Do you just love those scenes in Jane Austen fanfiction where a couple we care about elopes to Gretna Green?

Whether it’s Darcy and Elizabeth or some other couple we are rooting for, it seems so romantic to picture them rushing off to be married. Of course, we also cringe when a naughty couple such as Wickham and (fill in the blank) do the same. Still, I love to read about Gretna Green, and I thought I would share just a little about this life-changing village in Scotland and why it became legendary.

The reason for the exodus to Gretna Green was the Marriage Act of 1753—Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Act for the Prevention of Clandestine Marriages. The law passed after a good deal of debate about regularizing marriages to protect wealthy families from having their offspring preyed upon. Prior to this, London was infamous for “Fleet marriages” performed by clergymen who were in Fleet Prison for debtors.

Clergymen could live in the “Rules” area, just outside the prison (meant to provide them a sanctuary) and there they performed questionable marriages. They could not be fined for performing these marriages and were effectively beyond the law. The Fleet weddings were the bane of many a rich family. Underage heiresses were tricked or kidnapped and forced into marriages by unscrupulous men. Fathers also complained of sons who had married unsuitable brides. Even two dukes saw their sons married in these secret ceremonies. However with the Marriage Act, by 1754 the informal wedding had been swept away.

Under the act, clandestine or common-law marriages in England were made illegal. Now marriages required an official ceremony performed by a Church of England priest, unless the couple was Jewish or Quaker. The groom and bride had to each be 21 years of age, or have the consent of their parents or guardians. The wedding had to take place during daylight hours in a parish church within the Church of England’s jurisdiction. Banns had to be read for three Sundays prior to the ceremony, and the curate would ask if anyone knew any reason why either the man or woman could not marry. If the couple lived in separate parishes, the banns had to be called in each. Lastly, a license had to be obtained and the marriage recorded in the parish church.

Special Licenses avoided all these requirements but had to be obtained from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the names of those to be married had to be written on the license. These constraints did not help those wishing to marry against the wishes of their families. By requiring parental consent, the act gave parents the right to reject any marriage they considered undesirable. A clergyman who performed an illegal marriage could be transported for up to fourteen years. Yikes!

This act also applied in Wales and Ireland. However, it did not apply to Scotland which was under its own legal system and where the age of consent was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Hence marriages at Gretna Green became popular. It was not the only Scottish Border village destination, though it was the first village over the border on the main west coast route from England. It was not the closest place if you went north from London. If you went up the Great North Road to Scotland, it would take you to Coldstream Bridge or Mordington or Lamberton Toll, all on the eastern side of the country.

Moreover, marriage records show a number of Irish couples married in Scotland to thwart the Irish marriage laws. Gretna Green was not the most popular venue for the Irish, however. Instead they headed for Portpatrick in Wigtownshire on the far west coast because there was a daily packet boat service from Ireland to that village. Finally, the eloping couple didn’t necessarily need to go to Scotland at all. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man also allowed for clandestine marriages before their laws were changed.

One had to be absolutely certain they were in Scottish territory when the marriage took place. The Berwick toll keeper, who usually presided over the weddings for those who crossed into Scotland there, was sent to prison for performing a ceremony in Berwick town itself, which was in England.

Under Scotland’s irregular marriage traditions, anybody could perform marriages whether they were farmers, the blacksmith, the toll masters, the landlord of the local tavern, a passing highwayman or a local smuggler. So, contrary to the common tradition of “anvil priests,” the blacksmith was not the only person who could marry a couple.

After reading this, I began to wonder if I would actually feel married if the ceremony was performed by a blacksmith, much less a highwayman or smuggler! How binding would that seem? I would love to hear your views on the subject.

 Information in this post came from the following: http://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2013/11/ten-fascinating-facts-about-gretna-green.html  and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrigley_abduction

I had new covers created for my books, “Fitzwilliam Darcy An Honourable Man” and “Mr. Darcy’s Forbidden Love” and in celebration, I am giving away a Kindle e-book of each. Just leave a comment to this post by Midnight Friday (CST) if you would like to be in the drawing.  

