Word Wenches

Here today, gondola tomorrow

From Loretta:

Didst ever see a Gondola?  For fear
    You should not, I’ll describe it to you exactly:
‘Tis a long cover’d boat that’s common here,
    Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly;
Row’d by two rowers, each call’d ‘Gondolier,’
    It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.
  (Lord Byron, Beppo)

Thus opens Chapter One of Your Scandalous Ways.

Thanks to all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen's work, most readers have some idea of what, say, an early 19th C carriage looks like.  But the early 19th C gondola--the carriage of Venice, whose streets are mostly water--may not be quite so clear.
Since gondolas play a big role in Your Scandalous Ways--much as a carriage might in one of my English-set “road books”--I’m going to expand on Byron’s evocative and witty description.  And, as always, I shall supply visual aids.

The first thing we modern readers need to get used to is the cabin or felze.  People think of a gondola ride today as romantic, but the passengers are in public view.  In the time of my story, the passengers were likely to be inside the felze.  It would have a door, casement windows, Venetian blinds, and a cushy interior. (Katherine Shaw kindly sent me this photo.  Please scroll down this page to see another.)

Thus Byron’s “coffin clapt in a canoe.”  It was quite private--and yes, in Your Scandalous Ways, I take advantage of that privacy in more than one scene, as in this excerpt.

      He needed desperately to be taught a lesson.
      Unhurriedly she slid shut the casement beside her and closed the blinds.  She reached across him, letting her bosom brush against his chest, and closed the window and blinds on his side.
      As she moved back to her place, she felt his chest rise and fall a little faster than it had done a moment earlier.
      She folded her hands in her lap.  “There,” she said.  “No one can see.”
      “There won’t be anything to see,” he said.
      “We’ll see,” she said.

Today, a gondola ride is an expensive luxury, reserved mainly for tourists.  It's faster and much cheaper (and noisier) to board one of the water taxis or buses.  In Byron’s time the gondolas
were everywhere.  Picture these black vessels with their little cabins, like black taxicabs, converging on a theater.  “And round the theatres, a sable throng,” as Byron puts it. 

Here's a recent view of the rear of La Fenice opera house, where Francesca's gondola would be waiting to collect her after the performance.  Below it is a (mid?) 19th C view.

     "After midnight, when the theaters let out and the parties began, the lights of hundreds of gondolas danced over the canals and candlelight twinkled in the windows of the palaces.  Here, where no coach wheels and horses’ hooves clattered over pavement, one moved in a quiet punctuated only by voices.  Carried over the water, conversations ebbed and flowed around her, as though in a great drawing room."

And no, the gondoliers did not then wear the straw hats with the ribbons and they did not sing.

In the time of my story, one would glide along in the vessel in a quiet world.  As Lord Byron's friend Hobhouse wrote, “during the night a profound stillness reigns though the canals and streets, interrupted only by the warning cry of the gondoliers, and the drop of their paddles, or by the tinkling of some solitary guitar."

Research is the closest I can come to time travel.  The challenge is to make my hero and heroine’s surroundings vivid in the reader’s mind without letting it intrude.  I don’t spend pages going into all the details of gondolas.  And I cannot illustrate my books.  But I’m thinking this blog is enough to let you answer one of those time travel questions so many of us have fun with--and get a chance to win a free book.

If you could ride in a gondola in 1820 or a gondola now, which would you rather and why?

The winning commenter will receive, sometime in early June, a signed copy of Your Scandalous Ways.

Your palazzo or mine?

From Loretta:      

In response to readers who encouraged me to discuss the settings and other background material of Your Scandalous Ways, today we're taking a house tour.

“Ah, Venice,” James said as he took in the view--such as it was--in front of and behind him.  The buildings and gondolas were merely darker shapes in the grey haze.  “A fine place, indeed, but for the damp.”

