Costume Talks Are Fun - & Sell Books

By Beverley Eikli

I can't resist making period costumes from authentic patterns.  Earlier this year I made some 1780s half boned stays and panniers and chemise to go under my 1780s polonaise, together with a Regency gown for my 'History Through Costume Talks'.  A few weeks ago I made my two daughters a couple of pretty 1850s dresses and capes for a 'Christmas in July' event we went to at nearby Sovereign Hill which recreates the gold rush era of the 1850s.

Author talks can be great but they're more fun if I dress in costume, as I'll be doing when I take a workshop tomorrow evening for the Bendigo Writers Council in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia.

In just a few days my Regency espionage romantic suspense The Reluctant Bride will be released in paperback (though it's already out in kindle), and I like to promote it as authentically as I can. It spans the years between the September Massacres during the French Revolution and the Battle of Waterloo, so I chose to make a costume around that period and also have a simple Jane Austen-type gown displayed on a mannequin to underscore the radical change in clothing.

You'll note, above, the long torso of the gown. During the 1780s a barrel-shaped torso with wide hips and full skirts was the fashionable silhouette. The breasts were pushed up and referred to as 'rising moons'. When I found the authentic pattern I realised I couldn't make it until I'd made some half boned stays to create the authentic underpinnings. That then led to making the panniers and chemise.

Tomorrow on my blog I'll be describing the various layers, with accompanying photographs. In the meantime here's the...

Blurb for The Reluctant Bride:-

Can honour and action banish the shadows of old sins?

Emily Micklen has no option after the death of her loving fiancé, Jack, but to marry the scarred, taciturn, soldier who represents her only escape from destitution.

Major Angus McCartney is tormented by the reproachful slate-grey eyes of two strikingly similar women: Jessamine, his dead mistress, and Emily, the unobtainable beauty who is now his reluctant bride.

Emily’s loyalty to Jack’s memory is matched only by Angus’s determination to atone for the past and win his wife with honour and action.  As Napoleon cuts a swathe across Europe, Angus is sent to France on a mission of national security, forcing Emily to confront both her allegiance to Jack and her traitorous half-French family. 

Angus and Emily may find love, but will the secrets they uncover divide them forever?

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When Women Had No Legal Rights

By Beverley Eikli

Until 1991 a woman who fled an abusive husband had no legal recourse if he chose to force her return, or deny her her children.

As a writer of historicals and historical romance it's always a balancing act to create a heroine who is on the one hand not too passive for the tastes of the modern reader, nor unrealistic in the actions she takes to exercise her free will. After all, she had no financial or legal independence and was totally dependant on the goodwill of her husband or nearest male relative, unless she were a widow.

Emily, in my Regency espionage historical romance (with mystery, adventure and suspense), has had no choice but to marry Angus, a passionately self-contained war hero, in order to maintain her honour, and that of her family - and keep her child. My Regency espionage romance details Emily's blossoming from downtrodden and ill-used to a woman who deserves the happiness she's fighting for.

Below is the first altercation she has with her new husband which shows something of her feelings for her situation, as well as her self image. 

I hope you enjoy it.

 Here's the set-up:

Angus and Emily, newly married, have just been visited unexpectedly by Angus’s brother and his unsuitable consort. Emily, embarrassed by her highly pregnant state and knowing it will cause gossip amongst Angus’s family, reacts in this scene to her husband’s apologies for the situation Emily has just confronted.

With deliberate care Emily set down the plates once more and turned to look at her husband through narrowed eyes.

‘For contaminating me with a lady of dubious repute? But Angus, how much worse a contaminant would I have been had you not married me?’ She patted her swollen belly. ‘You’d be apologising to your brother. A fallen woman—’

‘Don’t speak like that.’ His wide-set eyes burned with undeserved defence of her. ‘Men’s impulses can be ungovernable, but ladies do not suffer such … urges … You were … taken advantage of.’

Emily stared at him. She sucked in a long, quavering breath as her simmering anger came finally to the boil. Is that what he believed? That she was insensible to passion? And that was a good thing?

‘What would you say if I told you that my impulses were every bit as ungovernable as Jack’s?’ She could barely control her anger sufficiently to speak. For days she had forced her feelings into the background, using the same emotional device against her unwanted husband as she had when her father insulted her, shutting out the hurt by erecting a barrieras impenetrable as steel.

Now, feeling surged through her, blackening her vision and causing her to sway. She put her hand on the back of the sofa to steady herself.

Angus stood awkwardly by the door, as if unsure whether to move closer to support her, or beat a tactful retreat.

Emily glared at him. ‘What if I told you that I was so consumed by passion in Jack’s arms I would not have heeded the Blessed Virgin Mary cautioning me against the temptations of the flesh?’ She tried to regulate her breathing, but the rage was clawing its way further up her body, threatening to make her its puppet. She, who never lost her temper. ‘I loved Jack. I was his slave in passion, every bit as culpable as he. If you are so concerned for virtue, spare your condemnation of innocent Miss Galway. You need only cast your eyes upon your wife to be singed by my sin. There! I have confessed my true nature. Whatever you thought of me before, you cannot but think worse of me now.’ She registered the horror in his eyes and was glad for it. Much better that she banish any pretence between them.

She’d never expressed anger as poisonous as this. At first it frightened her, then it sent exhilaration pulsing through her. Her love for Jack had been cut off at the root. Now hatred filled her veins, making her feel alive again. ‘And so you know, I care nothing for your opinion,’ she added.