One of the things I love about writing Regency stories is thinking of ways to dispose of characters, especially characters we all love to hate. A lot of acronyms have sprung up on Jane Austen Fan Fiction forums over the years, and one such acronym is FCA. On occasion a new reader will ask what FCA stands for and this post provides the answer. Freak carriage (or coach) accidents are used often in JAFF tales, and I thought it would be fun to look into one of our favorite plot devises.

As we investigate numerous reasons why these accidents may have happened, I couldn’t help but add my own thoughts in bold. Please indulge me.

Drivers were often careless, furious, intoxicated or even ignorant.

Careless driving often resulted because a driver was not paying attention and turned corners too fast, driving up banks or into ditches, or crashing into other vehicles or obstacles. Not too much different from today, what with women wearing the latest skimpy fashions!

Driving while angry or furious was not a frequent cause of accidents, mainly, I suppose, because the coachmen/drivers wished to keep their jobs. There were no penalties for it. It was suggested, however, that if the guilty driver gave a false address, they should be prosecuted for a misdemeanor. So road rage was not a big problem in the Regency era.

Driving while intoxicated was deterred by having stiff penalties inflicted upon the employers of known drunkards and then ensuring that full penalties were meted out to the guilty parties. DUIs started with carriages? Unbelievable.

Ignorant driving relates to those who did not know the best way to hold the reins. Tips for doing so included never driving with the reins too slack. In the article I found, there was an explanation of how to loop the reins so that they pulled on the hand, not the fingers. Supposedly, holding the rein in this way levelled the pull on the horse’s mouth. However, I could not make heads or tails (pun intended) of the instructions. Should you be scheduled to drive a team of horses in the near future, you can follow the link listed at the end of this post for more detailed instructions.

Bad road conditions.

The main obstacles in towns were the blocking of streets for the loading and unloading of goods or for performing work on them. As for vehicles outside the town limits, mail coaches and others had to keep an eye out for dangerous items in the roads. Some of the things regularly encountered by coaches were plows, tree branches and doors and gates, gates being the most common item found in roadways. Sound like the morning rush-hour traffic report to you, too?

As someone of that era said, “It was never clear if these obstacles were placed there to facilitate robbery, or out of sheer wantonness . . . [as the] instances of such acts of wickedness were frequent.”

In addition, cart and wagon owners often used large stones to block a wheel while they loaded or unloaded their carts or wagons. If left in the road, these loose stones were particularly dangerous to horses traveling downhill, and it was a situation easily prevented by a little thoughtfulness. So many road problems could be prevented by a little of that.

Collisions with Other Vehicles.

These occurred primarily because of runaway horses, although it was claimed that a good driver could avoid them. The rule of the road was keep to the left side and to pass vehicles going in the same direction on the right. The advantage to the rule was that everyone knew what to expect, and a driver could use his whip without accidentally lashing pedestrians. Hmm. I wonder if he might not lash someone when he went to the right to pass.

Another way to avoid collisions mentioned in my research was for a less experienced driver to collide with something that would stun the horse and force it to stop rather than hit another carriage. Can you imagine the poor creature crashing into a tree? Methinks it might stun not only the horse, but the occupants!

Horses presented a myriad of problems.

Relying on horses for transportation presented many problems included bolting, shying or rearing when a horse became frightened or was in pain. A good driver was aware of his horses’ conditions and noted the prick of their ears, so they could be ready to stop before an accident happened. For horses which pulled carriages, jibbing was more common than rearing. Jibbing was stopping and refusing to go, a habit hard to eradicate. Drivers were advised if their horse was a jibber, they should not attempt to have it pull a four-wheeled carriage, except as one of a pair. Moreover, it was suggested that jibbers pull gigs rather than other kinds of carriages. I love horses and prefer to blame all their eccentrics on the inexperience of their handlers.

