The rakess, p.1
The Rakess, page 1
Dedication
In memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, who is not a character in this book, but is the inspiration for it.
Content Warning
Fair readers, while this is a romance novel, it is a dark and stormy one. Here is a note on sensitive content, for those who like to know. (If you prefer to be surprised, skip this part!)
This book contains explicit sex; references to death of and abandonment by past romantic partners; trauma surrounding stillbirth, miscarriage and other aspects of 18th-century childbearing; sexual harassment, slut-shaming and misogyny; spousal coercion, kidnapping and control; and depictions of alcohol addiction and recovery.
Epigraph
“Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take;
But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.”
—Alexander Pope
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Content Warning
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Two Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Announcement
About the Author
Reader's Guide
Praise for the work of Scarlett Peckham
By Scarlett Peckham
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
I have devoured historical romance novels since I was a child. Which is why, perhaps, I am obsessed with rakes and ruin.
Growing up, it seemed like every other book I borrowed from the library was about a rake. You probably know him. He’s the bone-meltingly handsome dissolute second son of a marquess or an earl. Charming but feckless. Seductive but empty. So good at sex it is like he studied it at University. And so devoted to practicing these amorous skills that you sometimes worry for his health.
We would often meet our rake in the arms of his mistress (one of many), whom he would dispassionately bring to the throes of ecstasy before ambling to his club for a desultory liquid lunch with his friends. His friends were also rakes—that is, unless we had met them in a previous book—in which case they were reformed rakes, who were now hopelessly besotted with their heavily pregnant wives.
This last part was key. The rake, I came to understand, was like a caterpillar, existing in a preliminary state. His sexual appetites were compulsive because he was emotionally undeveloped. His world was a swirl of wicked pleasures because he was trying to fill a larger chasm in his soul.
How delicious, to be the one to fill it. Because, as the saying goes, a reformed rake makes the best husband. After all, the devoted rake, transformed into the most doting of spouses, is still handsome, charming, virile, and so good at sex that it is frightening. But he is also madly in love with you. You have made him whole.
The fantasy of the rake is powerful. But it is always interesting to turn a fantasy on its head, shake it a few times, and see what topples out. When I thought of changing the traditional gender identity of a rake from a man to a woman, it occurred to me that there is already a feminized version of the rake trope in romance. We call her the ruined woman.
You know who I mean. The well-born daughter with a past. Perhaps she has had a lover, or perhaps there have only been whispers of one. But regardless, it has colored the world’s understanding of her character and value. She is no longer marriageable, but she has been raised to only be marriageable. She must therefore either be rescued by a man willing to save her honor, or strike out in defiance on her own.
When the ruined woman falls in love, as she inevitably will, it will be with someone who sees past her damaged reputation to the wonderful person beneath. Often, she gets justice as well as love, winding up at the top of the society that tried to devalue her. Hers is a fantasy of redemption and vindication. And it is also delicious.
But her formative years are less appealing. For, unlike the rake, with his unrepentant wickedness and zest for erotic excess, the ruined woman is rarely living a life of pleasure. Perhaps she had a lover, who died before they married, or tricked her. But often, she did not even have a love affair—but has had her life destroyed by the mere suggestion of it. This is not a reflection of romance so much as a reflection of a double standard that persists in western culture: men who sleep around are admired for their virility, whereas women who sleep around are shamed for it, or worse.
And so it occurred to me that perhaps an interesting way to write a lady rake book was to combine the tropes of the rake and the ruined woman into one character. To make the heroine a woman who is blisteringly angry that she has been cast as ruined for a youthful affair, while her lover gets to be a rake. What happens if she objects to the very notion of ruin, and claims rakedom for herself?
And what happens when she falls in love? For in romance, neither rakedom nor ruin is ever the end of the story—it’s the beginning.
While cogitating on all this (eighty percent of romance writing is cogitating, sadly), I happened to pick up the book Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley. I read it in a few feverish sittings and came away with a burning, passionate love for Mary Wollstonecraft. This woman, I thought, was so like a romance heroine.
Among the things that she did in her life: founded a school; supported herself as a critic, philosopher, and novelist; conducted several intensely dramatic love affairs outside of marriage; embedded herself in Paris as a reporter on the French Revolution; traveled to Scandinavia alone with a baby to search for her lover’s lost treasure; gave birth to the author of Frankenstein; and had the singular posthumous experience of said daughter losing her virginity on her gravestone.
Oh, and she wrote a seminal work of proto-feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which called for a radical change in the way that women were educated, and argued that women were as capable of reason and independence as men.
