Valour and Vanity (40 page)

“Oh yes, my dears, it is. If you had told us, I should have told cook to have a roast, and as it is I have nothing but chicken, which is not so nice after a long journey.” Mrs. Ellsworth fluttered out into the entry hall. “You should have told us you were coming in time for Christmas!”

Jane glanced to Vincent, who had paused with his greatcoat half-off. His expression was guarded, but she suspected that his thought was the same as hers. It sounded as if Jane’s letter had not yet arrived.

“Likely they
did
tell us.” Mr. Ellsworth tucked his fingers into his waistcoat pockets and chuckled. “Your letter arrived, but it was so water damaged that we could not make out much except that you had
not
been attacked by pirates and that Lord Byron was out of town. Your mother was much relieved on both counts. Thank you for writing to reassure her.”

Jane sighed with a great release of tension. She had never been so glad to hear that a letter had been mangled in transit. “Of course. I would never want to worry Mama.”

“Such a considerate daughter,” Mrs. Ellsworth cooed and took her by the arm. “But come in, come in to the parlour. You must be sick with cold, and you have lost weight. I declare. You will work yourself to death.”

Jane’s attention, however, was distracted by the entrance of Mr. O’Brien and Melody. Jane’s sister was glowing, and very round. The graceful carriage that Jane had so envied was gone, though Melody still managed to make her increased figure somehow elegant. The two sisters’ embrace was rendered unfamiliar by the change in Melody’s situation, but was nevertheless heartfelt.

Jane was surprised to find that her cheeks were wet with tears.

“Oh, Jane…” Melody seemed to mistake the tears as sorrow for the child Jane had lost, which could not be further from the truth.

Shaking her head, Jane wiped the tears away. “No, no. I am so happy for you that it hurts.” She squeezed her sister’s hand. “You will be a wonderful mother.”

By the smile this brought to Melody’s face, it seemed to be the highest praise Jane could have offered her. “I am so glad you have come.”

Mr. O’Brien watched his wife with a peculiar yearning joy that was captivating. She recalled the same look on Vincent during the few months when she had been expectant. Jane glanced at Vincent, who caught her gaze and returned it with a warmth that heated her through. It did not matter if it turned out that she could not conceive. Motherhood was not something that Jane was certain that she wanted, or could even achieve. Then again … Jane and Vincent might be in Vienna, and not working, long enough to let matters take their own course. Whatever happened, it would do nothing to change their regard for one another.

Melody led the way back into the parlour, where they settled in front of the fire and had good English tea while they caught each other up on their travels and the decision to return to Vienna. It seemed that Melody had not been plagued with the same upset to her stomach that Jane had faced, and was rather deeper into her term than she had thought when she wrote. Her confinement was expected in January.

“La! Only think! When we were in Trieste, I was—well, you know—and did not even know it. Is that not droll?” Melody ran her hand over her dress. “But am I not ridiculously large?”

“Oh, my dear, I was even larger when I was expecting you.” Mrs. Ellsworth took out her fan and shook her head. “You will be larger yet, you will see.”

Mr. Ellsworth cleared his throat and turned to Vincent. “I say. I think we have been frightfully rude in not asking you how Murano was.”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Ellsworth sat up in her seat. “Sir David, do tell us how you passed your time?”

Her husband, caught with his teacup to his lips, choked on any possible answer. Coughing, Vincent set the cup down on the mantelpiece and turned helplessly toward Jane. Then his gaze darted toward her mother.

Jane smiled, took a sip of her own tea, and rescued her husband again. “Our trip was entirely uneventful.”

Afterword

Novels are not written in isolation, and I had a number of incredibly helpful people guide me through this one. I will thank them in random order, and hope, rather desperately, not to forget anyone.

First, of course, I must thank my editor, Liz Gorinsky, who was patient when my schedule imploded toward the tail end of the production process. She gives good notes and very gentle nudges. My agent, Jennifer Jackson, not only sells the books, she can talk me off the ledge when I am realizing that trying to write a heist novel is way, way harder than I expected it to be.

