Looking almost like himself in the mirror, General Fitzwilliam pulled a heavy glass bottle from his bag and handed it to Fitz. “For you, for keeping me in Cambrai these last weeks. A fine cognac from Darcy’s stores, so you don’t need to worry about my taste in alcohol.”
Fitz laughed, and unstoppered the bottle. He took sniff of it and whistled. “Very fine. How were Mr. and Mrs. Darcy?”
“Happy, and embracing each other last I saw them. Surrounded by Mrs. Darcy’s family who all arrived in Brighton in time to greet their return from my cousin’s estate.”
Fitz poured two shot glasses full and handed one to General Fitzwilliam. “To Mr. and Mrs. Darcy.”
They clinked the glasses and General Fitzwilliam drank his down. He let the rich alcohol swirl around his tongue for several seconds to savor the taste before swallowing it. Fitz sipped his slowly.
General Fitzwilliam stretched out, and laughed. “I suppose I’ll need to take my turn lying in the bed, before my miraculous recovery happens.”
There was a knock on the door, and the surgeon’s voice called out, “It’s Mr. Holmes.”
Fitz and General Fitzwilliam called out at the same time, “Enter.”
The surgeon bowed his way into the room. “General Fitzwilliam, you look much better, but you really should not stand around drinking so soon.”
“I’m not going to let you bleed me.” General Fitzwilliam laughed.
“Very kind of you, Major Williams, to call on the General as soon as you returned from your trip to Paris.”
Fitz shrugged. “I had business with him.”
All three men laughed. The surgeon came forward and studied the bottle on the counter. “Oh, oh my. That’s a very fine bottle. Very fine.”
“No!” Fitz cried. “Not after how you’ve tortured me the past weeks.”
“I only bled you twice.”
“I’m healthy, entirely healthy.”
General Fitzwilliam laughed and pulled another bottle from his bag. “Mr. Darcy was quite generous with the stores he laid in for himself in Paris; I have enough for you both.”
“Well, in that case.” Fitz laughed and poured a third glass for the surgeon and handed it to him.
Like Fitz, Mr. Holmes savored and sipped the liquid.
“So matters in this mysterious family matter of yours that necessitated this matter…” Mr. Holmes vaguely waved his hand as he spoke. He then held up his hand. “I of course do not want you to tell me.”
“Matters went very well.”
General Fitzwilliam looked at his reflection in the mirror one last time before taking off his clothes to crawl into bed. He looked harsh and wolf like.
Family was important. Perhaps the most important thing.
Afterward:
Any book anyone writes is partly inspired by other books that he has read. I think most of you know this.
There is no such thing as isolated and pure creativity; creativity is mostly putting together mixtures of ideas that come from elsewhere. Normally an author however will not be sure quite where many of the ideas that he uses come from. They are hidden by the way memory mixes everything together and time causes you to forget lots of things.
While the rest of the story has little similarity to it, the opening scene where Elizabeth rescues herself from Lord Lechery by bashing him over the head with a vase was inspired by the opening scene of Denise Domning’s excellent Almost Perfect, where the heroine breaks a vase over the head of a earl to rescue her sister after her father lost a bet wagering for her to become his mistress.
They think the earl is dead at first and run off, but of course he is not.
I also think there was some influence from Beth Massey’s Goodly Creatures, which I’ve recommended before in these little post essays. It was one of the first P&P fan fics I ever read, and its premise involved an earl who was Colonel Fitzwilliam’s cousin raping Elizabeth.
The scenes set in Paris were inspired by my memory of Victor Hugo’s description of Paris in 1817 at the start of the second section of Les Misérables, when Hugo told the story of Fantine’s last day before she was abandoned pregnant by her lover. Unfortunately, as it turned out, rereading that scene did not give me any clear idea of what Paris would have been like to wander around in 1817, because the scene turned out to be basically Victor Hugo in his fifties listing out all of the pop culture trivia he could remember from the years when he was a teenager.
On which subject, Elizabeth’s comment about hoping for some poet to write a story about the Notre Dame Cathedral was of course a reference to Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, which is known to English audiences as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and which has been on my reread list for three years.
It was published in 1831, and Elizabeth was very pleased to be able to read the story about the cathedral she had wished for, written by a great poet, even though he did write it in prose.
As the chapter in Les Misérables titled Paris in 1817 was not a guide book to Paris in 1817, I looked up an actual guide book to Paris from roughly the time period. I based the scenes in France on a book written in 1828 titled A Guide to France, Explaining Every Form and Expense from London to Paris, by Francis Coghlan. It was the first of a series of guidebooks written by this nineteenth century Rick Steves over the next thirty years for a variety of strange locales including Central Europe, Southern Italy, and Manchester.