       I don’t know about the rest of you but I didn’t, really, know all that much about Venice before I embarked on Your Scandalous Ways.  Casino Royale inspired my British agent hero.  "Hmm,” I said to myself.  “What would 007 be like in the early 19th century?”  The film inspired my setting, too.  Those climactic scenes in Venice awakened my curiousity.
      I did not realize, for one thing, that Venice was built on a bunch of islands in a marshy lagoon.
       Originally, it was where people from the mainland fled when the barbarians attacked in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.  It was a safe haven because the lagoon was very dangerous and tricky to navigate.  After a while, they quit going back to the mainland and started building.  How they built is the miracle of Venice.

       “All this, on top of water,” Sedgewick said, shaking his head as he looked about him.  “What sort of people is it, I wonder, goes and builds a city on stilts on a swampy lot of islands?”
       “Italians,” said James.  “There’s a reason they once ruled the world, and a reason Venice once ruled the seas.  You must at least give credit for a marvel of engineering.”

       Here's a view of the Grand Canal and some of the case (houses) or palazzi (palaces). You’ll find “ca” and “palazzo” used interchangeably.  Until the fall of the Republic (i.e., when Venice surrendered to Napoleon in 1797), only the Ducal Palace (that building to the right in the painting above this one) could be a palazzo.  All other houses, no matter how grand, were simply houses, case.  Afterward, the restriction went away.  And so the same house might be a “ca” in one book and a "palazzo" in another.
       These magnificent structures were indeed built on stilts packed close together.  From my Eyewitness Travel Guide to Venice & the Veneto:  “Pinewood piles were driven...25 feet...into the ground....They rested on the solid caranto (compressed clay) layer at the bottom of the lagoon.”  On top of these were laid layers of brick and stone.  The foundations were of Istrian marble, which resists damp.  This book has some wonderful cutaway illustrations that are well worth a thousand words.  But one need only look at the buildings and consider how much labor was involved--not to mention ingenuity--to appreciate the accomplishment.

     They followed Zeggio up a staircase to the piano nobile, and found themselves in a vast central hall.  This portego, as the Venetians called it, ran from one end of the house to the other.
      It was clearly designed for show.  The line of magnificent chandeliers down the center of the ceiling and rows of immense candelabra standing on tables along the wall--all dripping the famously magnificent glass work of Murano--would, when fully lit, have made a dazzling display of the gilt, the plaster ornamenting the walls, the sculpture, the paintings.

Here for your delectation are lots of pictures of Venetian palazzi.
       Getting pictures of the exteriors was easy.  Finding interiors was another matter--and for Your Scandalous Ways, it does matter, since many of the scenes are...um..intimate. Happily one of the Wench readers suggested Venetian Palazzi (ISBN 3-8228-7050-1--that's the English edition), which offers the proverbial visual feast. Copyright prevents my sharing those images with you, but there is some material online.
       Here's one of the many internet sites I perused in the course of my research.  This "Ceremonial Stair" in the Ca' Rezzonico is a fine example of the magnificent interiors.  This site provides a floor plan of the Ca’ Rezzonico, too.
       Virtually all Venetian palazzi have the same basic layout.  A great hall runs from the side of the house facing the canal to the side facing land, usually overlooking a courtyard.  The hall on the ground floor is the andron.  The one on the main public floor or piano nobile, is called the portego.  Rooms extend from either side of these central halls.  Some buildings have interior staircases and some have exterior ones.  Sometimes the building was extended to surround the courtyard.  Side rooms open into other side rooms.  But if you keep in mind that big central hall running from the front to the back of the house, and doors leading into rooms on both sides, you’ve got the general picture.
       This shows the floor plan of the Ca’ Mocenigo, where Lord Byron lived, and the picture is of the poet at his leisure in his humble abode.      
       You can picture my hero James Cordier in a room like this, though he’s more likely to be gazing out of a window at Francesca’s palazzo across the canal than lounging on a sofa.

