The Story Behind The Story

This was my first published book and I wasn’t intending to write a traditional Regency. When the editor at Signet (NAL) called to make me an offer, she asked me to cut 20,000 words. My response: “I can do it, but the sex has to stay.”

“Okay,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

The line folded a few months after the publication of Dedication. I don’t believe I was entirely responsible.

Dedication occurred as my attempt to crack the romance code and to write a book about people I found interesting–I didn’t want a hero and heroine who were beautiful young innocents flirting in drawing rooms. I wanted characters who’d had full lives and successful relationships with other partners–people who were grown up enough to have fallen in love before, but also capable of making stupid mistakes. I was also interested in the regency as a period a generation away from the French revolution, and as a time when upper-class women enjoyed some intellectual freedom and often a very high level of education. I don’t believe it’s coincidence that women were mainly uncorseted in this period.

An earlier version of the book revolved around code-breaking and espionage, which is why the hero, Adam, is a mathematician. To my great sorrow I had to lose the villain and his untimely end, eaten by Adam’s pigs, something I am determined to recycle in another book.

Dedication went through a horrific number of rewrites, and this is a discarded scene I’m very fond of. Adam, after he and Fabienne broke up the first time, has fled to the country to sulk and get married. It’s the 1790s. Naturally it breaks a huge quantity of writing rules: never use a dead person’s point of view, never use a flashback …

“I’ll be a good wife to you, Mr. Ashworth.” Margaret had said the words over to herself many times before, sometimes by candlelight in front of a looking glass, and then held a finger to her lips, imagining his kiss. Sometimes she murmured them at the height of summer, when the scents of rose, lavender and honeysuckle hung bewitching on the air. Now she uttered them in a voice that was almost a squeak from nervousness, laced tightly into her best satin gown, with a pin at the waist scratching when she moved, in the chilly air of the parlor.

“Your servant, Miss Hodgefield.” He bowed.

She flushed. His words made a mockery of hers, made hers as equally polite and meaningless.

She looked at him properly for the first time since he had entered the parlor. There was a thin line of crusted blood on one side of his neck, under his ear, from shaving, she thought, and shadows under his eyes. He looked older and more serious than when she had seen him last, two years ago before he left for the grand tour. His clothes were finer than any she’d seen the neighbors wear, a dove-gray velvet coat with dark blue embroidery, fine lace at his neck and cuffs, gleaming black riding boots.

She wondered if he compared her gown, that this morning she had been so proud to put on, in a conspiracy of giggles and whispers with her maid and mother, to the fashions in London and Rome and found her lacking. She’d seen only the day before in a fashion sheet some six months old that pale colors and shockingly diaphanous fabrics were the rage now, a simulated nudity that reminded her of her own shifts.

“Will you sit down?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Thank you, no. I should go… I have business to attend to on the estate.”

“Mr. Ashworth, you don’t have to…”

“To what, Margaret?” He smiled a little then, a faint imitation of the frank, open smile she had liked so much about him. The smile did not reach his eyes.

To marry me. To stay in this room with me. To be polite.

“Nothing.” She smoothed the blue satin of her skirts down and blinked back tears.

“Your father has agreed that the banns should be called, beginning next Sunday,” he said. “I trust that is agreeable?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you for telling me, sir.”

“Well.” He wandered towards the window and stood, tapping his riding whip against one boot. “I shall bid you farewell, then. Good day, Miss Hodgefield.”