As with all things, ends are inevitable. This will be my last post for Always Austen as the blog site winds down. Hard to believe this will be my forty-second post here at Always Austen!
However, posts and all that mean little without the presence of a woman, an author, and, I dare say, a friend who has offered advice, constructive criticism, and an example of excellence since I first began writing Austenesque fiction. Regina Jeffers is one of the pillars of our genre. Her stories are delightful, true, and are also excellent examples of what true authorship is all about. Her emphasis on plot and character development yields complete stories, true literary efforts, rather than tales that recycle characters in duplicative plots. She is the gold standard.
In 2017, Regina included me as one of the few thorns amongst the roses at a predecessor blog, Austen Authors. As a “newbie” in the genre, I can recall the fear I felt, wondering if my style of musings would aggravate an audience with expectations of something more in the fandom line—fashion, food, dance—rather than my historical, inside writing, musings.
Regina reminded me that Jane Austen wrote romance novels, of course, but historians can also use her as a primary source. The patterns of English rural and social life can be discerned if one reads Austen closely.
For instance, my own particular favorite—Mansfield Park—explores the rise of the sugar baron/merchant class. Yes, the elder Bertram owns Mansfield Park, but his fortune came from sugar and its by-product, rum. How long did it take—and how much did it cost—for him to rise from Mr. Bertram to Sir Thomas? And there it is. Austen did not need to answer that question because her readers knew exactly what was required of a man in trade who still owned plantations to become a gentleman and squire. However, two centuries later, this is a thought starter for those of us wanting to learn more by reading the history of Austen’s times.
Through her guidance, Regina permitted me to write my own style of historical Austenesque novels in which the Canonical characters exist in an environment that corresponds to Austen’s times. See The Sailor’s Rest set during Napoleon’s One Hundred Days, In Westminster’s Halls, which considers how ODC might have taken part in the great social debate over the abolition of the slave trade, or Ghost Flight, a World War II novel wondering how Darcy and Elizabeth would have done their bit in World War II. The Bennet Wardrobe Series introduces historical characters throughout the nine volumes.
So, I thank you, Regina, for your leadership, for your promotion of our genre, for your recognition that Austenesque fiction is more than fan fiction. Rather, she sees it as a way for writers to express themselves creatively as authors.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my participation in Always Austen. Thank you, dear readers, for making it the joy it has become.
For those who wish to continue to hear from me about Austenesque Fiction and other things writing, please visit my Substack, Austenesque Thoughts at
https://austenesque.substack.com
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Since I began writing over ten years ago, I have used my books to explore different writing styles. The Wardrobe books are time travel fantasies. Sailor’s Rest is a crossover tale between Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice. Longbourn Quarantine was my ‘Covid’ novella, expressing my disquiet at being confined through Canonical characters. Lessers and Betters considered secondary characters. Ghost Flight was a spy/espionage/war novel that took ODC out of England and stationed them in occupied France.
My latest, targeted for a mid-April drop date, is The Ambassador’s Wife: A Lessers and Betters Pride and Prejudice Variation. This novel of around 67,000 words uses the Lesser and Betters universe as its setting: Kitty Bennet and Richard Fitzwilliam—married for four years—travel to the Ottoman Empire’s capital, carrying the terms of a draft treaty between London and the Sultan. Henry Wilson, his wife, Anne (Reynolds), and James Foote joined them. There is a Russian assassin, along with French and Russian ladies of dubious character. Darcy, Elizabeth, Jane, and Bingley only appear in reference.
And there will be history to accurately set the stage of the political realm in the Eastern Mediterranean in the years after Napoleon’s final defeat.
How will Britain keep the Russians from allying with France? Will they preserve Egypt’s security and the path to India? How many will die in the process? And, will there be any love to be found along the way?
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(This is just an inspiration pic and not the cover)
Here is an excerpt from The Ambassador’s Wife, © 2026by Donald P. Jacobson. Reproduction is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
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Most killings pass without notice or justice.
Some, though, must not be ignored.
Anne Reynolds Wilson
***
He was dead.