That brings us to the end of today's tour.  Did you learn stuff?  Was it fun?  Want more?  About places in the book?  About other stuff--gondolas, Byron, characters, writing it, researching it...?  Ask, and some of ye shall receive.

More Scandalous: A Girl's Best Friend

From Loretta:

As has been mentioned on a previous occasion, Francesca Bonnard, the heroine of my new book, Your Scandalous Ways, is a..um..bad girl.   You know.  The two-letter “h” word that used to have a few more letters fore and aft.  She’s a very expensive bad girl.

People ask where we get our ideas.  Part of her personality was sparked by an article I read in the New Yorker some time ago.  It dealt, among other things, with a set of emeralds discovered at the bottom of the sea that were believed to belong to the Queen of Portugal, sometime in the 16th century.  Or the 15th century.  I don’t remember the date and haven’t yet unpacked my brand-new New Yorker CD-Rom, so I can’t check.  But I vividly remember the picture of the gigantic emeralds.  Wow.  So I not only gave them to my heroine but made emeralds an important part of the plot.  And then it turned out that all her jewelry was important, to both the plot and the character development.

We authors do take time, at least now and then, to let our readers know about what the characters are wearing.  Clothes tell us something about character as well as help us picture the historical setting.  In this story, though, the jewelry really mattered.

Here’s what James Cordier sees the first time he sees Francesca:
“A sapphire and diamond necklace adorned her long, velvety neck.  Matching drops hung at her shell-like ears."  I found the set of sapphires, along with most of Francesca’s jewelry in a wonderful volume, Jewellery:  The International Era 1789-1910, Volume I, 1789-1861.

 

As Marilyn Monroe informed us in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “these rocks don’t lose their shape”--unlike we frail humans.  Today a beautiful divorcee has men at her feet.  Tomorrow, if she isn’t careful, she could be in the gutter.  And the gutter is exactly where Francesca’s ex-husband would like her to be.  But she’s a survivor, and jewels are her IRA-- “saved against the rainy day that often came to harlots as age took its toll.''  They’re also advertising.  “Jewelry was a powerful form of financial security.  Better yet, unlike bank notes, it was security one might display to the world."

The jewels’ quality is a signal to men:  It symbolizes her exclusivity, i.e., if you have to ask how much, you can't afford her.

We usually see Francesca’s jewelry through the eyes of the hero.  Being, among other things, a talented jewel thief, James has a keenly noticing eye, and there are times when I wondered which made him hotter:  her gems or her body.  The combination does make him cranky, as when he tells her: 
       “You have a high opinion of yourself. But the king’s ransom in pearls you’re wearing is not proof that you are irresistible, only that some men are weaker than others.”
       Some man had been weak, indeed.  He shifted his gaze from her haughty countenance to the top and drop pearl earrings, then down to the two pearl necklaces circling her throat.  From the upper, shorter one dangled pear-shaped drops of graduated size, the largest at the center.  It pointed to the space between her breasts, whose rapid rise and fall told him she was not so indifferent as she pretended.  The low-cut gown, of silk the color of sea foam, reminded one of the pearls’ watery origins.  The pearl and diamond bracelets at her slim wrists glimmered against the butter-soft gloves.
       The jewels alone constituted a cruelly arousing sight for a man who was a thief at heart.  It was maddening that he couldn’t simply steal them and have done with her.”

I stole the pearls from the Empress Josephine.  The picture in the aforementioned book wouldn’t reproduce well even if it weren’t under copyright, but this picture shows similar pearls, although the lady is wearing only one strand.

I include a few more pictures of fine jewels, mostly belonging to the women in Napoleon’s circle. 

After all, it was in Paris that Francesca commenced her career as a Bad Girl.  Here are a pair of diamond earrings that belonged to Marie Antoinette, and which you can picture on Francesca's shell-shaped ears. 

