The Heiress Effect (50 page)

I’ve done my best to make sure that the timing
of this story parallels the history of the Reform Act of 1867,
which extended the franchise to many (but not all) working-class
men in 1867.

The gathering I describe in Hyde Park really
did have more than a hundred thousand people attending, and it
really did freak out the government—resulting in a much more
liberal extension of the franchise than had been previously
contemplated. If you’d like to read a surprisingly sarcastic
newspaper account of that event from
The Daily News
of May
7, 1867, I’ve reproduced it on my website at:

http://www.courtneymilan.com/heiresseffect-dailynews.php.

The paper says nothing about a group of women
at the park, but it
does
mention a woman in a sailor hat who
was said to “harangue” the crowds about equal rights for all. I
suspect that any woman who spoke loud enough to be heard in that
large a crowd would have been said to “harangue,” and so I’ve
assumed that she was as reasonable as the men.

Today we would understand that Emily has
epilepsy with partial seizures. At the time, however, epilepsy was
very poorly understood. Doctor Russell (who Emily refers to in the
book as one of the physicians who treated her) was perhaps the one
who best understood the disease; he was one of the first to employ
the “numerical method” to epilepsy.

You can read his book on the subject here:
http://bit.ly/150aVdY.

In any event, Russell, advanced as he was,
believed that it wasn’t epilepsy unless there was a lapse of
consciousness; hence the reason why Emily claims that her fits are
not epilepsy.

If you’re ever feeling like you need to be
more grateful for modern medicine, consider perusing the above book
for a list of treatments that were tried on epileptics. All of the
“treatments” that Emily experienced in this book were ones that I
found mentioned in various medical texts of around this period.

A brief note on the timing of Anjan’s
education: In the US today, it would be ridiculous to have someone
in school and studying for law examinations in January and then
practicing law in May, but it was perfectly possible then. When
Anjan says that he is “going out,” he means that he’s near the end
of his time at the University; the final year for students there
was not quite a full year. Anjan is studying for the Law Tripos, an
examination (or, rather, a set of grueling examinations that would
determine whether a student graduated with honors, and what honors
those were) that would have been delivered around Easter. Anjan
would have to return to Cambridge for commencement, but that was
just a formality.

More importantly, he wouldn’t have needed a
degree to be admitted to the bar. The requirements for bar
admission varied, depending upon which bar you were planning to
join, but usually required that you get some current members of the
bar to vouch for your character, that you passed a basic
examination, and that you “kept terms” with the Inn of Court—in
other words, you had dinner with a bunch of barristers a number of
times. In many cases, you could substitute two years’ of Oxbridge
education for the part where you ate dinners. Anjan, being a
careful planner, would have knocked off the requirements for the
bar sometime in the year before.

In terms of trying to accurately portray
Anjan’s experience, I read a handful of accounts written by Indian
students who studied in Britain in the mid-to-late nineteenth
century and I’ve tried to do my best to extrapolate what Anjan’s
life would have been like. The most famous of those accounts is
obviously Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. But I also drew heavily
on a description of life at Cambridge written by S. Satthianadhan,
who would have attended Cambridge around the time that my fictional
Anjan Bhattacharya would have done so.

Satthianadhan never talked about racism
directly, but there were a handful of times when it felt as if he
was giving advice out of the corner of his mouth. His praise for
the English was over the top, almost as a warning. One passage in
particular said (and I paraphrase), “The English might seem like
jerks, but that’s because they think they’re better than us.
Pretend that they’re right and they’ll be nice to you.”

I reproduced this passage on my tumblr, for
those who want to read it, at http://bit.ly/12j72Ch.

One way in which I’ve diverged from
historical usage is that at the time, Indians in England were often
referred to as “blacks.” I think that use would be unduly confusing
to modern, and particularly American, readers.

One last note about Anjan: Some people might
think it over-the-top to have the epilogue for this book mention
that Anjan was interested political office in 1874. But the first
Indian Member of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected in 1892
at the age of 67. In 1874, Anjan would have been 27—young enough
that if he started working toward that goal, by the time he was in
his mid-fifties, that barrier would already have been breached.

Finally, I need to echo what I said in the
Author’s Note for
The Duchess War:
This series effectively
rewrites the scientific history of evolution and genetics. While
Mendel’s experiments with pea plants were performed in 1830, their
import wasn’t understood until much later. In the book, I’ve
assumed that having Darwin and a prominent geneticist in the same
place and time would accelerate the pace of scientific
advancement.

I am deeply indebted to Robin Harders, Megan
Records, Rawles Lumumba, Keira Soleore, Leah Wohl-Pollak, Martha
Trachtenberg, and Libby Sternberg for various forms of editing and
copy-editing, and for putting up with me and my total inability to
deliver a book when I say I’m going to deliver it while still
handing me extraordinarily thoughtful remarks back in an
extraordinarily short period of time. I wouldn’t be able to produce
books like this without you all, and I’m deeply grateful for your
help.

Thanks also go to Kristin Nelson, my agent,
for her unstinting support, and to the rest of her agency staff for
all the many ways that they help: Angie Hodapp, Lori Bennett, Anita
Mumm, and Sara Megibow. I’d like to thank Melissa Jolly for the
support she’s given me. And finally, Rawles again, for everything
she’s done in the last few weeks to make my life easier.

Rose Lerner deserves a special thanks for a
breakfast in Seattle in January, where we were complaining
about…well, everything, including some of the limitations of the
subgenre. Anjan is the direct result of that conversation. Thanks,
Rose, for pushing me where I needed to be pushed. (If you like
historical romances and you didn’t get a chance to read Rose’s
books when they were available from Dorchester, they’re all going
to be reissued by Samhain Publishing, so keep watching.)

I’m indebted to Rozina Visram for her many
books documenting Asians in historical Britain. My sister Tami
helped with a few items of research by providing sooper sekrit
access to sources that I couldn’t get any other way. Sssh, don’t
tell her university.

There are also my friends, without whom I
would have collapsed into a spineless puddle somewhere around month
two of this book. Tessa Dare, Leigh LaValle, and Carey Baldwin gave
me friendship above and beyond the call of duty, the Loop that Must
Not be Named let me complain when I needed to complain and made me
write when I needed to write. There are dozens of other people who
have answered questions, provided comfort, and otherwise just been
awesome on the course of this journey, spread out over publishing
loops and individual e-mails: Kris (both Kris+ and Kris 1/a),
Delilah, Rachel, Elisabeth, Elizabeth, Heather, Marie, Tina, Joan,
Becky… at this point, I’m realizing that listing people by name is
a futile endeavor. If I forgot you, you’re awesome and I suck.

And then there is you. You’re last but you’re
never least. Thank you for reading this book. Thank you for telling
people about my books, for sharing them with friends. Thank you for
reading them silently and enjoying them. Thank you for everything
you’ve done, because without you, there wouldn’t be any books at
all.