He was killed.
He was murdered.
Three sentences heard three ways. All underline that the subject is dead, as stated in the first. The second suggests an involuntary departure from an outside cause but is silent on the nature of the death—illness, accident, or foul play. Murdered tells the audience that another of the two-legged persuasion did the deed and sent the victim across the Styx. There is no peaceful murder. Even a pillow over the face implies nails clawing in futility against determined hands. The word stands alone and refuses to sacrifice its potency to nuance.
From the journal of Lord Richard Fitzwilliam
British Mission Chancellery, Constantinople, June 28, 1819
Too much scar tissue laced his hands. Twenty years of charging the frogs had seen a dozen slashes ripped through his gauntlets; saber-injured tendons healed, but poorly, and left fingers weakened. In addition to Napoleon’s gifts, a fistful of swollen knuckles had denied Fitzwilliam youth’s dexterity at the ripe old age of forty. Remembering his father’s hands, he knew where to direct his gratitude. He still could manage his William Powell 10-bore shotgun well enough, but more delicate work, like dealing with his wife’s necklace, had to be left to her lady’s maid.
The mysteries of his neckcloth confounded him. Usually, his valet, Hastings, would have looped and knotted the waves and falls. The servant had been the general’s batman since the old days in India pulling John Company’s chestnuts out of the fire in India’s Maratha Wars. After Waterloo, Hastings had traded his scarlet jacket and sergeant’s stripes for the somber broadcloth of a gentleman’s gentleman. Hastings educated himself to polish his war-elevated baron, a man who had never been a lordling club lounger, into something reasonably à la mode.
But Hastings had fallen ill between Valletta and Athens and had been turned over into the care of the expatriate community’s doctor, one of Angus Campbell’s scattered relatives. This Doctor Campbell assured Richard that his man would shake this latest bout of jungle ague with time and a regimen of chinchona bark. Hastings had battled the disease since he had watched a young Lieutenant Fitzwilliam’s back when they fought with Wellesley at Assaye. Distinguishing himself in the destruction of Marathan cavalry, Fitzwilliam earned his captaincy, and Hastings his Chosen Man band. For the next dozen years, the two men had been joined at the hip following Wellesley from India to the Peninsula and, finally, to a steamy June in outside Brussels.
Fitzwilliam missed Hastings’s steady presence. Today, as in the old days when leading his troops into the massed blue of an Imperial column, little things stood out, items that Hastings would never have allowed to pass. In his experience, small mistakes precipitated utter disaster.
As he prepared his pre-dinner toilette, the barron demanded a metal basin from the Turk assigned to care for him in Hastings’s stead. Into this he had poured the ewer of tepid shaving water and put the hammered copper atop the brazier to bring the puddle to a rolling boil. Fitzwilliam was sure the servant thought him fey. June in Constantinople was temperate, but a sea coal-fed fire was unthinkable—unless you had seen a man’s leg blacken and die thanks to a wound washed with unboiled water. He submerged his shaving brush into this, scorching his face with blazing lather. His cut-throat razor endured a similar immersion. The general could shave himself, but he didn’t want to risk putrefaction because he had managed to nick his chin.
Thankfully, since they were in the ambassador’s house, and thus on British soil in an otherwise Mussulman country, the general would not have to brave the carafe thoughtfully placed on the nightstand. While none in his party—his wife, the Wilsons, and Foote—needed reminders, whiskey, wine, or beer were the only safe beverages. Richard Fitzwilliam would never have been foolish enough to drink water he had not seen bubbling for five minutes. Foreign wet had a way of turning British innards into twisted nightmares.
He snorted in disgust as the complicated knot he thought he had accomplished unwound when he took his hands away. Closing his eyes, Fitzwilliam tried to regulate his annoyance by focusing on the breeze wafting through gauzy drapes sheltering the window overlooking the Strait. Cooled by the mile-wide channel, the zephyr bathed him with eucalyptus’s scent. A stand of those trees shaded the residence. He felt his heart rate wane.
