To Rescue a Rogue (38 page)

T
he dinner table was set up in the marble hall of Marlowe, the heart of the chilly house. As Nicholas Delaney had remarked, “I doubt it has a soul.”

Despite being enormous, much of Marlowe was for show. Simon and Jancy had struggled to house ten couples and their children, for all the children were present from the oldest—Bastian Rossiter, Leander's stepson, to the newest—Nicholas's Francis.

For this dinner, however, the children were settled in their quarters with servants and the ten couples sat around the table.

The round table. That had been Dare's mischievous idea and Simon's doing. At first seeing it, Nicholas had laughed. “I told you and told you we weren't King Arthur's knights, merely Rogues.”

“Then you shouldn't have chosen twelve of us,” Lucien said. “We're either King Arthur's knights or the apostles.”

Now, with the summer sun still shining in through the glass cupola, joining with dozens of candles to drive away any evil spirits, they talked and laughed and remembered. Ten men's memories went back to boyhood, but ten women's memories went back as far because of tales their husbands had told them. And some of these women had been deeply involved in the dark adventures that had finally ended.

Mara had completed her string of beads and purchased one for each couple, which she now passed around. In the center were the two pearls for the missing Rogues. On either side sat the topaz for Dare and the garnet for Simon. Completing the string were jasper, jade, blue agate, malachite, bloodstone, and coral. For the last two Mara had chosen moss agate for Con, a solid country man, and lapis lazuli for Lucien.

Mara was wearing a parure of faceted topaz, which had been Dare's wedding gift to her.

Nicholas rose to propose a toast. “There is no greater blessing than friendship, in life and, especially,” he said to his wife, “in marriage. We have weathered storms and sailed between gorgons and krakens, and found at last smooth water and steady winds. May it remain so.”

Everyone raised a glass to the toast, but Dare said, “For some reason, I doubt that. You gathered us together at school because we were all destined for trouble, and you were right.”

“I was, wasn't I?” Nicholas said. “Sometimes I feel like Cassandra. But I brought in Con for stability, and you for lightheartedness, and neither of you let me down.”

“Ballast and sails?” Dare asked. “We won't wallow in the doldrums, then. Set sail for the future, and let krakens and gorgons beware!”

W
riting a romance about a hero addicted to opium wasn't easy. I put Dare in this position for my own plot convenience, however, so I had to get him out of it.

I didn't know how this would happen or who his beloved would be until I wrote
The Rogue's Return
. Up till then I knew nothing about Simon St. Bride other than his name and that he'd been in Canada during the rest of the Company of Rogues books. As his story unfolded, however, Simon's family and his home, Brideswell, became important aspects of the book. Then Mara emerged, and without knowing much about her, I knew she was destined for Dare.

(Destined For Dare. That would have made a title, wouldn't it? It was so very hard to resist titles with Dare in them. Dare to Love. Dare to Believe. I was strong.)

I still wasn't sure how to approach Dare's story, however. It didn't feel right to start with the focus on him and his addiction. It didn't feel right for Mara to be simply a ministering angel. Then the opening scene popped into my head. There was Mara in trouble and Dare to the rescue. Even better, Mara's trouble was completely her own fault and an aspect of that devil's hair that caused most of Simon's problems. Without knowing anything else about how the book would develop, I knew I had Dare's story.

It may surprise you—it certainly surprises me whenever I think about it—but I set very little of my Regency fiction in London. I tend to use country houses with only dips into London's ton society. (“Ton” comes from
bon ton
, meaning “good tone” in French, which equates to “the elegant people.” As you see in the book, I've become fond of another term found in Regency documents—the haut volle´e—the high-flyers.)

I've been writing Regency settings for decades now, so balls, routs, Bond Street, and Almack's are familiar, but Dare was avoiding the haut volle´e, so where could he and Mara go? To all the places tourists back then went.

There are records left by people who visited London and talked of the sights. One of them was a source I'd already used for
The Rogue's Return
—
The Ridout Letters
. One of the Canadian Ridout sons went to London and wrote detailed letters home.

There's also a book called
A Visit To London
, written in 1817. It's for children and, like so many sources, doesn't give all the details I'd like, but it was still a useful glimpse into the time of my book. For example, the children go to the Tower of London but the book uses that mostly as an opportunity for lessons on history and on animals of the world.

But how tempting to slide in the Juvenile Library, where little Maria gasps in delight over books called
Mental Improvement
and
Rambles Through the Fields of Nature.

The titles Mara buys are real. Yes,
Husband Hunters!!!
—three exclamation marks and all—was a new novel in 1817. Alongside Jane Austen, who was unfortunately to die later that year, readers had a wide choice of romance novels, usually with dramatic and gothic story lines.
The Ghastly Ghoul of Castle Cruel
might even find a publisher if Dare and Mara ever finish it.

