Skylark
Page 33
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Jo
About Heroes
Glorious spring sunshine beamed through the open curtains, and the raised window let in courting birdsong. Nearby, people chattered amidst their busy lives, and wheels rattled as a horse and cart hurried down the back lane. The golden light danced on the silky, disheveled hair and ravaged classic features of a young man lolling in the faded armchair beside the window. It glinted off half-lowered lashes, and golden stubble that suggested a night without sleep or orderly waking, and dug deep into a jagged scar down one cheek that told of more dangerous adventures in the past.
His legs, in breeches and well-worn boots, stretched before him, and a half-full wineglass tilted in his lax, long-fingered hand.
On a round table by his elbow stood a decanter with an inch or so of pale amber wine, and a plain, practical pistol.
He raised the glass and sipped, seeming intent on the small garden outside the window, but in fact Lord Vandeimen’s gaze was directed at nothing close or visible. He looked at the past, both recent and far, and with increasing, slightly fretful curiosity, at the future.
Switching the glass to his left hand, he placed two fingers on the cold metal of the pistol barrel. His father’s pistol, used for the same purpose nearly a year before.
So easy.
So quick.
So why was he waiting?
Hamlet had had something to say about that.
In his case, he decided, he was pausing to enjoy this particularly fine wine. After all, he’d spent nearly all his last coins on it. He must be careful not to drift away under its influence and waste this moment of resolution. One bottle hadn’t put him under the table since he was a lad, though.
So long ago, those days of wicked youthful adventures. Was it really less than ten years since he’d been a carefree youth, running wild on the Sussex Downs with Con and Hawk?
No, not carefree. Even children and youths have cares. But blessedly free of the weightier burdens of life.
The three Georges. The triumvirate.
His drifting mind settled on the day they’d tired of having the same patriotic name and rechristened themselves. Hawk Hawkinville. Van Vandeimen. It should have been Somer Somerford, but Con had balked at such a effete name. He’d taken a variation of his second name, Connaught. Con.
Con, Hawk, and Van. They’d grown up like brothers, almost like triplets. Back in those days they’d not imagined a time when they’d be so apart, but Van was glad the other two weren’t here now. With luck, they’d hear of his death when it was history, the pain of it numbed. They hadn’t seen each other since Waterloo.
Con had returned home directly after the battle, but Hawk and Van had lingered awhile. Hawk was still with the army, tidying up Europe. Van had been in England for six months, but he’d carefully avoided his home and old friends.
He drained the glass and refilled it, his hand reassuringly steady. It was strange that Con hadn’t hunted him down. Any other time, that would have worried him, but not now. If Con didn’t care, that was good.
No friends. No family.
Once, in another life, there had been so much more. When he’d left at sixteen to join his regiment, mother, father, and two sisters had waved farewell. Ten years later, all were shades. Did they watch him now? If so, what did their ghostly voices cry? Wouldn’t they want him to join them?
“Don’t protest to me, old man,” he said to his ghostly father. “You took the same way out when you were left alone. And what have I—? Oh, devil take it!” he snapped, slamming down the glass and seizing the pistol. “When I start talking to ghosts, it’s time.”
Impelled by some mythical urge, he picked up the glass and poured the remaining wine to stream and puddle on the waxed floor. “An offering to the gods,” he said. “May they be merciful.”
Then he put the long barrel cold into his mouth and with a final breath and a prayer squeezed the trigger.
The click was loud, but a click didn’t kill. He pulled the gun out and stared at it with wild exasperation. A flick showed him the problem. The flint on the old-fashioned pistol had worn and slipped sideways.
“Shoddy work, Van,” he muttered, hands trembling now, desperately trying to think whether he had a fresh flint anywhere in his rooms. If he had to go out and find one, the moment might pass. He might try again to pull his life out of the pit.
He knew he didn’t have a fresh flint, so he poked out the old one, sweat chilling his brow and his nape, and tried to fix it so it would work. He’d drunk enough to make him clumsy. “Plague and tarnation, and hell, and damnation, and—”
“Stop!”
He looked up, dazed, to see a figure standing in his doorway, draped in white, crowned in white, hand outstretched, looking like a stern Byzantine angel . . .
Smooth oval face, long nose, firm lips.
A woman.
She swept forward to grip the pistol barrel. “You must not.”
That’s the beginning of a novella called “The Demon’s Mistress,” which was first published in 2001 in the collection In Praise of Younger Men. It’s also the beginning of the book Three Heroes, which brings together this story and the sequels, The Dragon’s Bride and The Devil’s Heiress in a unique volume that will be published in June 2004.
