Author: Jude Deveraux
Category: Fiction
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Something that makes me crazy when dealing with people today, people who do not live eighty percent of their lives in the past as I do, is that when you say someone in the past was wild and fast, they smile smugly. Every generation thinks it is the one to have invented sex. Honest. This is true. People think their parents didn’t know anything about sex “back then,” so how in the world could people like the Victorians have known about sex? So what in the world could the Marlborough Set have done that was “wild,” right?
I do wish I could, through my books, make people today understand that every generation has liked sex. Today the electricity goes out or there’s a big snowstorm and nine months later the news reports that there’s—ha ha—a big increase in the number of babies born.
So why hasn’t anyone ever put two and two together and figured out why the people of the past had so damned many kids?
End of lecture, but the truth was, the Marlborough Set was fast. Every weekend they moved en masse to someone’s huge country estate and the hostess had to put little cards on the doors of the rooms telling who was where. This is so lovers could find each other. There is one funny story of a jealous man mixing up the cards so a duke found himself in bed with his own wife! How did this story get round unless it was told by the two involved and why was it considered amusing unless everyone was going to bed with everyone else?
You can see that these people figured out what to do with themselves without a television to suck their brains out of their skulls. Instead of sitting in a dark theater and watching the latest Hollywood beauty undress for some Hollywood hunk, the Edwardian man lay in a bed in a candlelit room and watched his wife remove some eight layers of
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clothing. He got to see a body that no one else in the world had seen because, unlike women of today, the Edwardian female didn’t dress in T-shirt and jeans. Also, he hadn’t seen one centerfold to compare his wife to. He wouldn’t even know that cellulite was something a woman should not have! Ah, the good ol’ days.
As I read about the Marlborough Set, I found a few references to Lady de Grey and I began to become glad there weren’t too many such mentions. It seems that in a fast set, Lady de Grey was the fastest. She had many, many affairs with other men, so many, in fact, that she was almost ostracized by the prince’s set.
However, she wasn’t ostracized because she’d gone to bed with lots of men, but because she’d broken the cardinal rule: No affairs until after the heir is born. It was believed that a man who owned a huge estate and had a title generations old had a right to know for sure that his eldest son was his. So after the man married some nubile eighteen-year-old, he took her to the country and did his best to impregnate her immediately. As soon as she was pregnant, he, of course, went back to town to have a good time. After the first kid was born, he went back to give her another one. After producing two children, then her ladyship was free to live her own life.
In Edwardian society, it was imperative that the first two children look like the woman’s husband. After that it was a matter of endless speculation as to who the other children resembled.
One woman, in her memoirs, told how on her wedding day just before she was to be whisked off into society, her mother gave her one piece of advice: Never remark on who the younger children look like. Many years later this woman found out that her “uncle” Harry was actually her father.
It seems that Hortense had broken this rule and had started having affairs before she’d produced an heir. The only reason I could find for this transgression was that it was believed that she hated her husband. This, however, was not believed to have been any excuse for her actions.
I hated to admit it but reading this story made me feel quite depressed. Unfortunately, this did sound like me. What if my parents had forced me to marry a man I didn’t like? I have never been one to play by anyone else’s rules, and I know that if I am unhappy, I can do some awful things—none of which I am about to reveal to anyone. But I doubt very much if there’s any thirty-nine-year-old woman who hasn’t done one or two things that she’d rather not remember.
So Lady de Grey was married for three years to a man she didn’t like and had lots of affairs. Was she trying to find love? Was she striking out in anger at people who’d forced her into this situation?
I would have to do more digging, but now it was time to see Nora again, so I gathered my things and left the library.
Nora had that hollow-eyed look that I was beginning to secretly (are there secrets you can keep from a psychic?) enjoy. It meant she had stayed up all night looking into her crystal ball or whatever, trying to find out about my past lives. I tried to contain my eagerness as I waited for another installment of the story. This whole thing was like reading an enormous novel, a novel that I couldn’t put down. The difference was that I couldn’t just snuggle on the couch with a glass of lemonade and read it straight through. I was finding out things piece by piece, day by day.
“In Elizabethan times, many bad things happened to you and this man,” Nora said.
“My soul mate?”
“Yes. Both of you committed suicide.”
“Why?” Why is always important to a story. Saying there was a murder holds no interest, but telling the emotions that led up to the murder holds people’s attention—and in my case, pays the bills.
“You did not trust each other and there were curses involved.”
“Curses? As in someone saying dirty words?” I wasn’t being flippant. Whether or not to use bad language was a big issue in the romance world.
She didn’t answer, just stared at me, waiting for me to understand.
“Oh. You mean those things like in a Sicilian movie? Or in really bad romance novels? Someone about to be hanged makes up a complex riddle that affects the next seven generations? That sort of thing?” From the look on Nora’s face she’d not read a few thousand romances as I had.
I took a breath. “Are you saying that these two people, just before they killed themselves, cursed each other? Something like, May you never know happiness until a bald son marries a red-haired cat, then generations later there comes along some girl named Cat and…” I trailed off because obviously Nora had no idea what I was talking about. There are jokes that only other romance people truly appreciate.
“What were the curses?”
I knew what she was going to say before she answered. “I don’t know.”
I started to complain but then I guess specific words get lost over centuries. “So they didn’t trust each other, cursed each other, then committed suicide?”
“Yes.”
“And this is why today, hundreds of years later, I do something stupid like allow a great man like Steve to get away?”
Nora smiled at me, as though she knew some secret that I was trying to hide.