He jerked his hand away. “Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”
“I was, until someone touched my nose.” She rolled onto her elbow, just able to see him in the dim light of their bedroom. The new gaslights of London cast an orange glow in the room, so unlike the heavy darkness when they had first moved there. “Are you not able to sleep?”
“No, no. I just heard Charles, so I went to look in on him.”
She frowned. They had acquired a nanny after it became clear that Amey’s time was better spent teaching than chasing Charles or Isabella. “Mrs. Eccles is supposed to do that.”
“But I like to.” He leaned down and kissed her gently. “I am sorry that I disturbed you.”
“Well … so long as I am disturbed.” She kissed him more deeply, sliding her hand up his arm to find the collar of his nightshirt and undid a button. “And perhaps a little agitated…”
He made a long, shuddering inhalation. “Muse…”
“Rogue?”
“Give me a moment—” He rolled to the side and opened the drawer of his bedside table.
She ran a hand down his back to find the bottom edge of his nightshirt. “Inconceivable.”
“That is the plan.”
They were occupied then and on many nights with duties marital. Jane had found her muse as surely as Vincent had, and both of them, together, discovered that it was possible to receive inspiration from more than one muse. Even if that second muse were smaller and frequently given to interrupting those duties marital.
But that is for a later time. We shall leave them now with the privacy they have earned.
Afterword
First and foremost, I need to thank Joanne C. Hillhouse, an Antiguan and Barbudan author, who helped me with the Antiguan Creole English in the novel. By “helped,” I mean “rewrote it.” Let me explain why I decided to do this.
I grew up in the American South—specifically, the Piedmont of North Carolina and East Tennessee. The reason I’m being specific about this is that I grew up in a part of the United States that has very clear regional differences. People talk about “the Southern accent” as if it’s a homogeneous thing, but it’s really, really not. Accent goes far beyond how the words are pronounced, or the cadences used, and very much into the word choices and sentence structures. Language reflects the culture of the people using it, precisely because we use it to express ourselves.
There are also very distinct class differences in the way English is spoken. This is true everywhere, but the American South is one of the places where it’s really clear. A Southerner will often try to scrub the “country” out of their voice to arrive at the “genteel” Southern accent so that people won’t think they’re uneducated. And, if they move out of the South, where that distinction isn’t recognized, that requires scrubbing all trace of the South out in order to not be perceived as a “hick.”
Yet … when I go home, I’ll slide back into a Southern accent when I’m in a store so I don’t seem like an outsider. It’s code-switching at its most basic.
So, when I decided to set a book with a lot of action in Antigua, I knew that I wanted to represent the Antiguan Creole English. I also knew, from having watched people mangle the Southern American English, that understanding the nuances was going to be really, really important and really, really hard.
Harder than making my books sound like Jane Austen?
Yes.
Why? Because Jane Austen has been researched, and studied, and analyzed, so there’s no shortage of material available. It’s taught in school in the United States. I could grab a representative text and use that as my base. Even when I had characters who were speaking with an East London dialect, I could ask a friend to “translate” it for me. But the primary text? No shortage of material, and it’s material that I have been exposed to since a very young age.
Trying to find a representative text of Antiguan Creole English written by a native speaker in 1818? Welcome to colonialism.
The next best choice was to read a lot of work written by contemporary writers. (I recommend the works of Jamaica Kincaid, Joanne Hillhouse, and Marie-Elena John.) It was very clear to me that I could come up with something that a reader unfamiliar with the Caribbean region would accept. And it was also clear that I would completely screw up the nuances.
So I hired Joanne Hillhouse to translate the dialogue. I also rewrote sections because she made suggestions about places where the communication would be nonverbal. Language is complex and not simply what is said, but also what is unsaid.