My least favourite of my own stories

Even the Author has favourites among her own stories. 

 All the characters who appear in my Regency Tales are real people to me, especially as they tend to embody memories, attitudes or events from my own life.

Each story is a pleasure to create but at some point the characters take over and develop the plot according to their own wishes. The setting also imposes certain conditions. I'm fond of all my fictional families but some of their stories please me more than others.

                                                                In All Honour

My least favourite is my second story, In All Honour ......but only because I wrote it in a hurry .......and most of the characters are sick, injured or poisoned.  One other reason is that the villain turns out to be a really vile fellow. He gets worse as the story goes on.

The tale - unsurprisingly - takes place in Bath. 

The Pump Rooms, Bath [Image courtesy of Colin Smith via Wikipedia]

Greg Thatcham the hero, starts off with his arm in a sling due to a bullet wound sustained in the Battle of Salamanca. Coming home because his older brother has died in a riding accident, Greg finds his father Sir Thomas, in very low spirits, so the two of them go to take the cure in Bath.

Richard, the youngest brother arrives in Bath with dispatches from the Ministry. In no time, he gets poisoned and poor Sir Thomas is frantic.

Sarah and her friend from schooldays Lizzie, manage to stay in better health but Lizzie must look after her Uncle Charlie, suffering from gout. Uncle Charlie [General Gardiner] thinks he's looking after her. 

Sarah and Lizzie make friends with youthful debutante Lavinia Keating and her brother John, who falls for Sarah, but in vain. That makes him another invalid if we count heartsick as a malady. 

Throughout the tale Greg suffers accidents, from being pushed under a fast-moving carriage to having the wheel on his curricle damaged. 

Everyone is under some kind of threat from the Nasty Villain Lord Percival. In addition to his dark deeds he means to have Sarah by hook or by crook. He nearly manages it and against all the rules of the independent heroine, Sarah does have to be rescued. Even an independent heroine could not survive a leap from the second floor of a house in The Circus onto stone paving.

Happily, all the invalids recover by the end of the tale.

It makes me proud that some readers consider Greg to be a worthy book boyfriend.

Also there has been praise for the setting as readers enjoy the different aspects of life in Bath.

The Basingstoke Canal

The Eighteenth Century was a time of 'canal mania'. As the industrial and agricultural revolution developed rapidly, canals were considered to be a cheaper and more efficient means of transporting goods in bulk than by using wagons on the poor roads of that era.

Hampshire had a thriving agicultural trade and Basingstoke was a well established market town. It was decided to build a canal from Basingstoke to transport the agricultural produce of North East Hampshire to the markets of London. The canal would link with the Thames via Byfleet and so create a 70-mile waterway to the Pool of London. Construction began in 1778 and took six years.

The Canal was moderately successful in its early years, due to the Napoleonic Wars. Because of French naval action in the Channel, coastal traffic was disrupted and it was safer to send those goods that used to go by sailing ship, along the canal.

In In All Honour, however, the road network has been improved and the canal, always over budget and needing a lot of maintenance, is not profitable. Sir Thomas Thatcham has decided to sell his share in the Canal but is waiting for the market to improve before he can make a decent return on his investment.