Speaking of heists, I would not have gotten through this without the help of my fellow podcasters at Writing Excuses: Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Howard Tayler. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to structure things in novel form. Scott Lynch also was wonderful about sharing heisty tips with me. The tricky thing about writing a heist is that it has a very specific structure. One of its pieces is that there is a hidden plan within the visible plan. There is always a thing that appears to go wrong, but which was actually part of the master plan. That’s easy in a movie because you are never inside the characters’ heads. In a novel, particularly the fourth in a series with an established, tight third-person point of view, we’re in Jane’s head all the time. I could not lie to the audience, nor could I have Jane be in the dark. So I had to write the scenes to work for both the visible plan and the hidden plan, depending on the context with which you read them. It was a great deal of fun, and I cannot thank the gentlemen enough for their help in sorting out the elements that I had to have on the page.

Thank you to Noah Chan for suggesting the tarot card suits for the aliases of the swindlers. I put out a call on Twitter saying that I needed a set of four aliases for the 1817 version of
The A-Team
. My original plan had been to use commedia dell’arte characters for the group of swindlers but was thwarted by the fact that
il dottore
is a traditional character. I have a habit of inserting a
Doctor Who
cameo into each of the novels, and that meant inadvertently tying
il dottore
to the bad guys. It introduced levels of confusion I did not want, but I’ll tell you a bit more about why I was unwilling to give that character up when we get to the “About History” portion. Suffice to say that the tarot suits were perfect.

Kelley Caspari helped me with the glass questions. She has the handy combination of being a science fiction and fantasy writer as well as having trained in Murano as a glassmaker. She is the one who suggested the flat version of the Verre.

Gianni Ceccarelli answered my plea for some last-minute Italian help.

Paul Cornell helped me with some lines of dialogue when I wanted to make them more specific to a certain character.

My husband, Robert, is wonderful about letting me babble about the book at random intervals. He has a knack for asking the right question, even when he hasn’t read the novel yet. I credit his truly wonderful parents with raising him right. Here I should note that though there are aspects of Vincent that are based on my husband, they have totally different back stories. Rob’s parents are fantastic. Mrs. Kowal, in particular, gave me some valuable insight into Catholic nuns, which was much appreciated.

Thanks as well to my research assistant, Erica Bergstrom, who spent countless hours trying to find information about Venetian markets and fashion for me. Lynne Thomas tracked down what Venetian police officers were called, using her super reference-librarian skills. Librarians in general were wicked helpful. The staff at both the Chicago Public Library and the Multnomah County Library were amazing. Seriously, people, just wander into the nearest library and thank the librarian there for knowing all things, or at least where to find them.

My beta readers on this book were Amanda Jensen, Andy Rogers, Annalee Flower Horne, Bonnie Walker, Brent Longstaff, Callie Stoker, CEdison, Charlotte Cunningham, Colin Parker, Crystal Bryant, Donna, EngineersFalcon, Epheros Aldor, Grant Gardner, Ian Miller, Jeff Evans, John Devenny, Jon Marcus, Julia Rios, Kassie Jennings, Kristin. Kurt J. Pankau, Laura Christensen, Lisa Bouchard, Liz Muir Busby, Maggie, Mary Garber, Micaiah Evans, Michael Simko, Peter Ellis, Susan Bermudez, Thom Stratton, Trey Wren, VicDiGital, and Wendy P.

My parents deserve specific thanks this year, because I had to review the copyedits over Christmas and they were very understanding about the fact that I just disappeared for hours and hours.

As usual, I need to thank Jane Austen for the inspiration. This time, however, she has to share that with Lord Byron.

And that brings us to our note about history.

A Note on History

I’ll be honest, Lord Byron was not originally scheduled to appear in this novel. In the course of research, I read Andrea Di Robilant’s book
Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon,
and she mentioned that in 1817, which is the year in which the novel was set, Lord Byron was actually living in Venice. I jumped on it. I mean … a heist novel? With Lord Byron? This is not something you pass up.

