C Harris: Where Shadows Dance

Yet, somehow, he had not expected the thoughts and images that now tormented him. The remembered warmth of her body beneath his on a stolen afternoon. The faint, evocative scent of starch mingled with honeysuckle. The way the morning light had quivered on the tops of her breasts when her gaze met his across the length of the chapel and she drew in an unexpectedly quick, nervous breath.

He raised the glass to his lips and then paused, his head turning as he caught the opening of a distant door, the sound of soft footsteps in the hall. His door swung slowly inward and Miss Jarvis— no , he reminded himself; his wife, the new Viscountess Devlin —stood on the threshold.

She wore only a thin chemise, her bare toes curling away from the cool floor, her eyes wide and dark in the night. “If you don’t want me here,” she said, “just say so.”

The wind billowed the curtains at the window and fluttered the loose hair about her face. He set aside his wine and went to her. If his nakedness caused her either embarrassment or alarm, she did not show it. He breathed in the familiar scent of her, and she lifted her face to him.

He covered her mouth with his and felt her hands slide up his bare back, pulling him close. He tangled his fingers in her hair, his thumbs brushing the soft flesh beneath her chin as he deepened the kiss. She pressed against him, and he felt the warm, remembered firmness of her body. Her breasts were small and high, her stomach gently rounded, her hair fragrant with the scent of flowers when he buried his face in her neck.

She threaded her hand with his and walked with him to his bed. He gazed into her eyes, saw her lips part. Reaching out, surprised to find himself trembling, he slipped the straps of her chemise from her shoulders.

“‘When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,’ ” he quoted softly with a smile, “‘and she me caught in her arms long and small ...’”

She stopped his words with her kiss, and he bore her down beneath him onto the tangled sheets of his bed. The wind filled the room with the scent of the distant sea and in concert with the moon set strange shadows to dancing around them. He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels passing in the street below. For his world had narrowed down to the silken hair that slid across his belly and the heated invitation of her legs wrapping around his hips and the gentle wonder with which his wife whispered, “Sebastian ...”

As difficult as it is to believe in this age of instant communication, word of the United States’ declaration of war on Great Britain, which occurred on 18 June 1812, did not reach London until 29 July—and even that was unofficial. The Baltimore Mary , which in Where Shadows Dance brings word of the war nearly two weeks earlier, is my own invention.

The United States was still treated as a plural noun in 1812; thus, Englishmen at the time said, “The United States have declared war on us.”

The diplomatic maneuverings of the summer of 1812 that form the background of this story were real, although far more complicated than portrayed here since they also involved Austria and Prussia. England did indeed bribe the Swedes with gold and promises of Norway—which at the time was part of Denmark—in exchange for Finland, which Sweden had recently lost to Russia. The Czar was indeed pushing—unsuccessfully—for a strong, active alliance with the British.

Richard Trevithick ran a London Steam Carriage from Holborn to Paddington in 1803; in 1808 he constructed his Steam Circus in Bloomsbury. The New Steam Circus described here in 1812 is my own invention.

Antonaki Ramadani was a real man, although he was actually the Chargé d’Affaires from the Sublime Porte, not the Ambassador. Yasmina Ramadani is my own invention. The extensive spying activities directed toward ambassadors to the Court of St. James that Ramadani describes were quite real.

The Surrey Docks in Rotherhithe were the center of the Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London. Rather than being boiled aboard ship as became the practice in later years, the blubber was cut into blanket pieces and brought back to London to be melted down. But by the early nineteenth century, the whales that had once filled the seas near England were nearly extinct and the industry came to be dominated by the American whaling fleets.

The intrigue surrounding the Survey of the Situation, provided to Napoléon on the first and fifteenth of each month by the French Minister of War, was inspired by a real event. From 1811 to 1812, a traitor in the General Staff of the French Army was slipping copies of these reports to an officer attached to the Russian Embassy in Paris named Alexander Ivanovich Chernishav. The smuggling of these reports to London is my own invention, although I have referenced the real event by using Chernishav’s name for my Russian colonel.

The story of Nathan Bateman is based on the autobiographical account left to us by Joseph Bates, an American sailor impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Thousands of American sailors suffered his fate. And yes, Bates was sent to London as a prisoner and thrown into a hulk on the Thames after the United States declared war on Britain. He survived to become a ship’s captain, a revivalist minister, and a strong champion of abolition and the separation of church and state, before dying an old man in 1872.