She managed to remain upright, though her vision came in waves. She could feel her strength leaving her, but she had to spit out the truth so he’d have no illusions as to the kind of woman he’d married. A woman no good man deserved.

‘You married me because you needed a wife. I married you so I could keep my child. We made a contract. My body is yours to do with as you please, but that is all you will ever have. My thoughts, my feelings, my love will be forever out of bounds to you.

end of excerpt

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Alpha Hero, or Beta?

By Beverley Eikli

I love an historical beta hero. Give me one who has a brooding, taciturn exterior hiding a passionate heart.

That's my Angus in The Reluctant Bride, though having said that, there is a touch of alpha there, too.  As a returning war hero he's proved incredibly courageous but he's also brooding and burdened by events which forced his hand during the retreat to Corunna, in 1809 several years before my story begins.

Angus has unexpectedly found an opportunity to rescue Emily, the woman he's loved from afar, by marrying her, but unfortunately during his first meeting with her to pass on news of the death of her fiancé, he tells her a lie to spare her the pain of knowing how Jack really died.

Now Angus is determined to do whatever it takes to win Emily, his emotionally distant new wife - except tell her the truth. That's not possible. Yet.

Angus is also an alpha hero in that he sets about winning Emily with honour and action when he's sent abroad on a mission of national importance. The beta side of him is revealed in that  he treats Emily with more understanding than she deserves as she’s so stubbornly resistant to his overtures.  One of the challenges I had was showing Emily in a sympathetic light when she's so unkind to Angus to begin with.  But she's just lost her beloved fiancé and the main events in the story span eight months, which isn't terribly long to grieve.

Here's the opening scene in The Reluctant Bride. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter One

‘It’s not a sin, unless you get caught.’

 

The gentle breeze seemed to whisper Jack’s teasing challenge, its soft, silken fingers tugging at Emily’s ingrained obedience. She put down her basket and stared with longing at the waters below, sweat prickling her scalp beneath her poke bonnet as desire warred with fear of the consequences.

 

‘Where’s your sense of adventure, Em?’

 

Still resisting, Emily closed her eyes, but the wind’s wicked suggestiveness was like the caress of Jack’s breath against her heated cheek; daring Emily to shrug aside a lifetime of dutiful subservience – again – and peel off her clothes, this time to plunge into the inviting stream beneath the willows.

 

She imagined Jack’s warm brown eyes glinting with wickedness. Taunting her like the burr that had worked its way into the heel of her woollen stockings during her walk.

 

Exhaling on a sigh, Emily opened her eyes and admitted defeat as she succumbed to the pull of the reed-fringed waters.

 

Desire had won, justified by practicality. If she had to remove one stocking to dislodge the burr she might as well remove both.

 

Scrambling down the embankment, she lowered herself onto a rock by the water’s edge. Her father would never know. If he glanced from his study in the tower room, where he was doubtless gloating over his balance sheet, he’d assume she was a village lass making her way along the track. Emily had never seen him interest himself in the poor except …

 

Like most unpleasant memories, she tried to cast this one out with a toss of her head, still glad her father had never

discovered what she’d witnessed from her bedroom window one evening five years ago: the curious sight of Bartholomew

Micklen ushering the beggar girl who’d arrived on his doorstep into his carriage.

 

Then climbing in after her before it rumbled down the driveway and out of sight.

 

Now was just another of those moments when Emily was glad her father remained in ignorance. Her insurance, should she need it, was that she knew a few of her father’s secrets the excise men might just want to know.

 

By the time the first stocking had followed Emily’s boots onto the grassy bank she was bursting with anticipation for her swim.

 

What did one more sin matter when she’d be Mrs Jack Noble in less than a week?

End of Excerpt

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The Darker Side of the Regency

By Beverley Eikli

Spies, lies, traitors and a passionate, self-controlled hero who will do anything to win the woman who’s become his ‘reluctant bride’…

I’ve been on a roller-coaster book blast tour the past few days to promote The Reluctant Bride and it’s been fascinating to read the reviews along the way. Writing a slowly developing work means it’s hard for me to see what a reader will pick out as characterizing the book.

‘This book has a slow boil,’ says Jen of The Crafty Cauldron. ‘It starts as a romance story and ends in a fantastic mystery/action storyline. I was blown away at how much I liked this book. I really thought I wouldn’t. The author has a way of snaring you before you even realize. This is a great read. Definitely for the historical romance buff like myself.

 The Reluctant Bride has had a long and convoluted history.  It was a simple 'marriage of convenience' story when it won the Romance Writers of New Zealand competition six years ago.  I then went on to publish three Regencies with Robert Hale, all the while researching the French Revolution and 'layering' The Reluctant Bride with a back story set during the September Massacres of 1792. 

The pivotal, life-changing events for my hero, Angus, however, occur during the retreat to Corunna in 1809, though the actual book picks up four years later when Angus calls on the woman he's loved from afar to tell her that her fiancé has just been killed in battle.  The lie he tells her, in order to spare her pain, comes back to haunt him after he's made her his 'reluctant bride.'

The Reluctant Bride won Choc Lit's ‘Search for an Australian Star’ competition late last year.

And now it's out on Kindle ($2.99) with only 7 days before the official paperback release. Then I'll be cracking open the champers!

Buy from: Kindle UK, Kindle US, Apple UK, Apple US, Kobo Books

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