I’m also including a picture of Pauline Bonaparte, not because of the jewels, but because of the red dress.  Francesca is aware that a red dress stands out nicely against a black gondola, and readers might want to keep this dress in mind (though it’s from a few years earlier than the  time of my story) when they read the book. 

For more of Francesca and James, you can stop here, at Romance B(u)y the Book, and read an excerpt.

More glimpses are coming, but I hope this preview of Francesca’s "rocks" gives you a sense of who she is and who James is and what went into creating these characters.

What other kinds of things do you like to know about a story?  Shall I talk about their clothes?  The palazzi?  Gondolas?  Offer glimpses of Venice in 1820?  What Byron was up to during his years there? 

There are more Scandalous blogs coming between now and the 27 May appearance of Your Scandalous Ways.  One or more of your comments will tell me what to feature next time, so feel free to indulge your curiosity! 

Pudding & Pie

From Loretta:

It just keeps snowing.  As of yesterday, this part of Massachusetts had 20 inches.  By tomorrow, we are likely see over two feet.  I am learning to use my new camera, and below, here and there, you'll see my winter wonderland experiments.

It's good weather for thinking about food.  Frankly, after a week of baking cookies, I'd rather think about food than prepare it.  Last time, on my chicken blog, some of the U.S. readers expressed curiosity about English puddings.  I have since had a little time to delve into The New Female Instructor or Young Woman's Guide to Domestic Happiness, first published in 1834.  Turns out there are many varieties of puddings.  The puddings are cooked in a cloth, which must be scrupulously clean.  It is dampened with boiling water and lightly coated with flour, and depending on what kind of pudding you put into it, you tie it either closely or loosely.  Everyone clear on that?

Puddings are divided into two categories, Boiled Puddings and Baked Puddings.  There are both sweet and savory varieties, but mainly sweet.

One of the Boiled Puddings listed is Marrow Pudding:  Grate a small loaf into crumbs, and pour on them a pint of boiling hot cream.  Cut a pound of beef marrow very thin, beat up four eggs well, and then add a glass of brandy, with sugar and nutmeg to your taste.  Mix them all well together, and boil it three quarters of an hour.  Cut two ounces of citron into very thin bits, and when you dish up your pudding, stick them all over it.

My sense is that the beef marrow is used much in the way suet is used in a number of dishes, as the fat element. There's a recipe for Suet Dumplings, among others.

Here's the Potatoe (yes, that's how it's spelled in the book) Pudding, which sounds quite tasty: 

Boil half a pound of potatoes till they are soft, then peel them, mash them with the back of a spoon, and rub them through a sieve to have them fine and smooth.  Then take half a pound of fresh butter melted, half a pound of fine sugar, and beat them well together till they are quite smooth.  Beat up six eggs, whites as well as yolks, and stir them in with a glass of sack or brandy.  Pour it into your cloth, tie it up, and about half an hour will do it.  When you take it out, melt some butter, put into it a glass of wine sweetened with sugar, and pour it over your pudding.

I loved studying these recipes because they were created before anyone ever heard of cholesterol.  This is also the case with Albanian cooking, which always makes me wonder where they got the idea the Mediterranean diet keeps you slim.  Or was it just my family that used butter so lavishly?

We have a savory pie called, depending on where you come from, Lakror or Byrek.  (the y is pronounced like the German ü.)  It's made in large pans, something like the size of a pizza pan.  The crust is made of several layers of paper-thin dough, well coated with clarified butter.  It can be filled with various mixtures: cottage & cream cheese, ground beef, lamb & onions, leeks & cottage & cream cheese, onions & cottage cheese, scallions & cottage cheese, spinach & the cheeses, squash.  One might add or substitute feta cheese to some of these mixtures.  My favorite is a version with a slightly different crust, involving more oil & less butter, and filled with a tomato & onion mixture.  Like most Albanian dishes (like most delicious food, actually), the pie is labor intensive.  But experienced Albanian cooks can make several in a few hours.  In the old country, they'd probably take the pie to the local baker & have it baked in a wood-fired oven.  IIRC, a great many kitchens did not and still do not have ovens.

