After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(109)

John was an idiot to offer anything. But he knew too well what it was like to have no hope of help and to find it anyway.

Here, he thought to the woman at the well who had shaken her head, denying his existence to the man who sought John. John had crouched hidden behind the bushes until the threat had passed. She’d looked at him then. She hadn’t spoken; she’d only nodded and left, as if she hadn’t changed his life with that simple denial. Here. I’m paying you back for that after all.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” John said. “I don’t want to be your friend. I’ll kill you on the battlefield if I have to. But if you’re desperate enough to die, you’re desperate enough to abscond. If you don’t want to go back, get rid of your damned officer’s coat and take mine.”

The man stared up at him. He looked at the coat, at the musket that John had tossed aside.

Slowly, he took John’s coat. “I won’t forget this,” he said. “I’ll pay you back someday.”

John had heard that particular promise before. He’d heard it when he saved his father from being crushed by a falling mast. He’d heard it when he’d rescued another man in the Rhode Island First on the battlefield. Half the time, white men didn’t even bother with empty words to assuage their consciences—at least not to the likes of him. The other half? They never remembered their promises. They didn’t have to.

John shook his head. “Don’t bother.”

“John?” Elijah’s call came from further in. “John, is that you down there? Are you wounded?”

He turned, leaving the British officer alone with his coat. He was already faintly regretting his choice—the late-autumn night was cold enough that he’d want that coat before morning struck.

He would never see the man again.

In the dark of the night, the man had no idea what John even looked like. Even if it were day, he’d never be able to distinguish John from any other black man. White men rarely could.

“I’m Henry,” the officer called after him. “Henry Latham, at your service.”

Henry Latham no doubt thought he was an honorable fellow. He’d tell himself that one day he’d return the favor, just as he assiduously avoided contact with anyone who looked like John. There was little use puncturing his illusions.

John knew that the roll of his eyes was hidden by the night, so he took care to imbue an extra dose of sarcasm in his tone. “I’ll be sure to remember that.”

“John?” Elijah was coming closer. “John, are you well?”

“I’m alive,” John called in return. “Alive and unharmed.” His body was already protesting the unharmed designation, his shoulder twingeing, his head still hurting.

Ha. He had already forgotten the name. He’d never hear from the man again.

Interested? You can get the standalone version of The Pursuit Of… by clicking here after June 26, 2018, or the full anthology of Hamilton’s Battalion here.





Teaser: The Devil Comes Courting



Captain Grayson Hunter knows the battle to complete the first worldwide telegraphic network will be fierce, and he intends to win it by any means necessary. When he hears about a reclusive genius who has figured out how to slash the cost of telegraphic transmissions, he vows to do whatever it takes to get the man in his employ.

Except the reclusive genius is not a man, and she’s not looking for employment.

Amelia Smith was born in Shanghai as a child and was taken in by English missionaries. She’s not interested in Captain Hunter’s promises or his ambitions. But the harder he tries to convince her, the more she realizes that there is something she wants from him: She wants everything. And she’ll have to crack the frozen shell he’s made of his heart to get it.

Click here to find out more about The Devil Comes Courting.



Author’s Note





I got the idea for this book many years ago when I was reading ecclesiastical law for fun, because that is a thing that I do.

Specifically, I was reading about annulments, because there is an idea that is sometimes promulgated in historical romances that annulments are relatively easy to obtain as long as you don’t consummate the marriage. This is not actually true; annulments are terribly difficult to obtain, even if you have never had intercourse, and most of the ways that people claim you can annul a marriage are, in fact, not accurate.

So yes—to the best of my ability, what Adrian and Camilla discover about annulment over the course of the book is correct.

You can annul a marriage for lack of consent, but the standards for “lack of consent” back then do not track what we consider to be a lack of consent today.

What Adrian says about not holding yourself out to be married is true—if you told people a woman was your wife, even if you were married at gunpoint, the ecclesiastical courts might claim that you had consented to be married after the fact.

If someone tells you that they can determine virginity on physical inspection, they are lying to you.

Like just about everything else in life, it was a lot easier to get a marriage annulled if you had power and money. I exaggerated the degree to which that mattered in the two stories of Miss Laney Tabbott and Jane Leland, but it still mattered.



I got the idea for some of the specifics of this book back when I was writing The Suffragette Scandal in 2014, when I wrote this line: “It would be like the Archbishop of Canterbury calling a select club of his compatriots ‘Bad, Bad Bishops’.” For some reason, the phrase “Bad, Bad Bishops” just tickled the heck out of me, and it became the code name for this book.