She didn’t want to study animals, the way her mother did. No, she’d rather be a writer like her father. If she took off her spectacles, she could just see a hazy green lump on the horizon that was another island. This part of the ocean was full of them … island after island, all waiting to be visited. Waiting to be described by Miss Katie Wilde.
This particular island was pretty, but it didn’t have any residents other than sea turtles, wild goats, and birds. If she had her druthers, they’d be living on an island with people, so she could learn another language. Unfortunately, when her father settled into writing, he liked to find somewhere private.
You couldn’t get more private than an island with no name and no inhabitants.
With a sigh, she put her glasses back on and picked up her book. It was one of her favorites, written by an ancient fellow named Pliny. Pliny’s uncle had sailed right into a volcanic explosion, trying to save its victims.
Katie would have done exactly the same, except she wouldn’t have died in the attempt. She could tell that Pliny agreed with her; his uncle should have been more careful. She fell asleep dreaming of captaining her own ship, steering it (carefully) toward great deeds and even greater adventures.
A while later, a coconut fell beside her with such a thump that it sprayed her face with sand. Katie sat bolt upright, mouth open in shock, which meant that sand from yet another “falling” coconut made her cough and spit.
Sweetpea fled, and Katie was forced to jump to her feet and chase Ben and Shaw round the island, shrieking so loudly that it woke up their parents.
They were sleeping in the shaded platform house whose timbers traveled from place to place in the hold of the Lindow, the huge ship designed and built to the highest specifications and with no expense spared. A ship that Lord Wilde had described in his last book as a corner of England that floated from place to place.
At the moment, the king and queen of that small corner of England were lying in a bed covered with snowy-white linen sheets. Hearing shrieks, Alaric raised his head just long enough to discern that the sounds indicated happy rage. “Let’s do that again,” he said, the suggestion rumbling from his chest.
Willa was sprawled on top of him, breathless, her body glistening with sweat, her hair spread across his chest like tangled silk.
“Too tired,” she mumbled.
That made him laugh. Willa was never tired. A new journey, a new island, a new adventure—all of it energized her just as much as it did him.
Alaric could never have imagined a life like this. He had been more than willing to live in England, if that was what Willa wanted. He would have been happy there. He would have helped with his father’s estate, and Lord Wilde would have ceased to write books.
But he was so damned lucky. His arms tightened around Willa. He was in love with his fascinating, gorgeous wife, with his nimble-minded, curious children … with his life.
Wilde in Love, indeed.
A Note About Bogs, Egyptian Ducks, and Melodramatic Plays
When I began the Wilde series, I decided to place it in a castle far from London. My discovery of Lindow Moss was one of the most delightful parts of my research. Although Lindow Castle doesn’t exist, the Moss is a real bog found in Cheshire—a stretch of peaty wetlands, sometimes known as a quagmire, that was originally 1,500 acres wide. In a bog, peat, made from compressed mosses and grasses, forms a floating crust, an undulating blanket, that looks solid, but isn’t. A traveler might fall through into rushing water below, or be mired in spongy muck and unable to climb out.
No matter how arcane a bog may seem to urban readers, in the Georgian period, Egyptian hieroglyphs were even more mysterious. The supposition that the hieroglyph of a duck meant “son” is true to the period. As was later understood (and Willa suggests), the hieroglyph actually stands for the sound of the main consonants of the Egyptian word for “duck”; yet without context, that hieroglyph can also mean “son,” a word formed by those consonants.
Perhaps you noticed that North is always pocketing the red ball when he plays billiards. Billiards dates back to the 1500s, when it evolved out of a lawn game akin to croquet. By the Georgian period, it was wildly popular. The game itself was still in transition; at this point, two players each have a white ball. They hope to cannon off the opponent’s ball and the red ball in one shot.
I turned from history to literature when it came to fashioning my mad missionary’s daughter, Prudence. As a Shakespeare professor, I’ve spent years teaching portrayals of Puritans and deranged lovers; here I am particularly indebted to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Faire and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The actor Fitzball appears as a thank-you to the playwright Edward Fitzball, who provided versions of the mother’s lines in Wilde in Love.
I owe another literary debt to Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price. Sweetpea is a nod to Homer’s pet skunk Aroma, who travels in a basket and is instrumental in solving a robbery. Obviously, Sweetpea echoes her literary ancestor by thwarting a criminal. Exploring skunks in the past—alas, grow-your-own-tippet sales of American sables were not fictional—and the present was fascinating. Skunks are intelligent, friendly animals, best left in the wild, but making wonderful pets if need be.
I know some of you want to kill me because of the ending of Chapter Thirty-six; as a reader, I agree with you. But as a writer, I have to warn you: every one of the Wilde books ends with a cliff-hanger. They are the sort of family whose lives hurdle onward at a pace we mere mortals can only gasp at.
I hope you have as much fun reading about them as I have writing about them.
Don’t miss the next book in
The Wildes of Lindow Castle Series
TOO WILDE TO WED
Coming 2018!
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Eloisa James, Wilde in Love
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