Food gets people excited, and we tend to have strong opinions.  As I trolled the Internet, looking for recipes & pictures, I came upon this lively discussion.

One of the comments seems to refer to some recipes I found here.

I too found the recipes odd.  My family does not put cinnamon in baklava, for instance, and I never heard of anyone putting mint in the meatballs (qoftë).  Maybe someone somewhere confused mint with parsley, and the error traveled round the Internet, as often happens.

Of course, everyone expects the food to taste the way Mum or Gram made it or the way it tasted in Korcë or Tirana or Permet or Pogradec or wherever one's family came from.  But Albania is very mountainous and used to have vast stretches of swampland.  Villages tended to be isolated.  Thus, even though it's a small country with a small population, there's tremendous variety in the cuisine and in the way any one dish is prepared.  I have a tattered cookbook put together decades ago by the local church.  It has three different methods for making the Lakror/Byrek crust--and the various members of my family who make it not only don't make it any of these ways, but do it differently from one another.  And equally deliciously in their separate ways, by the way.

If you'd like another fine example of Albanian Heart Punch Execution Cooking, check out perpeq.

I leave you with a dish my mother makes at holidays, a sweet stuffing called Drop (the o is a longish one, like the o in adore).  I have clear memories of breaking up the stale bread for my grandmother, who was very particular about the kind of bread and the size pieces it had to be.  She never used or wrote a recipe.  Neither does my mother.  This one comes from a church cookbook, and I think it may be a good starting point:

2 loaves day old bread
1-1/2 cups butter
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts
sugar (Mum adds secret sweet ingredients she won’t reveal even to her children)

Break bread into small pieces.  Melt butter in large pot.  Add bread and cook until golden brown.  Add raisins, nuts, and sugar.  Serve with turkey or chicken.  Note:  For more flavor, add two tablespoons of turkey or chicken drippings.

Since I haven't a holiday book to give away, I'll let the winning commenter choose a Loretta Chase book from those I have available.

Happy Holidays!

Yes, Virginia, there is a chicken

From Loretta:

Christine wins a signed copy of Lord of Scoundrels because I thought her question would be fun to look into:
<<Well, I don't know if it is a suggestion or not, but  am always curious about where inspiration comes from.  Does it come from music, or out of the blue?
Also, my sister mentioned that chicken was not eaten until perhaps Victorian times.  Now while I don't remember meals in general being mentioned in many books, but I'm certain I've seen chicken consumed in books - or maybe it was geese (surely chicken was eaten earlier than 100 or so years ago).  Don't know that that would make a good blog though.>>

I don’t know about the other Wenches but my inspiration comes from a desire to maintain a roof over my head and eat regular meals...which leads nicely to food, always an excellent subject for the blog.

Christine, I’d love to know where your sister got this idea.  Chicken has been around and has appeared on dining tables for centuries.

I consulted Reay Tannahill’s Food in History and found the following: (p. 38):  “The great Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro--at their peak between 2300BC and 1500BC....may even have begun on the domestication of the Indian jungle fowl, later to become the world’s ‘chicken.” 

On p. 88 Tannahill refers to an Apician (from an ancient Roman cookbook) recipe that “recommends saucing cold chicken with dill, mint, dates, vinegar, liquamen, oil, mustard, asafoetida and boiled-down grape juice.”  Liquamen, according to the OED, is “the name of a kind of fish sauce used by the ancient Romans.”  However, there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether the Latin of the recipe refers to chickens or guinea fowl.  AgTigress may wish to comment on this.

According to this book (p. 31) braised chicken is referred to in a third century BC poem “The Summons of the Soul.”

