His Wicked Promise by Samantha James

[meganbmoore]

Widowed Glenda MacKay returns to her family home after her uncle’s death only to find that, during his long illness, most of his serfs ran away due to raiders, the estate is virtually bankrupt, and no one has any discipline. Most of this appears to be the fault of a neighbor who is supposedly behind the raiders. He wants to marry her, of course. To

Comments

[meganbmoore]

I have no idea what you're saying and request that you not use that word at my LJ.

[southerndave]

... How fitting it is that you review something like this when a planet full of people like myself (who should never be let near a word-processor) are cranking out 50,000 word chunks of the most awful prose you could ever imagine. (How bad? I recognised some of the tricks I used to keep up my wordcount for nanowrimo in an excerpt from Twilight that - I think it was you - put up as an example...)

[meganbmoore]

I don't think I've ever stooped to putting excerpts here, though I may be wrong. Not brave enough to check.

[southerndave]

Someone else might have quoted it, or it may have been elsewhere... I have no desire to go back and look for it, either...

[sundae_sweet]

Refers to her as a possession? Please tell me he gets shot at the end?

Well, I guess that's a long shot since he seems to be the hero. Here's hoping that ten years down the line, he contracts a grave case of syphilis.

[meganbmoore]

Sadly, no.

[raincitygirl]

Wow, that's....bad.

It always struck me as frustrating that most high-born women farmed their babies out to wet nurses for, well, centuries. I know, I know, hard to buck tradition and so forth. But lactation would've provided at least *partial* protection against conceiving again too soon, and in an era before modern contraception, partial is better than nothing. This whole thing where women have 14 babies in 16 years, and then we're *surprised* when they fall down dead. Well, it's frustrating.

I remember reading somewhere that one of the Dukes of Norfolk (I believe it was the one who was played by the Ninth Doctor in the movie and got his head chopped off) lost all three of his wives to death in childbirth. Three! I mean, okay, in those days it was probably pretty common to lose one wife in childbirth. But after the second one died, wouldn't you start thinking about, well, non-procreative kinds of sex when you get married for the third time? On account of not wanting any more wives to die?