But back to opium. The history of opium, its uses and abuses, is fascinating and complex. I recommend
Opium, a history
by Martin Booth for an overview. I also read many personal accounts of the struggle with the drug at around the time of this book including Thomas de Quincey's famous
Confessions of an Opium Eater,
which gives less useful information than you might expect. The extremes and incoherence are probably evidence of his extremely high dosage.

I also benefited from e-mail contact with someone who has gone through withdrawal from a modern drug derived from opium. I thank him.

At the time of this novel, opium hadn't been refined into morphine, codeine, heroin, etc. It came as a resin scraped off the seed pods of poppies and was usually taken as laudanum—that is dissolved in alcohol along with flavorings and sugar.

It's important to remember that in 1817 opium was as legal and cheap as aspirin, and thought of in much the same way. Most houses would have some on hand to ease pain, soothe distress, and even to calm a fretful baby.

People could buy the paste themselves and make up medicines, or they could buy some type of laudanum from a druggist. (The words chemist and druggist are both used in the period. These days the British get their prescriptions from a chemist and the North Americans from a drugstore. An example of how language splits.)

This accessibility made life both easier and more difficult for the addict. There was no need to seek out criminals to get a fix, or to do without food to afford the drug. On the other hand, there was little to dissuade a person from continuing to take it except that an addict tended to take more and more and reach a point where both mind and body began to fall apart.

Few people back then seem to have become addicted for “kicks.” Some did, like Nicholas, seek the supposed mental brightness of the drug, but most took it for pain at a time when there was nothing else that could help. If the source of the pain was chronic, they kept taking it for years, possibly in larger and larger doses to get relief, and thus they became trapped, because opium changes the body. Stopping it wasn't simply a matter of willpower because the body, especially the internal organs, could no longer operate properly without it. The addict who went “cold turkey” (not a Regency term) might die. They would certainly endure extreme agony of mind and body.

Nowadays there are drugs to help the process, but in Dare's time, the only hope was to slowly wean the body off opium until the point was reached where it could be stopped entirely without death.

Even so, the end stage was horrible and it was often all for nothing. If the addict had started to take opium for chronic pain, the cause of pain could still be there. If they'd taken it for mental stress, their fragile minds would still torment them. Many experts did believe that it was wiser to use willpower to take a low maintenance dose of opium than endure the torment and hazard of withdrawal. Remember, it wasn't illegal or expensive.

What about Feng Ruyuan? There are many stories about people from China and other Oriental countries having greater understanding of the way of the drug, so I used that to ease Dare's road. It seemed likely that Nicholas would know such a person, even though China was mostly a closed-off country at the time.

In the mysterious way of creativity, in the middle of writing this book, I received an e-mail from a fan in China who had come across one of my books. She was very helpful in pinning down who this man I was seeing might be and giving him an appropriate name.

As for Brideswell, there I drew on another mystical tradition—that of sacred spaces in Europe. It seemed to me that a place that made such a deep impression on people's minds had to have some special vibes.

I enjoyed a visit to England to refresh my memory of London and to explore Lincolnshire. You'll find photographs on my Web site, and also contemporary pictures of places like Dubourg's Cork Exhibit. I invent many little details in my books—for example, Great Charles Street is made up because real people were living in the houses of the real streets and I didn't want to disturb them—but I stick to reality as much as I can.

I found a marvelous book called
The Shows of London
by Richard B. Altick, which tempted me to send Dare and Mara to a whole range of amusements. They never did get to explore Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, or to inspect Napoleon's carriage, which was still riotously popular. They could have marveled at the huge panoramas of famous places around the world, especially one set up in the circular Rotunda in Leicester Square. There were waxworks and effigies and enormous paintings of things like famous battles. And what about the Panharmonicon that reproduced the effect of a brass band, and for which Beethoven composed a piece?

But writing a novel is so much about what to include and what to leave out. I manage not to dump all my research into the story by writing these author notes.

I enjoy hearing from readers. Contact details are on my Web site, www.jobev.com. Or you can write to me c/o Margaret Ruley, The Rotrosen Agency, 318 East Fifty-first Street, New York, NY 10022. I appreciate a SASE if you would like a reply. I have a newsletter list that gets a monthly e-mail (most of the time) and I send out a postal newsletter once a year.

And last, no, this isn't the end of the Rogues. The Rogues' World will continue and I'm already working on a story about Dare's sister, Thea. You see, she had a strange encounter at the ball.

Having these characters come to life for me is so much fun.

All best wishes,
Jo