Two soft hands tenderly caressed his shoulders. “Do we have to call in the men of the Thirty-Third Foot to tie their colonel’s cravat?”[i]
Lady Kate Fitzwilliam’s silky soprano tickled his right ear. “If I had known you’d be so far out to sea with Hastings’s illness, I would have asked Annie if we could borrow Henry. The Sergeant is no Beau but knows how to wrap his neck with a serviceable Mail Coach knot.
“You realize that the last time anyone was fashionably late in our circle was when Caroline Bingley thought to impress the locals by showing up well into the Assembly’s first set.
“Lady Henrietta may wonder if our unpunctuality means her esteemed guests have gotten lost on their way to dinner. I got the sense that the lady is excited to have the society of a baron and his baroness around her table. This far from town, she is probably thankful to have any English bluebloods, albeit ones of recent military pedigree.
“Now, be a dear, and pour me a small whiskey from that portable drinks kit you keep hidden in your trunk against being stationed in dry climes. I must fortify myself before I try to set you to rights, Husband.”
Fitzwilliam marveled at how he had been so fortunate as to secure the hand of the brave woman who had sacrificed one eye and nearly her life to defend a child. Four years had passed since the Cecil Governess had thrown herself between a child snatcher and her charge, young Lady Margaret Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury’s granddaughter. Many tabbies of the ton still derided Lady Kate, claiming what her patch hid was disgusting. Their jealousy was manifold because she had secured Waterloo’s one unwed monument, Wellington’s Right Arm, Uxbridge and the Duke being unavailable on the marriage mart. They dared not speak their calumny in front of any of the Duchess of Wilton’s familiars—let alone the Countess of Matlock, who was one tea biscuit from the Patronesses themselves. Their social death would be swift and final. Instead, the sparrows whispered, allowing themselves to feel better, but impressing none who mattered.[ii]
His wife had never been just Kitty Bennet to him. She was so much more: his life-love, helpmeet, and the other half of his heart. He could never call his tigress by any diminutive, however endearing, as her sisters did. They had known her from the cradle, while the general became acquainted with Catherine Bennet after her twenty-first birthday. To Richard Fitzwilliam, she was Kate and only became Catherine in the most formal settings, usually when the Regent greeted her at a levée. However, even that august presence, like his late beloved mother, could not wrap his mouth around Lady Catherine more than once. His address quickly reverted to the more familiar.
Hearing fawning supplicants, those who presumed some acquaintance, greet the baroness as Lady Catherineleft him bilious. Richard’s aunt may have departed, but her presence remained like the aura of cheap cigarros in a Seven Dials brothel.
He turned beneath Kate’s hands and encircled her waist, trim despite her increase with their son Michael two years ago. Bending, Fitzwilliam drank deeply of her full lips and held the kiss until her fists pushed against his waistcoat.
Kate murmured into his chest, “Mama told me that men think of only two things. You willingly delay the second, a feast in the Eastern fashion, to focus on the first. I would have thought our rest after we arrived from the harbor would have left you sated.”
Fitzwilliam pulled back slightly to capture her gaze, raised one eyebrow, and scanned what he hoped was a saucy grin. “But my dear one, I would rather dine on you. Lady Liston won’t send the soup to the servants because we are tardy.”
“Besides, we have been apart for nearly two—whole—hours. I have quite forgotten if it is here,” Richard dove in to nibble beneath Kate’s left ear, “or here,” he quickly switched sides to nuzzle the downy skin on her neck’s right side, “that drives you to distraction.”
Her double squeal completed his investigation and earned him a swat on a broad bicep. “You, Richard Fitzwilliam, are an original and thoroughly incorrigible! I thought men in their fifth decade found more to love in horses and hounds than with their frisky younger wives.”
The general took her teasing about their age difference in stride. When he had courted her, he had feared the fifteen years between them would be an unbridgeable chasm. Not once nor twice but rather three times, Kate, with her china-blue right eye flashing like a star sapphire, told him she could only love a man who had known the world’s glories and sorrows. Her words assuaged his worry, but ’twas not until 1816, when she had engineered the reintroduction of Bingley and Darcy to her two older sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, that he understood her whole meaning.