But on to Georgian and Regency times (18th & early 19th C).  From The Jane Austen Cookbook by Maggie Black & Dierdre Le Faye [my notes are in color in brackets]: 

“In July 1779 Miss Catherine Hutton dined with the Revd Mr Shuttleworth, the rector of Aston in Derbyshire” and here’s part of her account:  “At three o’clock we sat down to table, which was covered with salmon at top, fennel sauce to it, melted butter, lemon pickle and soy; at the bottom a loin of veal roasted; on one side kidney beans, on the other peas, and in the middle a hot pigeon pie with yolks of eggs in.  [This would be the first course, which might include five to twenty-five dishes].  To the kidney beans and peas succeeded ham and chickens, [second course--another five to twenty-five] and when everything was removed came a currant tart  [an intermediate dessert--one of these might be served after first course, as well]....After dinner we had water to wash [ in finger-bowls], and when the cloth was taken away, [the table cloth was removed and another cloth or the bare table lay beneath], gooseberries, currants and melon, wines and cyder” [for the dessert course].

Food & dining is an inexhaustible subject--not to mention fraught with peril, as is usually the case with historical matters.  Other sources explain the courses differently, for instance.  So I’ll limit myself to a couple of notes.  At this time, people dined à la Française:  The numerous dishes for the course were set on the table all at once.  You’d help yourself from the side dishes nearby.  If you wanted something from another part of the table, you’d have to ask for it or, if there were plenty of servants, you'd send one to fetch it for you.

Miss Hutton’s is one type of meal served to a certain group of people.  We need to keep in mind that what (not to mention what time) people ate depended on their class and how fashionable they were.

Still, lest we assume that the humble chicken was not presented to grander guests, here’s what Prince William of Gloucester saw when he sat down to dinner with the Dean of Canterbury on 25 August 1798:  “Fricando of veal, chickens, curry of rabbits soup, open tart syllabub, macaroni, baskets of pastry, salmon trout, soles, vegetable pudding, muffin pudding, three sweetbreads-larded, peas, potatoes, goose, raised giblet pie, ham, preserve of olives, haunch of venison, raised jelly, buttered lobster, custards.”

According to the 97-item menu reproduced in J.B. Priestley’s The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, a dinner given by the Prince Regent in 1817 included La fricassee de poulets à l’Italienne; Les poulets à la reine, à la Chevry; Les petits poulets à l’Indienne; and Les poulets gras bardés.”

Another note:  While the wealthy had their greenhouses for growing exotic or tender fruits and vegetables, food generally tended to be locally produced and seasonable, as The Jane Austen Cookbook notes (p. 16.):  “Nearly all housewives in the country kept their own poultry yard, which would yield the eggs and meat from turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, guinea-fowl and perhaps some hand-reared pheasants.”

The illustration of a cottager feeding poultry is from W.H. Pyne’s Picturesque Views of Rural Occupations in Early Nineteenth Century England.  The first version of this book was published in 1808.

  So, yes, Virginia, there is a chicken, well before Queen Victoria's time.

These are Rhode Island Reds, which belonged to a friend of mine.  The chickens above are historically accurate poultry from Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA.

Ask a question or make a comment and you might win a copy of Lord of Scoundrels.   It's the holiday season, after all.

Dressing Jessica Trent

From Loretta:

I’m in the middle of revisions & have caught a cold, so I guess we can forget about this blog being deep and meaningful.

Today we’re taking a short look at weird clothes in LORD OF SCOUNDRELS, my longest running production.  I wrote this book well over a decade ago, and apparently did a good job.  It won a Romance Writers of America Rita award, and readers continue to buy it and continue to let me know--either in their emails or via polls---that it’s one of their favorites.  You can expect to hear more about it in the coming months, here and elsewhere.

Here it is in its beautiful new cover from Avon.  You can get the real thing in December from your favorite bookstore.

What you won’t be able to find easily (or nearly so cheaply) is the hardcover version.  It had a brief life, a small print run, and has now fallen into the hard-to-find-and-expensive category.  I had only two hardcover copies myself. 