The bit about Manchester is something of a joke; he actually wrote a guide in 1838 to using the railroads between Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, which is not actually exoticizing the northern half of England. On the other hand a book many of you have probably at least seen the excellent BBC version of Gaskell’s North and South, a book which does in fact exoticize the North.
As someone who has read substantial amounts of twenty-first century travel advice, reading Coghlan’s nineteenth century travel guide gave me a reverse culture shock. The travel advice of that different country which is the past sounds so similar. There were lists of prices, descriptions of locations and how to get in them, and the standard advice: Be careful of pickpockets and don’t show off your money, and things go faster and easier if you are able to get by with just a carry on (in Coghlan’s time, a single carpet bag).
I had a similar reverse culture shock when I first learned to read French, and found that the comment section of French newspapers online was exactly like the comment section on English language newspapers, except in French. On which topic, I did a fair amount of my research for the scenes in France by reading Wikipedia and academic articles in French.
For some reason the French Wikipedia is often more detailed about things in France than the English language wiki. Strange. I had not ever really expected to get a practical use out of knowing French — and I could have found out most of what I did if I only read English, but it still was fun.
I have a few further notes about the research on this book, but I’m going to interrupt your now regularly scheduled description of how I wrote my most recent book, for your even more regularly scheduled request to donate money to fight extreme poverty. So please be part of those of us who fight for a better world.
When I started writing, a major reason I wanted to write novels was that I could ask people to join me in acting to make the world a better place at the end of my books. This is why even though I changed the way I write these fundraising appeals to make them less of a downer than the ones in my first books — an example of me responding, whether for good or ill, to negative reviews — you are never going to read a Timothy Underwood novel that doesn’t say you can make the world a better place, and that doesn’t remind you that there are people who are literally dying who you can literally keep from dying.
You should feel really good about yourself if you help people who live in places far away from you, who you will never meet nor know.
I beg you from the bottom of my soul, give to a valuable cause, and make the world a better place.
Please, if you have a
good job or income, donate with me to some cause, even if it isn’t extreme poverty in developing nations.
Providing medical care to people who are extremely poor is probably the way that you can make the biggest difference to people who are alive today.
I am only saying what follows to give an example of what one person does to make a difference:
Last year I donated 10% of the amount I spent on housing, clothes, food, etc. I excluded from this amount money “spent” on taxes and health insurance and dentists visits and the like. Groups I hang out with on the internet probably think this is too little money, since it is less than 10% of my gross or net income, while I suspect most people would find that a rather large amount of money to donate.
Everyone needs to decide for themselves what they can comfortably do to make the world a better place, and what will not hurt themselves and their families. But you should find an amount you are comfortable giving, and you should give that amount.
Most of the money I donated went to Doctors Without Borders, which as you probably already know is an effective and transparent organization that does an enormous amount of good in war torn and conflict ridden countries. It is a good choice if you are deciding what cause to support, but not the only good choice.
So now back to talking about things I learned as I wrote my book: The way that senior officers were arranged in the British army during the Napoleonic wars frankly seems bizarre and nonsensical to me. But they did win the war, so clearly it wasn’t too malfunctional.
The first thing that I’ve found some authors are confused about is not weird: Brigadier General was not a regular rank in the British army during the Napoleonic period. Instead, on occasion, regimental colonels and lieutenant colonels would be given a provisional appointment to the position of brigadier general that only applied for the duration of the conflict, and only in the theater for which the appointment was made. The reason for this was to select the commander for groups of four battalions that would be stuck together to be given a single commander. The rank of major general was the lowest permanent general’s rank in the army.
This is the part that is weird to me. The British army would promote all of its lieutenant colonels as a group to the rank of full colonel — a rank that was functionally meaningless, as it had no additional pay or responsibilities. And then they would a few years later promote all of the surviving colonels to the army rank of major general — this did not mean that these officers were employed commanding large units of troops, they very possibly weren’t. In some cases they might not have any military employment, as in the case of an officer who Wellington sent home from the Peninsula, and who, despite never having any active military duty again, was promoted in the next round to the rank of lieutenant general from major general.
Every regiment had a colonel of the regiment, who handled administrative duties, and did basically nothing else. And regiments were organized into separate battalions, one of which might be in Spain at the same time the other was in India, and these two battalions basically had no connection, except having the same colonel of the regiment, and both had a separate lieutenant colonel commanding them.
I think France was actually a safe place to flee from British law at this time. An extradition treaty was signed between Britain and France in 1842, but as far as I could find from looking through several articles on the history of extradition, there was no treaty prior to 1842 between those two countries, though France had established extradition treaties at a much earlier date with most of its neighbors, and was in fact in the eighteenth century the country that did the most to develop the practice of extradition for common crimes.