Wollstonecraft believed fiercely in these things in part because she had watched her own female loved ones suffer from their limited career options. She watched dear friends marry to support their extended families, only to become trapped in abusive relationships or die in childbirth. She herself struggled to find ways to support herself and her sisters without the ability her brothers had to inherit family money or enter a more lucrative trade than the low-paying teaching and governess positions that were available to her.
And while she was certainly not a freewheeling rake, she lived life outside of society’s conventions. She disavowed marriage due to the way it proscribed a woman’s rights, and loved passionately and had a child anyway. None of these things came without a cost. She battled depression for most of her life, and twice attempted suicide after the father of her child left her. She survived, recovered, and continued seeking justice, career success, and love.
When she did eventually marry, in order to prevent her second child from facing the stigma of illegitimacy, she struggled with creating an equitable distribution of domestic labor in her home, so that she and her husband could both continue their professional work. But then, just when she was finally settling into a loving and equal partnership, finding joy in motherhood and also in the book she was writing—a gothic novel called Maria set in an asylum where the protagonist’s husband has entrapped her for defying him—she died from complications of childbirth.
Rather than celebrate her as the revolutionary thinker she was, her critics used the details of her life to paint her as an immoral woman, and dismiss her ideas. History has since corrected itself, thank goodness, and today her work is enshrined in feminist and historical scholarship.
But I am not a scholar. I am a romance novelist. I wanted to give her my kind of happy ending.
Because in Wollstonecraft’s story, what I saw were rakes, and ruin, and a woman who used every tool at her disposal to call out injustice and live her life as she saw fit. A woman who suffered for her ideals during her lifetime, and was slut-shamed upon her death. A heroine who deserved to get exactly what she wanted.
Seraphina Arden is not a direct fictionalization of Mary Wollstonecraft. But her opinions owe a large debt to Wollstonecraft’s ferocious intellect, fighting spirit, tumultuous emotions, and capacity for passionate love.
As a book critic, Wollstonecraft had many scathing criticisms of romantic novels. I have no idea if she would think this one is sentimental drivel by yet another scribbling woman. But I hope some part of her would have read Seraphina Arden’s story and found it, well, delicious.
Love,
Scarlett
Part One
From The Society of Sirens: A Memoir
By Seraphina Arden, 1827
Contrary to the legend, the night we formed the Society of Sirens did not begin as a revolt.
It began, ironically, with French champagne chilling in a silver bucket.
With me, wearing a new dress of scarlet silk and feeling my pulse beating in my throat as I applied the scent of bergamot to the hollows of my neck and thought, Tonight will mark the era of our vindication.
I remember swishing down the hall in that red gown, feeling like a dancer about to pirouette onstage after a lifetime of rigorous rehearsal. I stopped to pick up Jack Willow’s paper, so I could brandish it triumphantly as I greeted my three friends. I had rehearsed the words I would say to them in greeting, holding up our essay:
Relish it, my darlings. Look how far we’ve come.
So many years had passed since Lady Elinor Bell had first introduced us. Back then, we had been three lost, fallen girls, landing in Elinor’s parlor from disparate corners of society with only our low morals in common. I was the Cornish miner’s ruined daughter, correcting Jack Willow’s circular by day and bedding philosophers by night. Cornelia was Elinor’s niece, cast out by her aristocratic family when her relations with her painting tutor proved more than educational. And Thaïs was a lady of the night who had come to Elinor seeking donations to start a charity for girls forced into prostitution.
Elinor made daughters of us. She taught us that family could be hewn from love rather than blood. She showered us with guidance, introductions, and bequests, insisting that the misfortunes of our lives had been shaped not by any failing in our characters but by the concessions, injustices, and heartaches that made womanhood a kind of penalty.
She insisted on a principle that our biographies had theretofore contested: that we mattered. That girls—even so-called ruined ones—were not a thing that could be thrown away.
She’d saved us.
And now, with the publication of this essay, we were going to save others.
The article called for pledges to build a philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex. We’d all had a hand in crafting the proposal, but only Elinor had signed it. We’d thought this was a clever act of subterfuge. The Crown increasingly saw the faintest whisper of equality as sedition—to stamp such a proposal with the names of disgraced women would certainly raise ire.
We reasoned that the faultless reputation of a proper matron like Lady Bell could disguise the radicalism of our ideas enough to demand a hearing.
We assumed that Elinor—a matriarch, a wife, a viscountess—was safe.
But we were wrong.