This brings me to my short Public Service Announcement:  I’ve autographed one of these hardcovers and donated it to the All About Romance Auction for the benefit of Hands On New Orleans.  The auction began 15 October.  There’s still plenty of time to bid on it as well as on some special editions and sets of other books--a chance to get a rare edition while contributing to a worthy cause.

Back to our regularly-scheduled blogging.  I know you understand the essentials about Regency-era clothing because Kalen Hughes explained here recently what the hero wore, and what the heroine wore.

But as we discussed briefly in the comments, by the late 1820s women’s attire became very...entertaining.  Here is the picture that can save me a thousand words.

Lord Dain, my hero, does not fail to notice the weird stuff women are wearing.  This is from his first encounter with the heroine Jessica Trent, in an antique shop:

“All Dain could ascertain was that the female wore a blue overgarment of some sort and one of the hideously overdecorated bonnets currently in fashion.”

Later, he watches her leave a party in the small hours of morning:

“She was not wearing a ridiculous bonnet but a lunatic hair arrangement even more ludicrous.  Shiny knots and coils sprouted from the top of her head, and pearls and plumes waved from the knots and coils.”  (These delicious illustrations are from C. Willett Cunnington's English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.)

The two colored plates below come from The Costumer's Manifesto site.  For more, look here.
Lord Dain's gaze moves downward:  “The oversize ballooning sleeves of her silver-blue gown didn’t even have  shoulders.  They started about halfway to her elbows, primly covering everything from there down--and leaving what should have been concealed brazenly exposed to the view of every slavering hound in Paris.”

Later in the story, Jessica dares him to box with her.  This heroine knows the ways of men.  She understands the principles of fisticuffs.  But she is no tomboy by any stretch of the imagination:

“She was wearing an immense leghorn hat, with flowers and satin ribbons sprouting from the top.  It was tied under her left ear in an enormous bow.  The carriage dress was the usual fashionable insanity of flounces and lace and overblown sleeves....He could not remember when he’d seen anything so ludicrous as this silly bit of femininity gravely poised upon a stone in approved boxing stance.” (The carriage dress at left is from Ackermann's Costume Plates: Women's Fashion in England, 1818-1828, edited by Stella Blum)

Underneath, women of the time are all wearing pretty much the same thing, and this half-undressed view would be one of Dain's favorite views of Jessica (although she'd have him or her maid doing the undoing).  Like many other men, the Marquess of Dain doesn't understand women's fashion and really just wants to see them wearing as little clothing as possible.

Not all of my heroines are fashion plates.  Some are the exact opposite:  They don’t care about their clothes or they use clothing as armor.  But Jessica Trent and my new heroine Francesca Bonnard (of YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS) are fashion mavens.  The way they dress, to a great extent, tells us who they are, in the same way that other heroines’ simpler or less fashionable attire expresses something about them.

I think most of us identify with certain heroines' attitudes toward their attire.  I know I do.  I'm more the Jessica Trent-Francesca Bonnard kind of girl, though it's only in my dreams.  I don't have their bank accounts.  What about you?  Which heroine's style of dress do you most strongly relate to?   Is the dress important?  Or do you barely notice how the author garbs her characters?

Scandalous Preview

From Loretta:

In response to popular demand (two readers), today’s blog is about YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, my almost-somewhat finished Work in Progress.  As most of you are aware, we are required to deliver our manuscripts anywhere from six to twelve or more months before publication.  My book’s scheduled for June 2008.  Before that, there will be considerable back-and-forth with editors.  This means a great deal may change.  Even names.  So I’m going to hold off on excerpts for a couple of months.

YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS is the second in my Fallen Women series, which started with NOT QUITE A LADY--which is also the fourth book in the Carsington brothers series.  I think each book should serve as many purposes as possible, considering how much time I spend writing them when I could be watching movies, say, or traveling around the world or shopping for clothes.