On occasion a horse might have stomach staggers which made him giddy, stagger sideways, and fall by sinking to the ground on its hind legs first. It was frequently caused by over feeding a horse on dry oats and hay and was remedied by feeding the horse steamed corn or a bran mash. There were also several other reasons for this malady, including excessive driving, a badly fitting collar pressed against the horse’s windpipe, or a tight bearing rein. Poor animal!

Other Causes of Carriage Accidents: Harness and Carriage Issues, Passengers.

Harness issues were too numerous to mention but included breaking bands, straps and bolts. The main advice given to avoid harness accidents was for drivers to double check their harnesses for any defects before driving. Carriage issues involved going too fast downhill or having the carriage lose ground and run backwards when going uphill. Had to smile at that one, for I imagined Lady Catherine in the coach!

As for passengers, women were advised to leave their hands free, even while being helped in or out of a carriage by a gentleman and to watch that their long skirts did not catch on the steps. That puts a damper on all the scenes where Darcy helps Lizzie in or out of a carriage and they look longingly at each other, doesn’t it!

Riders were advised never to jump out of a carriage in motion, which was a risky proposition. You think? However, if a horse bolted and the person needed out, he was advised to jump in the same direction as the horses were going. I cannot see that ending well, either.

When riding in carriages, passengers were advised to be careful to secure themselves so as not to slide off the seat if there is any sudden movement. Sitting in Mr. Darcy’s lap would be my safety suggestion. If not the safest position, at least it would be the most enjoyable.

One important side note about carriages: The choice seat in a carriage was the one on the right hand side facing the animals; this was usually reserved for women or the elderly. Refer to my note above regarding Darcy’s lap.

Now that we have gone over the many causes of FCA, please tell me your thoughts. Do we writers rely on them too often? Or are they to be expected given the times? I have to admit that I love them as a plot point no matter how many times I read them.

Information for this post came from:http://18thcand19thc.blogspot.com/2015/08/carriage-accidents-and-remedies.html

One of the first things you learn about writing stories based in the United Kingdom is that what Americans call a certain item is not necessarily what the British call it. To name all the differences would take too long. Besides, if you are a Jane Austen fan, you probably know most of them already. However, lately I learned something new about British biscuits (cookies to us in the States) and thought I would share it with you. First, here is the Oxford Dictionary’s explanation of the difference between a cookie and a biscuit, from the British and American perspective:

 Biscuit:  In the UK, your biscuit might be topped with chocolate or have currants in it. You might dip it in your cup of tea, or have one as a snack after lunch. If you were in the US, you might put bacon and eggs on it or smother it in gravy and have it for breakfast. Or you might put a piece of chicken on it and have it for dinner.

How did these two very different meanings come to be? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word biscuit comes originally from the Latin biscotum (panem), which means bread “twice baked,” which would explain the hard, crunchy quality of a British biscuit. An American biscuit is similar to what the Brits would call a scone (and an American scone is something else entirely). It’s unclear how these two different foods came to have the same word, and we can only speculate about the influence of the French language in the southern United States.

Cookie: The word cookie opens up a whole other can of worms. In the UK, a cookie is a soft, squishy, moist biscuit, for lack of a better word. British cookies tend to be bigger and more substantial than a British biscuit. In the US, a cookie covers both what the British would call a biscuit and a cookie. The word comes from the Dutch koekje, meaning “little cake,” and could have been popularized in the US through the early Dutch colonization, though we don’t know for sure.

So, a British biscuit is an American cookie and an American cookie is a British cookie and an American biscuit is a British scone and an American scone is something else entirely. Simple!

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Now that you have mastered all of that, allow me to continue. While watching the made for television movieDeath Comes To Pemberley, I noticed that when Mrs. Reynolds was showing Mrs. Darcy what food was to be served at the ball, she mentioned “Prince of Wales” biscuits. I thought nothing of it, for who has not heard of foods named after kings, queens and even celebrities. Anyone care for a slice of Napoleon?