Lord Byron was an inveterate letter writer. Those epistles have been collected in
Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals,
edited by Leslie A. Marchand. What was particularly helpful about this collection is that it had a selection of quotes broken down by subject in the back. Where possible, I’ve used Byron’s own words for his dialogue, although sometimes I tweaked them to suit the conversation. He really did have a menagerie, by the way, including several monkeys.

The three poems he recites during the course of the novel are all slightly adjusted from the canonical version. I justified this in the book by pretending that he later wrote them down and edited them. I took excerpts from
Beppo: A Venetian Story
and
Don Juan
(Canto. 14). I also rewrote part of
The Prophecy of Dante
to be
The Glamourist
.

Because Byron was so diligent at writing letters and keeping a journal, it’s possible to reconstruct a good timeline of his activities. The days that he leaves Venice in the book were days when he was actually gone. But … allow me to point out that Lord Byron was travelling with a man named Doctor Polidori, whom he often called simply “the doctor.” There’s a two-week period in which they are more or less unaccounted for. Anyone who is a fan of a certain time traveler will find it pretty clear what happened.

The only part of Byron’s timeline that I moved was his swimming race against Mingaldo, although his commentary is close to verbatim from one of his letters. He swam in the canals often enough that I felt like I could get away with it.

The church of Santa Maria degli Angeli is a real church in Murano and had a teaching school attached to it. The nuns I have inhabiting it are entirely made up, though their order is not. Venice was a diverse city, even after the fall of the Republic. Because Italy had been part of the Roman Empire, and lay just across the Mediterranean from Africa, it had a high percentage of people of African descent. While I can’t provide documentation that any of the nuns at this particular convent were black, it’s not unlikely. The first documented black nun was Louise Marie-Therese in 1695 in France, and there are records of black nuns at other convents all through Europe. Vienna, in particular, had a large mixed-race population, which is why I chose it as the hometown for Sister Maria Agnes. When I first planned this novel, I defaulted to an all-white cast because that’s what I’m used to reading in texts from the 1800s. The more research I did, the clearer it became that a homogeneous cast would not be historically accurate.

I was also surprised to learn that Venice had a number of female glassmakers. Until the fall of the Republic in 1797, the island of Murano was the predominant manufacturer of glass in Europe. During Napoleon’s reign, in addition to sacking the city and looting the treasures. After that, to keep them in line, the newly formed kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia placed heavy taxes on the supplies needed for glassmaking, which created huge economic problems for the glassmakers. In addition to this, foreign glassmakers came and apprenticed, then took the techniques home with them. In the space of ten years, they went from having forty glassmakers to only three. Signor Nenci’s studio was one of the few remaining glass factories in Murano. While I used his name and the name of his factory, the character who inhabits the name is entirely made up.

Not long after Jane and Vincent visited, Murano underwent a revitalization, and by the 1830s it had a thriving industry again. I like to imagine that it would have happened faster if the
Verre
had been real.

Yours,
Mary

Glamour Glossary

GLAMOUR.
This basically means magic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning was “Magic, enchantment, spell” or “A magical or fictitious beauty attaching to any person or object; a delusive or alluring charm.” It was strongly associated with fairies in early England. In this alternate history of the Regency, glamour is a magic that can be worked by either men or women. It allows them to create illusions of light, scent, and sound. Glamour requires physical energy in much the same way running up a hill does.

GLAMURAL.
A mural that is created using magic.

GLAMOURIST.
A person who works with glamour.

BOUCLÉ TORSADÉE
.
This is a twisted loop of glamour that is designed to carry sound or vision depending on the frequency of the spirals. In principle it is loosely related to the Archimedes’ screw. In the 1740s it was employed to create speaking tubes in some wealthy homes and those tubes took on the name of the glamour used to create them.

CHASTAIN DAMASK.
A technique that allows a glamourist to create two different images in one location. The effect would be similar to our holographic cards which show first one image, then another depending on the angle at which it is viewed. Invented by M. Chastain in 1814, he originally called this technique a jacquard after the new looms invented by M. Jacquard in 1801. The technique was renamed by Mrs. Vincent as a Chastain Damask in honour of its creator.