Before I came up with the plot of this novel, I’d thought there was no extradition treaty, because while doing the research several years ago for the trial following the duel in Colonel Darcy (still one of my best books! You should read it, and don’t you know want to know what the duel and the trial were about?) one of the court records from the Old Bailey I read was of the trial of a man who had killed someone in a duel and fled to France.
This man stayed in France for ten years, and he was only arrested and prosecuted for murder following his return.
Honestly, the planned plot of this novel might have been very different had I not had that bit from that trial wandering around in the back of my head, looking for more stories to connect to. I know that it was based on that story that I simply assumed Elizabeth would be safe from British prosecution if she fled to France and stayed there, and then after having the novel half written I panicked and started looking into extradition laws, when I suddenly wasn’t sure if that was actually true.
What precipitated this panic was learning from Coghlan’s guide that travelers should apply for a passport to France from the French embassy that offered them for a nominal fee. I also was reminded of something that I had half learned while reading Les Misérables many years ago, that internal travel in France at this time required the possession of a passport which would be checked in every city the traveler went to. Of course Valjean’s passport specified that he was a criminal, so everyone who he met learned that immediately.
Obviously given the panic and the manner with which they left for France, Elizabeth and Darcy would not have collected a passport from the French embassy. So I needed to figure out what would happen next. I found two accounts while reading about French passports with stories of travelers who arrived in continental countries which required passports for internal travel where they had not known they needed to acquire a passport.
One story was about Mary and Percy Shelley being surprised that passports were demanded of them when they returned to Italy in 1816, since that had not been bothered about the previous time they had travelled through the area. The other was the story of a man who arrived in the Netherlands without a passport, and had some worry about being able to go on, but this was solved according to the man’s journal with the help of fellow British travelers.
Neither account specifies how the problem of obtaining a passport was solved.
So for my novel I assumed they used a combination of respectable appearance and bribery.
I initially began to write the proposal scene with Darcy kneeling on the floor, but then I checked if that was already a tradition. A bit of googling showed me that A) most of the answers to that question found by Google were written by freelancers who write search engine optimized blog posts for fifty dollars a pop. That is if they are particularly lucky and well paid; B) it definitely was not the thing men did until some point in the nineteenth century. I then remembered, we are told what Darcy was doing when he proposed.
He did not kneel either time he proposed, so he didn’t kneel in my story either.
On a similar point, everyone is shocked when I and my wife admit that I did not kneel when I proposed. But it was sweet and romantic, and quite perfect. So… uh. Men contemplating the popping of the question: Kneeling is not mandatory, fight against expectations. Be romantic in your own unique individual way. By copying Darcy.
As for future Pride and Prejudice variation plans, I am afraid I don’t have any P&P stories right now ready to start writing on. This novel was a rough draft I had half finished already when I returned to Mr. Bennet’s Daughter a few months ago, and now that I’ve finished it, I need to come up with more ideas. To be honest, it will probably be at least a half year before you see another book by me, I feel like I want to take a break from P&P and work on my own settings for a while.
Thank you to everyone who read this book, and I hope you enjoyed it. Leave a review if you think it is well worth reading (or if you think it is well worth avoiding). The reviews really do help people find and read the book.
Timothy Underwood
May 2019,
Budapest
About the Author
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I am from California, but currently I am living in Budapest with my wif
e. I first discovered Pride and Prejudice on a long day of travel out of Mexico as a teenager. I recall being very impressed with myself for getting the jokes. I read a lot of nineteenth century literature that year, of which Austen and Charlotte Bronte, of course, were my favorites. It was years later that I discovered and repeatedly binge read Pride and Prejudice fanfiction.
Now I get to add to the pile of fanfiction able to binge – and I love it when I get messages from people telling me that they are binging on my books.
If you liked this book, leave a review. It is a way of helping other people find books they liked.
I can be reached at [email protected].
My Other Books
A Compromised Compromise: Elizabeth tripped and Mr. Darcy caught her in his strong arms, and as he set her back on her feet, they looked deep into each other’s eyes. They kissed. Unfortunately, they were seen in this passionate embrace before they returned to their senses. US UK AU CA DE FR
The Missing Prince: Pride and Prejudice with magic. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth always have been bound together through a mysterious magic, even though they have never met. When he mysteriously disappears, Elizabeth is the only one who can save him. US – UK – AU – CA – DE -- FR
Too Gentlemanly: My most recent book. After Georgiana had Wickham’s child, Darcy avoided society for years and never went to Netherfield until now, years later. When he meets the still unmarried Elizabeth Bennet they clash and attract. Will they kill each other or marry? US – UK – AU – CA – DE – FR
Colonel Darcy: My most popular book! Fitzwilliam Darcy never forgot his promise to write Elizabeth, but when he is released from prison after the war, it might be too late, because Elizabeth's family is forcing her to marry a baronet. US – UK – Australia – Canada – Germany – France
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