For when I answered the door that night, Elinor was not with Cornelia and Thaïs.
Instead, they clutched Jack Willow between them—hunched and bleeding, with two black eyes. Thaïs was breathing shallowly. Cornelia, who never cried, was weeping.
“What’s happened?” I asked, rushing them inside. “Where’s Elinor?”
“He’s taken her,” Thaïs whispered. “Lord Bell. Says she’s gone radical and destroyed his good name.”
“Taken her?” I sputtered, still not understanding. “But where?”
Jack leaned against the wall. “He won’t say.”
Cornelia gestured at Jack’s swollen face. “He ransacked Jack’s shop. Said he’s going to the papers to expose Jack and Elinor as Jacobins and adulterers. Threatened to sue Jack for criminal conversation, shut down the whole press.”
Elinor had always dismissed her husband’s jealousy over her friendship with Jack as amusing proof that Lord Bell, beneath his bluster, loved her.
But Bell’s possessive streak had been a symptom of ownership, not affection. And Elinor, despite her greater intellect, her larger fortune, and her kinder heart, was her husband’s minion under law.
And he wanted her to know it.
We realized, that night, that we’d miscalculated; Elinor had never been safe. And if she wasn’t, no woman was.
And if no woman was safe, what was the point of being cautious?
If the finest lady any of us knew could be abducted from her home by the man to whom she’d dutifully borne two children, then what did adherence to the codes of feminine respectability protect?
Perhaps there was more freedom in being the kind of woman who was not respectable. For such women have little left to take away.
As infamous, unmarried ladies branded harridans and whores in the endless gossip about us in the papers, did we not possess a kind of power? Bad women, after all, are the subject of endless fascination to the sex that wants to subjugate us. We were accustomed to our misdeeds being chronicled in headlines, discussed in village squares.
Why not attach our ideas to this notoriety? Why not raise money for our cause by waging a war of shock and scandal?
It was only then that we opened the champagne. We raised our glasses not in a toast but in a vow: to create a place that would make the world more safe for women like Lady Bell. For women like ourselves. For all womankind.
And to get Elinor her freedom from Lord Bell.
Which is all to clarify the rumor that the night we formed the Society of Sirens had been planned as a rebellion all along.
It wasn’t.
Sirens, you see, are not born thirsting for justice.
Sirens are made.
Chapter One
Thirty years earlier
Kestrel Bay, Cornwall
June 1797
At the ungodly hour of half past two on a sun-braced afternoon, Seraphina Arden stood before her looking glass in her flimsiest chemise, squinting against the glare coming off the ocean as she removed pins, one by one, from her coiffure.
She unspooled a long curl from above her temple and arranged it to trail over her left breast, drawing the eye to the hint of pink one could just barely make out through her thin lawn shift. She untucked another tendril from her nape, letting it unfurl down the middle of her back. The effect was louche, as though she had been grabbed in a passionate embrace.
Perfect.
She was the very image of an utterly ruined woman.
Henri enjoyed that kind of thing, if she recalled.
It had been years since their last encounter, but the memory of those nights in Paris still made her breath catch. Even mediocre painters had a facility with their hands that elevated the purely carnal to an art form—and Henri’s work was celebrated on three continents.
She draped a cloak around her shift and set off down the coastal path toward the abandoned belvedere at the border of her property and Jory Tregereth’s. As weather-wizened as a ruin, perched precariously among the cliffs, the old folly afforded a magnificent view of Kestrel Bay, if one didn’t mind steps overgrown with tufts of purple fumitory weeds and winds that nearly knocked you over as you climbed.
The air smelled like her childhood—like brine and sand and pollen. A heady, salty scent that made her ill at ease. She had come here to remember how that era of her life had ended, but now that she was here, every memory of it smarted.
Henri would be good for her. He would remind her who she had become, and distract from the relics of what she’d lost.
She ascended the steps carefully, wincing against the bright, flat glare off the Kestrel. At this time of day, the light hit the cliffs in such a blinding arc it was difficult to parse the sky from the sea.
But she only had eyes for Henri.
He’d come early. He was leaning against the balustrade with his back to her, absorbed in sketching cliffs. Oh, but he was picturesque. Like a chiaroscuro, with his dark clothes and hair cutting against the misty vista of the ocean. She’d forgotten precisely how well formed he was: long and lean with those broad shoulders and strong arms and clever artist’s hands. She couldn’t make out his face, but in silhouette his jaw was better made than she remembered. The two years since their last assignation had agreed with him.
