10. Bad romance
The stalker is stalking... or is he? And Angela's love interest is introduced (and deleted)
In this week’s extract we move Angela’s story along and introduce a B-plot: her love story with “the duke”. The duke is the Duke of Wellington, AKA Arthur Wellesley, AKA the former prime minister, AKA commander of the British Army and victor of the Battle of Waterloo. You can see why I didn’t want to make a “thing” of him. Like Dickens, the last thing this novel (or any of my novels) needs is extremely famous men soaking up the limelight. I also felt uncertain about how to address him: Arthur? Mr Wellesley? I kept him anonymous, and just refer to him throughout as the duke.
In his heyday, he looked like this:
When The Household is set, and when Angela, who was 33, was in love with him, he looked like this:
Yes, Angela was in love with a 78 year old. In some ways I…can sort of see why? The power, the dizzyingly impressive career, the gravitas. But in other ways…a 45-year age gap is quite something. I don’t think I’ve even mentioned Angela’s wildly unconventional habits in this area: she eventually married a 27-year-old in her late 60s.
In his letters to Angela, you can tell the duke is genuinely fond of her. In some there is a vaguely sexual undertone – one, that advises her on how to “keep warm” at night, is not even an undertone. The staircase he built at his Hampshire home, Stratfield Saye, between their two bedrooms is the stuff of legend. Maybe they did get it on. She certainly did propose to him, and he declined. She didn’t go on to marry anybody else until Ashmead Bartlett, the 27-year-old, who wasn’t even born when these events were taking place (that is a whole other post: he was an American, therefore an alien, and so she had to forfeit some of her fortune as per the conditions of the inheritance).
I was quite excited to try my hand at a love story with an age gap. I don’t really do romance in my novels. There’s a notion that the two things that are impossible to truly capture in writing are love and pain, and I think that’s true. Writing this first scene with Angela and the duke felt very out of my comfort zone: it was uncharted territory for me, and generally romance is something I shy away from. I don’t mind reading it but writing it isn’t for me. I cut this entire scene and that was the right decision.
The reason? It isn’t very good, and also I was trying to shoehorn in a thing that happened IRL but not in this timeline, when the duke had a massive go at Angela for calling on him and waiting in the study when he was getting dressed upstairs, just in case somebody else arrived and associated the two unrelated situations. Prudish much? Anyway, it just doesn’t work, or certainly not as an intro. I wanted their love to feel nice and genuine and like a relief from the darkness of Richard Dunn, and him having a go at her in his debut appearance doesn’t achieve that. A lesson that sometimes you have to let go of the nice little anecdotes you find that make great “bits” for a story.
Here is our tenth extract:
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