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 I’m
delighted to inform you, gentle readers, that my February
Regency historical, SOCIETY’S
MOST DISREPUTABLE GENTLEMAN, is now available! This is
the story of Greville Anders, brother of Joanna Anders Merrill,
the heroine of FROM
WAIF TO GENTLEMAN’S WIFE, and distant cousin of
Nicholas Stanhope, Marquess of Englemere, hero of THE
WEDDING GAMBLE.
Greville poses quite a temptation to heroine Amanda Neville.
She should offer her father’s unusual guest no more
than simple politeness; after all, he’s merely a younger
son with little wealth, no property—and has just served
aboard a Royal Navy warship as a common sailor! Still, dressed
in gentleman’s clothing rather than his tattered nautical
garb, the rascal is devilishly appealing.
Amused and piqued by Miss Neville’s coolness, Greville
figures there’s no harm in flirting with his host’s
beautiful daughter while he heals from battle wounds. After
all, her dream is to marry a man of high rank and become a
great political hostess, ruling the London Society he disdains.
Soon, she will depart for the city and they will never see
each other again.
Except that fate and love seem to have other plans…
DISREPUTABLE
is set along the Devon coast, which, like the Cornish coast,
was a hotbed of smuggling. One of heroine Amanda’s chief
worries is that her younger brother, who has been sent down
from Oxford, has involved himself in the trade as an antidote
to the boredom of being forced to remain in the country. The
local Devon chief of the trade is a “gentleman,”
but competing with him for control of the coast is a dangerous
Cornishman, “Black John” Kessel, who first appears
in THE
SMUGGLER AND THE SOCIETY BRIDE.
I became interested in smuggling while writing SMUGGLER,
my Regency Silk & Scandal miniseries book. I needed a
daring, rather disreputable-appearing hero who, naturally,
had good reasons for his illegal dealings. This followed the
pattern of the smugglers themselves, some of whom became local
folk heroes, but some of whom were truly cruel, evil, dangerous
men.
“Black John” is one of the latter, his character
a composite of several individuals described by a man who,
perhaps more than any other, is responsible for preserving
the tales and folklore about smuggling operations along the
Cornish and Devon coasts.
He seems at first a most unlikely person to have interested
himself in smuggling. Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker spent
40 years as vicar of the small church in Morwenstow. In addition
to tending parishioners, Reverend Hawker wrote books and poetry
about the legends of the Cornish coast, including “Song
of the Western Men,” which became the Cornwall’s
National Anthem. An eccentric who sometimes dressed in a claret
coat, blue fisherman’s jersey, sea-boots, a pink brimless
hat and a yellow poncho, he liked to work in a small hut he
constructed in the cliffs overlooking the sea. That structure
is now the National Trust’s smallest property.
From his pen we know about such characters as Cruel Coppinger,
a shipwrecked Dane who married a local girl before taking
over her wealth to fund his criminal operations. Coppinger
wasn’t above abusing his wife to extort money from her
mother, or coercing villagers to cooperate in moving his cargo
with the threat of beating, kidnapping or even murder if they
refused. Then there is the story of the “Witan Stone,”
a small crevasse beneath a rock into which the smuggler put
some gold to persuade the local revenue officer to look the
other way when he was landing his cargo. If the officer took
the gold, the smuggler knew that “the coast was clear”
for him to land his cargo.
I hope you’ll enjoy the echoes from
the legends of Reverend Hawker that appear in Greville’s
book!
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