However, a friend shared a link to a lovely blog, Food History Jottings, which opened up a whole new side of biscuit-making for me. That is the practice of using stamps to mark the biscuits for celebrating historic events and/or the monarchy. I knew about cookie cutters, but I had no idea there were stamps. These little tools stamped biscuits with printed motifs by hand before mechanised processes took over during the course of the nineteenth century

Below is a picture of Prince of Wales Biscuits and the recipe.

Prince of Wale’s Biscuit

1 lb butter and 3lb 8ozs of flour. To be mixed the same as hollow biscuits; and to be stamped with the prince’s feather; they must be pricked with a fork; and baked in rather a slower oven. From Joseph Bell, A Treatise of Confectionery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1817).

This fine stucco of the Prince of Wales Feathers adorns the space  above the back entrance to the prince’s kitchen wing at Brighton Pavilion. This emblem was the motif printed on the Prince of Wales biscuits.

York Biscuits were invented to commemorate the marriage of the Duke to Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia in 1790 and continued to be made well into the twentieth century. A picture of a boxwood York stamp is included below.

 Duchess of York’s Biscuits

1 lb butter, 8 oz. of sugar, 3 lb of flour. Rub the butter into the flour; then add the sugar, and mix it up into a stiff paste with milk; rolle the paste out about a quarter of an inch thick, they must be cut square and stamped with a proper stamp of the happy union and baked in a good oven. From Joseph Bell, A Treatise of Confectionery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1817).

Lastly, here is a biscuit stamp with a strong connection to George III, father to all three brothers – the Prince Regent, the Duke of York and the Duke of Clarence. It is carved with a royal crown and engraved with the words Royal Volunteers Biscuit. The use of the long s, rather like an f, dates this print prior to 1810. Volunteer militias were raised throughout Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, and perhaps these biscuits were enjoyed in the officers’ mess with a glass of wine.

The pictures below depict the biscuit making process. First, the dough is rolled out and cut into strips using the rolling pin as a ruler. The other illustrates how the biscuit prints or stamps were used.

In addition to stamps, every kitchen drawer in the Regency period also housed a docker, which was a device for punching tiny holes into the biscuits to stop them from bubbling up. Many of the biscuit prints, like those discussed above, also incorporated their own little docking nails to combine the two steps.

The biscuit in the centre has not been docked correctly and has blown up into a bubble. It will, therefore, easily flake and fragment, making it no good for keeping (but great for eating right away!).

This is just the kind of information I love to discover in my research. If you have time, be sure to check out the Food History Jottings blog at the link below. It may inspire you to do some biscuit/cookie baking of your own.

Now, I leave you with a picture from this blog showing a large selection of biscuits and a giveaway. In the foreground are millefruit biscuits, sweetmeat biscuits, filbert biscuits and rolled wafers. The round biscuits on the plate in the middle printed with the feathers emblem are Prince of Wales biscuits. In the background can be seen some spice biscuits and more rolled wafers.

Have I made you hungry? I hope so, for I am giving away two Kindle E-books of THE LITTLE BOOK OF SCONES from Grace Hall and Liam D’Arcy. I chose this book instead of a book on biscuits, simply because I like the author’s name! Just comment before midnight Saturday to be in the drawing to win a copy.

Most of the information for this post is from: http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.ca/2013/05/some-regency-biscuits.html?utm_source=feedly

Now that I have your attention, I confess that I have never watched the television program Breaking Bad. However, the hype about the show was so successful that even non-television viewers like me have heard of it.

As I was doing research for a Regency story, I found some information about broken bones I thought I would share. I think we all know that a bad break to a bone in the Regency era was a very serious thing. In fact, one of the sources of this article called their post: Setting a Broken Bone – 19th Century Medical Treatment was not for Sissies because setting broken bones was a painful procedure in a time before anesthesia.

A simple fracture of the arm might be relatively easy to put right. Muscles contracted in reaction to the injury and had to be stretched before the bone was set. Thus, the bone of a forearm could be set without too much exertion on the part of the surgeon or bone setter. Once set and placed in a sling, the arm bone required only time and rest to heal.

