Shoulder to shoulder with her friends, the familiar scents of their perfumes in her nose, she felt the pressure ease behind her eyes. Sebastian’s presence was there, too; warm and gentle like a shielding blanket against her back. The coil of tension in her chest unspooled. Nothing was normal these days, but there was love surrounding her. One could master new shores.
The great clash of empires, over a century in the making, had left once-powerful old institutions across Europe broken beyond repair. The Russian royal family was wiped out, the German monarchy abolished, Austria-Hungary had split, and the Ottoman Empire had fallen. While the United States had begun her rise as a new global power on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had been badly battered, and even its insulated, glacially slow-moving world of the aristocracy was facing change. Annabelle did not fear change as such; here, it could be a good thing. She was, however, apprehensive about the chaos that so often erupted into the voids of power. Sometimes, of course, something new had long been preparing in the wings, raring to claim its rightful place should the opportunity arise. On the other side of the street, the women moved slowly, patiently, toward the ballot box. The hats in the queue ranged from fashionably large flower-laden ones to the now bygone smaller models of her youth. Her nose stung with tears, after all. She felt Hattie’s hand in hers and clasped it tightly.
“This is a new dawn,” she said.
“It’s rising over ruins, though,” Hattie murmured.
“Yes,” said Annabelle, “but we are looking at the silver lining.”
Author’s Note
Inspiration for Elias’s story
In 2017, the FBI raided the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to collect a Phoenician marble bull head from Lebanon’s Temple of Eshmun. The sculpture had been stolen from its safekeeping location during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s and had ended up in the hands of an American art collector couple. Legal action was required to have the piece returned.
Artifact theft is an old story. In the Victorian era, the rulers of China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire designed legislation to limit the outflow of local heritage into the hands of foreign collectors. A 2017 Washington Post article (“Indiana Jones and the Big Lie”) highlights reactions to these measures at the time: In the 1870s, an American consul . . . advised Heinrich Schliemann, a German-American tycoon who had smuggled valuable treasures out of the Ottoman Empire, that permitting “any part of them to go into the absurd collection of rubbish which the Turks call their ‘Museum,’ would be worse than throwing them away.”
The history of Lebanon is long, fractured, and complex, and I only capture a small slice of its rich tapestry in this novel. For those interested in reading more on the themes mentioned, I recommend the works of Ussama Samir Makdisi and Akram Fouad Khater. As for Elias, it hurt to make him leave the mountain, but it is representative of the Lebanese experience throughout the centuries—about forty percent of Mount Lebanon’s population left between the 1860s and the end of World War I. Today, more Lebanese people live outside Lebanon than in Lebanon.
Artistic license
I merged “A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town” (John Gardner) with Richard Skinner’s “boy meets girl; boy loses girl; man hunts whale.”
The Phoenician wine press in Tell el-Burak was discovered in 2020.
The Married Women’s Property Act (MWPA)
The MWPA amendment was not sponsored by the Duke of Montgomery—who is a work of fiction—but by the man who inspired his character, Lord Selborne. Selborne was a conservative peer who eventually changed his mind and supported women’s rights, and he successfully introduced the bill to the House of Lords on February 14, 1882. It passed into the House of Commons later that year and was passed with amendments on August 15. To better convey the tone of the debate surrounding the bill, I merged the statements made by Sir George Campbell, Mr. Warton, and Mr. Fowler during an MWPA committee meeting on August 11 with the August 15 sitting; see the minutes for August 11, 1882, Hansard 1604.
The Writ for Restitution of Conjugal Rights
In 1884, Parliament abolished the jail penalty for noncompliance thanks to Weldon v. Weldon, an 1883 divorce court decision. Mrs. Weldon had sued her husband for restitution, which was highly unusual. Previously, Captain Weldon had tried to commit Mrs. Weldon to an asylum on grounds of her spiritualism, because he wanted to live with his mistress. When the court granted Mrs. Weldon’s plea, the law was swiftly changed to spare other men Captain Weldon’s fate. For this story, I changed the timeline of this event to 1882.
Gifted women in the Victorian era
Today, Catriona would probably be classed as gifted, with giftedness being a form of neurodiversity. Giftedness is traditionally perceived as positive, but the inherent overexcitability may express as impaired executive function, intense emotions, sensory issues, and anxiety. Some traits, such as valuing content over presentation, continue to be coded as “typically male,” which makes it more challenging for gifted girls to feel they belong. I imagined such a woman in late Victorian Britain. As a working-class woman, she would have had little time or energy left to apply herself after work, childcare, and chores. In the middle and upper classes, the new cult of domesticity sidelined women who refused to fulfill an increasingly narrow role. “Good and Bad Mothers” is an actual article, reflective of attitudes at the time, and I imagine a thick skin was required to ignore the shaming. We will never know how many female contributions are missing from science, the arts, and politics, just because rigid gender norms forced women to choose between sharing their gift or being socially accepted. I’m forever grateful to the women who came before me who found the strength to be true to themselves under such circumstances. We stand on their shoulders when we choose who and where we want to be today.
Acknowledgments
To my readers—I want to thank you for your patience. While I began writing in 2020, various grievous events converged and it took me a year longer than planned to finish this novel.