both smart and sexy. She makes her home among the rolling hills of Kentucky horse country, along with her historian husband, their unstoppable little girl, and a genuinely grumpy cat. Find her online at www.susannacraig.com.
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