Larger limbs were not as simple to set. With a broken leg, the size and strength of the leg muscles far exceeded that of the arm, and the exertion to set the bone in place would have required at least two persons. A fracture in the lower leg would have been easier to remedy than a fracture of the thigh, which has the largest muscles. Thigh muscles experience a greater degree of contraction and shortening, and several assistants would have been needed to properly place those bones in their natural position. If, after all the pulling and resetting, both limbs were the same length again, the procedure was considered to be a success.

As early as the 16th century, there were apprentice barber-surgeons who learned their trade by necessity. Yet, not all bone setters were apprenticed to a medical person. If no surgeon or physician lived nearby, the local blacksmith might set bones in humans as well as animals for a fee. The apprentices were often forced into the army to treat soldiers. However, if a soldier’s bones were shattered from canon or gun fire and risked infection, the surgeon might chose to amputate before the tissue developed gangrene.

Over the centuries, scientific inventions sped up a surgeon’s or bone setter’s ability to help patients. As early as the 15th century, the printing press churned out medical manuals in which procedures were standardized and knowledge disseminated over the world. In the late 17th century, traction was being used to repair a broken bone, and in 1718, French surgeon, Jean Louis Petit, invented the tourniquet to control bleeding, a medical technique that was especially helpful during amputations.

Some bone setters were celebrated for their skill. In the early 18th century a Mrs. Mapp was legendary for her abilities. The daughter of another famous bone setter, Polly Peachum, the wife of the Duke of Bolton, Mapp was known as Crazy Sally. Nevertheless, her curesearned her upward of 100 guineas per year. Below is a quote from an article in Boston Medical and Surgeon Journal regarding Mrs. Mapp.

“Her bandages were neat, and her skill in reducing dislocations and in setting fractures was said to be wonderful. If it was known that she was going to the theatre, that was sufficient to fill the house. Her own estimate of herself is shown by an interesting incident. When passing through Kent street, she was taken for one of the King’s German mistresses, who was unpopular. A mob gathered and used threatening language. Mrs. Mapp thereupon put her head out of the window and cried, ‘Damn your bloods, don’t you know me? I am Mrs. Mapp, the bone setter,’ and drove away amid the applause of the multitude.”

Not everyone was a fan however. In the same publication was this insult: “Mr. Percival Pott, the celebrated surgeon, who was her contemporary, spoke of her claims as the most extravagant assertions of an ignorant illiberal drunken female savage.”  

I will add that had Ms. Mapp appeared at my door, she would likely have been sent packing. Bless her heart. It is good thing she had an occupation because she wasn’t going to catch anyone’s eye with her beauty! And, though she was married at one time, it was said that her husband thrashed her before running off with her money.

I wanted to end by including this picture entitled The Comforts of Bath by Rowlandson. Though it was meant to make us smile, there were a great many people during Jane Austen’s time that suffered because of the lack of medical care and knowledge. As far as our health is concerned, we are truly blessed to live today.

For much of my life, the arrival of June meant family vacations at the beaches of Alabama or Florida. Even now, when the calendar rolls over to the first of that month, I feel as though I can finally unwind and relax. A holdover, I am certain, from all the years spent waiting for the school year to end so we could take a well-needed break from our daily lives.

I cannot help but consider how a trip to the beach today compares to one in the early 1800’s. I confess that I cringe when I watch the scenes in Persuasion where the women are walking along the seashore and the bottoms of their gowns get wet. Washing clothes in that period was not an easy task, made more difficult because of the length of their gowns. Furthermore, I cannot fathom how stifling the heat must have been in the summer months when one was wearing all those clothes. Heat stroke, anyone?

Still, had a woman wished to ‘take to the water’ in order to cool themselves, they would likely have used an invention known as the bathing machine. The purpose of this invention was to keep women and their bodies out of sight, while the men were allowed to frolic freely, if on a separate section of the beach.