In Thornhill’s parlor, the baroness had pointed at Bingley, still affable and puppyish at twenty-eight, and said, “Boy.” Then she nodded at Darcy. “Man.” With that, if possible, Richard was even more lost in love with the mighty woman who had made his life. Not that he did not like Bingley, but to be put in the same category as Darcy… well…
Releasing her, he padded over to a study oak sideboard—full English in its heaviness…I cannot imagine a battleship captain’s reaction when he saw this monstrosity winched aboard as part of the ambassador’s “baggage”—and busied himself pouring two fingers of uisge beatha into his kit’s silver cups. Kate’s favoring the fiery spirit only confirmed his assessment that she was unique amongst the women of his acquaintance. His mother, redoubtable as she was, rarely tippled the earl’s brandy and only then when something had overset her, a rare occasion.
Turning back toward the pier glass, he discovered he had misplaced his wife—not for long and not far, though. She had wandered over to the window, the curtains billowing to frame her gowned beauty. Now Fitzwilliam could do what he loved: conduct an inventory of someone who had only lived in dreams until that November morning in the Year Fifteen.[iii]
He found it hard to believe that his wife once had been a shrinking violet. He had only known her as the confident woman who had battled a brute for a child and then ignored her lowly station to follow her heart to his. She had blossomed under his mother’s and the marchioness’s tutelage to take her place in society as the Baroness St. Jean. Even with their instruction rooted in the ton’s hidebound forms, Kate Fitzwilliam was still her own woman.
She could have retired to the country, preferring to isolate herself from narrowed eyes and condescending smiles. Instead, color-coordinated eyepatches called attention to her loss as she cut a swath through the Season’s thickets. Although just twenty-four, Kate kept her corn-silk blonde coif tightly trimmed in a style more suitable for a matron who had just sent her youngest to Harrow. This idiosyncrasy stemmed from the months it took her hair to grow back after Annie Reynolds shaved her scalp before Maturin’s surgery. His wife pertly reminded Fitzwilliam that drying a young lady’s pile of hair demanded hours of leisure. She asserted that she had too much living to do and not enough time to do it. Kate had learned about the sharp edge upon which life balanced and declared she could not countenance wasting even an hour of it lounging by a fire with her tresses fanned over a chairback. However, she also mentioned a practical reason: the complicated coiffure of waist-length hair made it difficult to tie her eyepatch’s strap.
Richard, never one for convention, could not begrudge his beloved her unconventionalities—if that is what they were. Her refusal to follow the crowd in fashion, comportment, or speech made her unique in Fitzwilliam’s eyes, like a vein running through a marble slab. Kate bore her amendments with grace. Hers were not golden like those added by a kintsugi master mending a bowl, but still left anyone who met her with an appreciation of the profundity of her trek.
Richard tapped the cups together; their bell-tone clink drew her eyes from the garden. Looking over her shoulder, she lit the room with a radiant smile. Kate accepted her drink. “Let us slake our thirst. I will then put you to rights before Lady Liston writes a scathing note to your mother.”
Feigning terror, the general gulped his whiskey, lifted his chin, and presented his neck to Lady Kate’s tender ministrations.
[i] Major General Lord Richard Fitzwilliam, First Baron of Mont St. Jean, was colonel-in-chief of the Thirty-Third Regiment of Foot, often referred to as “Wellington’s Own.” Fitzwilliam’s father, the Earl of Matlock, had purchased a lieutenancy for his second son, the young man refusing any higher rank, declaring he needed to learn his trade from the bottom up.
[ii] Lady Emily Cecil and Catherine Bennet had met at a seminary in Sanditon in events that preceded Of Fortune’s Reversal. The young women became fast friends. Lady Emily married the Duke of Wilton. See Lessers and Betters.
[iii] While Fitzwilliam had encountered Margaret Cecil’s governess at dinners at Cecil House, Catherine Bennet barely registered with him until he witnessed her defense of the youngster on November 5, 1815 in Hyde Park. See Of Fortune’s Reversal.
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