Though surnames might change, the hero and heroine’s first names are a pretty safe bet to stay.  Francesca, an English divorcée with very expensive taste in jewelry and appalling taste in husbands (thus the “divorcée”), has come to Venice, the Sin City of her day.  Her day is 1820.  We meet her in September and if all remains the same, the events of the tale will take a little over a week.

By the time of my story, Lord Byron, who lived in Venice from November 1816 to December 1819, has gone on to Ravenna and his affair with the Countess Guiccioli, after numerous other affairs and one-night or one-hour or fifteen-minute stands.  Lord Byron did a lot of smooching in Venice, but I am not sure he out-smooched Casanova.  I would have liked to mention the latter in YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, but his memoirs weren’t published until decades after the time of my story.  Byron is one of my sources--which at this moment far surpass the number of canals in Venice in 1863.

For those of you who, as I did, lack a clear picture of how strange and wonderful this place is, here it is, from the viewpoint of deities and satellites.

Venice lies in the middle of a swampy lagoon.  For centuries, it was accessible from the mainland--with difficulty and only by the experienced--only by water.  According to an 1863 Baedeker’s “The 15,000 houses and palaces of Venice are situated on three large and 114 small islands formed by 147 canals , connected by 378 bridges (most of them of stone) and altogether about 7 M (miles) in circumference.”  The number of houses and canals has changed over time.  Still, Byron would easily recognize the city today.  He might hesitate to swim in the canals, though.

Following a period of time living with a merchant and his wife (with whom the poet had a tempestuous affair, surprise, surprise) Byron moved into the Palazzo Mocenigo, which is on the Grand Canal, the big S-shaped waterway that divides the city.  My heroine Francesca lives on a rio, one of the many other canals.  Her house is the Palazzo Neroni, named in honor of a character in Trollope’s BARCHESTER TOWERS.

  Across the canal from her is the fictional Ca’ Munetti.  Ca’ is Venetian shorthand for casa, which is what all the palaces except the Ducal Palace were called before the fall of the Republic.  After 1797 and Napoleon’s arrival (and ransacking), though, the restriction on using the term palazzo was lifted.  This is why you will come across a building listed in one place as the Ca’ Rezzonico and in another as the Palazzo Rezzonico.  I stole the name “Munetti” from Byron’s friend Hobhouse's misspelling of somebody or other.  For those of you curious how authors come up with fictional names, this is one of my highly sophisticated methods.

Back to my tale.  In the great tradition of storytelling, A Stranger Comes to Town--and moves into the place across the canal.  The stranger is my hero, James, who is named after James Bond because he, too, is a government agent, albeit a very cranky one on account of (a) he’s been there done that with being Secret Agent Man and (b) he wants to be in England and (c) the other spies are too incompetent to figure out how to get a bunch of Highly Significant letters from a girl--Francesca--thus sticking him with a dumb job in Venice, wettest city in the universe, when he could be in London, second wettest (or is it third?), meeting nice girls for a change, instead of adventuresses, assassins, and Fallen Women.

James is half English, half Italian, all blueblood, and he’s Trouble, a Very Bad Boy.  Really.  He showed promising signs of a criminal career in his youth, before he was steered into legal criminality.  But Francesca is a Very Bad Girl.  It’s a match made, not in heaven, but in Venice, which in many people’s opinion is the next best thing.

Since I could go on endlessly about, say, the prisons on the eastern end of the Bridge of Sighs--or the challenges of getting the Italian words right and who I’m pestering for information--or what a gondola looked like in 1820--I’m going to do the sensible thing and leave it to you to tell me what you’d like to know.

Apart from excerpts (they’ll be coming), what else do you like to learn from an author about a book pre-publication?  Do you like bits of history to help set the stage?  Do you want more about the writing process:  picking names, doing research, dreaming up stuff?  More about characters?   Let me know, and I’ll try to accommodate you either today or in the coming months.