The bathing machines in use in  Margate, Kent were described in 1805 as “four-wheeled carriages, covered with canvas, and having at one end of them an umbrella of the same materials which is let down to the surface of the water, so that the bather descending from the machine by a few steps is concealed from the public view, whereby the most refined female is enabled to enjoy the advantages of the sea with the strictest delicacy.”

Bathing machines began popping up around the 1750s as four-wheeled carts with two doors on either side that were normally rolled out to sea by a horse. Swimwear hadn’t yet been invented and most people still swam naked. Later, when early forms of swimwear were introduced, society declared that a proper woman should not be seen on the beach in her bathing suit. The bathing machine allowed bathers to change out of their clothes and into their bathing suits without being seen or having to cross the beach in improper clothing. The machine would simply be rolled out to sea and hauled back in when the beachgoer raised a small flag attached to the roof.

Once deep enough in the surf, the bather would exit the cart using the door facing the water. For inexperienced swimmers, some beach resorts offered the service of a “dipper,” a strong person of the same sex, who would escort the bather out to sea in the cart, essentially push them into the water and yank them out when they were done. As long you as you didn’t drown, this was considered a successful day at the beach.

At their most popular, bathing machines lined the beaches of Britain and other parts of the British Empire, as well as France, Germany, the United States and Mexico. Below is a panoramic view of a beach in France.

The following excerpt from The Traveller’s Miscellany and Magazine of Entertainment written in 1847 recalls the details of a luxury bathing machine. Along with the excerpt, I have included a picture of Queen Victoria’s bathing machine. I can just imagine the interior may well have rivaled the description given in the magazine.

“The interior is all done in snow-white enamel paint, and one-half of the floor is pierced with many holes, to allow of free drainage from wet flannels. The other half of the little room is covered with a pretty green Japanese rug.  

In one corner is a big-mouthed green silk bag lined with rubber. Into this the wet bathing-togs are tossed out of the way. There are large bevel-edged mirrors let into either side of the room, and below one juts out a toilet shelf, on which is every appliance. There are pegs for towels and the bathrobe, and fixed in one corner is a little square seat that when turned up reveals a locker where clean towels, soap, perfumery, etc. are stowed. Ruffles of white muslin trimmed with lace and narrow green ribbons decorate every available space.”

The bathing machines remained in active use on English beaches until the 1890s, when they began to be parked on the beach and used as stationary changing rooms. When legal segregation of bathing areas in Britain ended in 1901 and it finally became acceptable for both genders to bathe together, it was the beginning of the end of the bathing machine. Most of them had disappeared in the United Kingdom by 1914, and by the 1920s, they were almost entirely extinct, except for those used by the elderly.

Still, even in this era of bikinis and topless beaches, some of the bathing machines are still in service, having been divested of their wheels to become changing cabins. The adorably photogenic and colorful little beach houses, pictured above, are the direct successors of the Georgian bathing machine and a little-known reminder of seaside history. Who knew?

Now, my question to you is this: Had you lived in that era, do you think you would have dared to take advantage of a bathing machine? Better still, would you have dared to appear in one of those bathing costumes?

The information in this post is from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathing_machine and www.messynessychic.com

Since we have just celebrated the holiday, allow me to explain why Valentine’s Day has lost some of its appeal for me. In spite of the fact that I dearly love chocolate, Russell Stover being my preference, I am at the age that I can no longer pretend that calories and sugar don’t count if consumed on a holiday. My doctor has been telling me that for years—though, just between you and me, I believe she’s opposed to anything that makes me happy, like not exercising.

Since I can’t indulge in my favorite heart-shaped box of chocolates,  the other customary gifts usually chosen by our significant others are flowers, perfume and jewelry. My allergies preclude having cut flowers in the house, so that eliminates the roses I adore, along with perfume or anything scented, such as candles. As for jewelry, I rarely wear the pieces I already have, choosing instead to wear only my wedding ring and earrings. Earrings are something that my son knows I will wear, so he’s been giving me those for years and I have a great collection. This leaves very little for my husband to choose from on gift giving occasions.

