Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
A Right Honorable Gentleman
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Author’s Note
When I first had the idea for this book, I knew I wanted Judith’s father to have been convicted of something in the House of Lords. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how that would be possible.
Trials in the House of Lords were usually a complete farce. The closest trial in time to Judith’s father was the Earl of Cardigan’s trial in 1841 for dueling. To call that trial a complete sham would be stretching things. Basically, the Earl of Cardigan was seen dueling. There was no question he was involved in a duel.
The indictment, however, stated that he was dueling with Harvey Garnet Phipps Tuckett, while the evidence presented at trial called the man Captain Harvey Tuckett. The House of Lords unanimously agreed that there wasn’t evidence to support the indictment (!!) (if you know anything at all about the standards for when evidence supports an indictment, you are likely also thinking !!!!) because how was anyone to know that Captain Harvey Tuckett was the same person as Harvey Garnet Phipps Tuckett?
In the meantime, the prosecutor for the Crown was ripping his hair out and not so gently suggesting that it was allowable to draw reasonable inferences. Needless to say, the history of trial in the House of Lords is one where lords are given every benefit of every unreasonable doubt. The only exceptions were cases of treason, and those where someone had done something that threatened noble prerogatives.
I suspect, given the amount of money that was being made on the opium trade, that Judith’s father would have really been convicted.
In case you’re wondering why Anthony still has a title, when his father was convicted of treason, by the time 1866 came around, the concept known as “corruption of the blood” no longer existed. Corruption of the blood sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.
The idea behind the concept is this: For the life of the current earl, the earldom belongs to the earl. Once he dies, it belongs to that earl’s eldest son, and so on and so on. So, in a sense (and if you want to know exactly what that sense is, you can go to law school and learn about future interests, although I really don’t advise it purely to satisfy a question of curiosity), an earldom is property that you can chop up in time: the earl owns it only for this life, and the remainder belongs to his sons. Corruption of the blood is a legal concept that says that once a person has committed a sufficiently foul crime, he can lose not only his property, but can extinguish the remainder that otherwise would have gone to his son.
It no longer existed as of 1866.
For those wondering why Anthony wasn’t tried in the House of Lords, it was because his father was still alive. Trials in the House of Lords took longer—they had to give the Lords time to assemble. While Anthony had a courtesy title of viscount, the courtesy title did not give him the right to trial in the Lords. So when the evidence came out, Anthony would have been tried and convicted first. Back then, trials happened quickly.
By the time 1858 rolled around, a sentence of transportation didn’t automatically mean a trip to Australia. In fact, the law was changed in 1857 to reflect what was a growing reality: most convicts sentenced to transportation served their entire sentences in England. The former penal colonies were increasingly settled by people who had no interest in taking more convicts, and many of the former ships sat in the Thames (or elsewhere) and housed convicts like massive floating prisons.
If prisoners were chosen to be actually transported at random, the chances that Anthony would have been shipped to Australia would have been very small. Prisoners, however, weren’t chosen at random, and so I imagine that Anthony would have been whisked from trial to transportation.
There weren’t that many convict ships to begin with, so I’ve had to make a few alterations from the historical record. The only ship that made the convict run to Western Australia in the fall of 1858 was the Edwin Fox. I’ve added a different, fictional ship—one that would have sailed in November of 1858 from Plymouth, headed for Fremantle. This was somewhat late in the season for a voyage to Australia; going that late risked running into bad weather.
I’m not going to say too much about the opium wars, because…well, we’ll see them again. I will say that the event that technically precipitated the second opium war was basically one hundred percent pretext. Britain had been trying (and failing) to legalize the opium trade by diplomatic means. China seized a ship that was maybe British. I say “maybe British” because one, the Chinese seized it because it was on a list of pirate ships, and two, its registration as a British ship was expired at the time it was seized. Also, three, of the twelve workers on board the ship, all were Chinese.
Britain demanded that the ship and all its workers be released. The Chinese government agreed to release nine of them, but initially insisted on keeping three who were pirates. Britain refused to accept custody of the nine sailors, and in retaliation, seized a ship that they believed was owned by the Chinese government. (It wasn’t.) Blustering ensued, with the end result that China released the entire crew, but didn’t provide the full apology that Britain wanted, and so British forces attacked. Thus started the second opium war.
Nobody would have gone to war over this incident unless they really, really wanted to do so.
More details can be found in The Opium Wars by W. Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello.
