Excerpt: The Horrid Miss Clarke

It had never occurred to Heloise to be disobedient to her father’s wishes, for she loved him dearly and in her eyes he could not do wrong. If it was his wish that she marry the mysterious Bertrand, it was not for her to question his decision; she did not doubt that there was some good reason for it.
 
This time, the loud clank of the doorbell tore Lucy away from medieval France and the sad fate of the Lady Heloise. Realising that it was impossible for her to accomplish any more writing that morning, she opened the drawer of her desk, put her recently begun novel inside, and locked it. She did not want anyone to find her latest oeuvre; Lucy had taken good care that no one, not even her closest relatives and friends, would ever find out what she did to provide for her family. It was not that writing novels was a pastime unbefitting a lady; nor was getting published. There were many famous women writers who were highly regarded. But Lucy’s novels were different; they were of the kind the Minerva Press usually published, and while they sold well and provided Lucy with a regular income she knew that the censorious would have something to say to the matter. It was better to keep this particular part of her life secret and publish under a pseudonym – Eugénie de Léon. She had even developed an entire fictional biography for her alter ego. Madame de Léon was a French émigré, who had made it to England by the skin of her teeth some ten years previously, and who was now writing novels in order to earn a living for herself and her children. Madame de Léon’s husband had naturally ended his days on the scaffold, nobly sacrificing his own life for that of his wife and children. No one suspected that the amiable French matron did not exist, and that the novels purportedly written by her were the work of a twenty-year-old Englishwoman, whose father’s stinginess had driven her to desperate straits.