Still, being a dutiful husband, every year he covers his bases on holidays, especially Valentine’s Day, by asking me if there’s anything in particular that I would like. And every year my reply is the same: “Just get me a card, and write something mushy in it.” Making certain to remember to take me out to dinner to celebrate, my plea for no gifts actually worked until last year.

Walking into the house with his hand behind his back and a silly grin on his face, I instantly knew he was up to something. He presented me with a card, which I opened and read right away. The verse was lovely, but not as lovely as the note that he had written below it. Then, beaming as though he had just purchased a Lamborghini, he handed me what was behind his back—something he was certain would make me smile. It was a stuffed dog!

When I was young, my siblings and I longed for a pet. Our parents, however, were not in favor of getting us one, most likely because they knew they’d ultimately be left to care for it. Consequently, every Christmas I asked for a stuffed animal and, in my vivid imagination, those toys took the place of the pets I was not allowed to have. Needless to say, I have since made up for the lack of pets during my childhood.

Even so, I never outgrew my love of stuffed animals and years later when Beanie Babies became so popular, collecting them was all the excuse I needed to fill a large barrister bookcase. A similar one holds another collection of life-size cats made by the same company and other assorted animals. My Valentine dog joined the menagerie.

As an author of Austen inspired fiction, I have often thought that if the celebration of Valentine’s Day was as influenced by advertising during the Regency era as it is today, it would be amusing to write. I can imagine writing a scene where Darcy must create a card for Elizabeth, complete with original poetry, or rush to a confectionery shop to buy chocolates, all because he forgot it was Valentine’s Day. Bingley might see the huge heart-shaped box of candy that Darcy bought for Elizabeth and rush out to purchase an even larger one for Jane. It’s such fun to imagine the competition between the men in an effort to impress their ladies. I bet even Wickham could come up with a fitting Valentine present if the acquisition of a young lady’s fortune hung in the balance.

As it is, I’ve written only one story that references the holiday and that’s a modern short story hidden somewhere on my computer. I did, however, write a conversation in my latest novel, Darcy and Elizabeth – A Most Unlikely Couple, that I think would be fitting for Valentine’s Day.

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“Oh, Will,” was all she managed to say before their lips met.

 William ended the kiss, whispering, “I need to retrieve something from my bedroom. Do not move.”

 “I do not think I shall be going anywhere, the way I am dressed,” Elizabeth teased, holding the sheet back.

 By then William was donning his robe and glanced to her display. Sucking in his breath, he said, “If you keep that up, I shall never leave this room again.”

 Despite what he said, he did hurry from the room and in only seconds returned with a mysterious smile on his face and a hand hidden behind his back.

 Elizabeth smiled mischievously. “Just what are you hiding, Mr. Darcy?”

 “Close your eyes and you will learn soon enough.” She did as asked and felt the bed settle as he sat back down on it. “Now you may open them.”

 Elizabeth sat speechless, blinking steadily at an exquisite, gold wedding band. It was wide enough that words had been engraved on it and a diamond had been sunk into the space between each word.

 He chuckled. “Have you nothing to say?”

 “I . . . it is so beautiful that words fail me.”

 “Read the inscription.”

 As she read the words aloud, her eyes filled with tears and her voice choked. “First . . . Last . . . Only . . . Always.”

 “I wanted my feelings toward you inscribed on your ring for the entire world to see. You are my one and only love, now and forever.”

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Since this post was written before Valentine’s Day, I have no way of knowing what I’ll get from my Mr. Darcy this year—perhaps just a card with a personal note. If so, I’ll cherish it, for whether it’s a sentimental card or a silly stuffed animal, nothing can take the place of someone expressing how much you mean to them.

I hope that someone in your life thought of the perfect way to make you smile.

P.S.  Darcy and Elizabeth – A Most Unlikely Couple was published in November and I hope to make you smile by giving away two copies, your choice of kindle e-book or paperback. Just leave a comment on this same blog on Austen Authors site and tell me that you want to be included in the drawing. Giveaway closes midnight Saturday (CST).