The novella and two novels form a trilogy of connected stories about three friends from birth who go to war together at sixteen and return ten years later divided. You may have read one or more of these stories, but I think you’ll want to add this edition to your collection, because in this form the three stories come together to make one long story of wounds healed and friendship restored.
Look for this trade paperback edition (a larger-sized paperback) if only to admire the absolutely stunning cover showing the three soldier heroes.
As a romance writer, I’m always interested in heroes, and by that I mean more than the man who gets the woman. Heroes—and heroines, too, of course—stand tall and fight for something, whether it be liberty, security, honor, or justice.
As you saw, Skylark has much to do with the nature of the hero. Stephen wants to be the dashing sort but instead is called to work through the law and politics to try to put the world right. In a way it can be harder to fight the quiet fight rather than the guts and glory one, but outright war always takes its toll, as it did on the men of Three Heroes.
This is the direct theme of my story in the SF-romance collection Irresistible Forces (NAL, February 2004). The novella is called “The Trouble with Heroes” and the phrase is completed at the end of the story. “The trouble with heroes is that they want to come home. But home is also their just reward.” War changes the warrior, and it is often hard for them to return to and fit in with the home they have struggled to defend. Sometimes, as with Dan in “The Trouble with Heroes,” the skills and qualities they have learned in order to defeat the enemy make them unwelcome back in their community.
I originally wrote that story in 1999, before we all became more immediately aware of the debt we owe to heroes and the price of war. With Irresistible Forces arriving now on shelves, I’m hearing from readers moved by the way the story applies to their feelings about our times.
In her review of the collection for Romantic Times, Donna Carter said, “The jewel in the crown is Beverley’s ‘The Trouble with Heroes,’ a moving exploration of the consequences of war and power on the those who fight as well as those left behind.”
As for the warriors in Three Heroes, George, Lord Vandeimen, has seen too much war and lost too many friends, so when he returns to find his parents and siblings dead and his home falling apart, he has no more will to fight. He decides on suicide, and it takes a beautiful, r
ich, determined widow to stir the ashes back into flame and give him a reason to live.
George, Lord Amleigh, has been flattened by the war, no longer able to truly enjoy life or live it to the full, but he’s working to put his life together, including plans to marry the very suitable Lady Anne Peckworth. But then he inherits the title and property of the mad Earl of Wyvern and meets again the woman who as a girl had crushed his youthful heart. The meeting, the passion, and the restoration of life and love take place in The Dragon’s Bride, set against the exciting backdrop of smuggling in Devon. Yes, the same backdrop as Skylark, featuring the same bizarre house, Crag Wyvern, and “Captain Drake,” Susan’s brother.
The third George is Major George Hawkinville, a man of the mind who is like Stephen in many ways, equally uneasy about being left on the fringes of the action, even though he knows that is where he can serve best. Today Stephen would probably still be a reforming politician but I think Hawk would be a computer genius. He has a gift for the organization of information.
He went into the cavalry to fight but he was soon moved into the quartermaster’s division and accepted that he could do more good by moving armies efficiently and arranging for adequate food and supplies to be where they were needed. His work sometimes involved investigating fraud, thievery, and profiteering, so when he returns home to find a swindle affecting his home, he’s the right man for the job.
In The Devil’s Heiress, Hawk sets out in cold pursuit of the adventuress who’s stolen his father’s money, but finds the seemingly innocent Clarissa Greystone. His struggles to find the truth and do the right thing embroil him with the other two Georges and with Con’s friends, the Company of Rogues. Soon Clarissa is his heaven and his hell, and everything is complicated by the return of an enemy who will do anything to get that money.
The Devil’s Heiress in particular grows out of some earlier Rogues books, An Arranged Marriage and An Unwilling Bride. An Unwilling Bride was set around the time of the Battle of Waterloo, which was a glorious victory over Napoleon Bonaparte shadowed by a shocking loss of life—more than ten thousand in one battle. It was after that grim and gruesome victory that the Duke of Wellington, commander in chief of the allied forces, said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
In Skylark, Stephen quotes from Lord Byron’s verses about that terrible battle, which impressed itself upon its age as 9/11 has impressed itself on our times. In An Unwilling Bride, when the first casualty lists arrive in London, showing the loss of one of the Rogues there, Nicholas Delaney proposes a toast:“To all the fallen; may they be young forever in heaven.
To all the wounded; may they have strength and heal.
To all the bereaved; may they feel joy again.
And please God, may there one day be an end to war.”
I was deeply touched when in October 2001 a reader asked permission to include these words on a 9/11 quilt she was making. You can see it online here: www.geocities.com/spenycjo/goldendoor.html
In praise of heroes, who are usually the youngest and best of our times,
Jo Beverley