There are three other things I should mention briefly about events in this book. First, when Christian describes the revenge he gets on his classmates at Eton, he mentions that they board up a room. I didn’t invent this prank; I read about it in a volume of Legends of Caltech many years ago. Second, you may be wondering how Theresa’s Kindly Elf Bread works. The process is called no-knead bread, and yes, it really doesn’t require kneading. Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast describes this in detail, or you can just read this New York Times recipe: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread.
Finally, that thing about literally holding tongues… I didn’t invent that. I’m not sure which of my family members did (although my suspicion falls on my older brother) but I learned at a very early age to never stick out my tongue if anyone had a towel in their hand. A valuable life lesson, I’m sure.
One last super-tiny thing, which I mention only to put a sticky note on this discussion for later author’s notes.
In The Brothers Sinister series, I mentioned in the author’s note for the first book that I was making a few tiny changes to the history of science. And, well, yeah, if you know what happened, sorry not sorry. At this point I’ve pretty much made it canon that the Brothers Sinister universe diverged strongly from ours—so much so that in The Brothers Sinister universe, women obtained the right to vote in 1895. (If you haven’t read the crossover short story that establishes this, Adam Reynolds of Cyclone Technologies time-travels back to meet Frederica Marshall-Clark. It’s on my website here.)
With that as background, I point out six tiny little words in this book. They occur when Christian is discussing the men on Anthony’s List with Mr. Lawrence. Those words are: Lord Palmerston, deceased some months past.
You should not pay attention to these words. Yes, Lord Palmerston is a real person. Yes, he was the Foreign Secretary during the First Opium War and the Prime Minister of England during the second. But Lord Palmerston really did die of a fever in 1865, less than a year before this book starts. So it’s surely just a coincidence that he’s on Anthony’s list and happens to be dead.
If it weren’t a coincidence, the entire political landscape of the Worth Saga universe might be up for grabs. Would I do that to you?
Acknowledgments
This was a really hard book to get through. Thank you to all the numerous people wh
o helped me do so—my geniuses, Tessa, Carey, Brenna, Leigh, who listened to me talk (complain) about this book and told me it was too complicated and didn’t laugh too hard when I said I would make it work, even though they knew I would admit they were right four months later. All the Diasporans who heard me claim that this would be the month I would finish this book…thank you for pretending to believe me. Northwest Pixies, thank you for your support and our yearly retreat, where I began to work on this. Peeners, thanks for letting me vent. And special thanks to my beautiful raptors, Alisha, Bree, Rebekah, Alyssa, and Mala, who remind me daily that faces are high in protein. I would never have made it through this book without all of you to cheer me on. Mr. Milan, Pele, and Silver were always supportive. Okay, Silver was not actually supportive, but since he is about fifteen cats’ worth of cat, he was at least useful.
The initial version of the acknowledgment referred to my chickens as useless. Then they sustained an attack by the neighbors’ dogs, and now I’m worried that life is imitating chicken-killing art. So I apologize for that, chickens. Take your time with the eggs. No rush.
Thank you to Lindsey Faber for pushing me as hard as I wanted to be pushed, Martha Trachtenberg for putting up with basically infinite delays, Rawles Lumumba. Finally, thanks for swift, amazing work from Wendy Chan, the Passionate Proofreader, and Sadye Scott-Hainchek at The Fussy Librarian. Thanks also to Kristin Nelson, Lori Bennett, and everyone at NLA for their support.
Finally, Melissa, thank you for calmly, sweetly prodding me to do everything I need to do, even when it takes me something like three months to do it. Also, you may have noticed that one time we took a walk and saw geese, and I started narrating goose thoughts as Bill and Fred? That kind of turned into a thing. So.
As those of you who have been reading my books for a while may have noticed, this one took a long time to write. (A really long time.) I started in August of 2014 and here we are. I’m not a particularly speedy writer, and even for me, this book was a doozy. I’m sorry. Thank you so much for your patience, and I hope the wait was worth it.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Once Upon a Marquess: © 2015 by Courtney Milan.
Cover design © Courtney Milan.
Cover photographs © SunKids | shutterstock.com.
Digital Edition 1.0
All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
After the Epilogue
Thanks
Her Every Wish: Excerpt
After the Wedding: Excerpt
Other Books by Courtney Milan
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Courtney Milan, Once Upon a Marquess
(Series: The Worth Saga # 1)
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