Dancing the Maypole
Share/BookmarkLucky in Love
The twenty-six year old Edmund, Earl of Warenne accepts a challenge to win an impossible wager. At the risk of losing his favourite snuff box and being saddled with an ugly wife, Edmund agrees to court a desperate old maid sight unseen and have his honourable marriage proposal rejected in front of witnesses. He knows he’ll win; he’s lucky as well as thorough. Not really wanting to be saddled with an unpleasant life companion he decides to take extreme measures to ensure that the old maid finds his offer unpalatable. Fate flips its coin. Edmund’s natural optimism is put to the test as the coin is caught with tragedy facing upward. Will he be able to see the lucky side of life when he realises that sometimes to win is to lose?
Miss Priscilla Stanley is doomed. She’s the unluckiest woman ever born. If something good happens to her, she knows that if she waits long enough something bad will come of it. She’s very pretty with alluring curves, but she counts these blessings as curses because they attract all the wrong kind of men. She isn’t penniless. As soon as she marries she’ll receive a two thousand pound annuity left by her parents, but without a husband this fortune is frozen. Penniless, she’s forced to live with her Aunt and Uncle who view her as a harbinger of ill fortune. They hope to be rid of her before their house burns down or they die in a horrid accident. Unbeknown to Priscilla, her Uncle has agreed to pay her cousin Donald five thousand pounds if Donald can find a man to marry her and take her away. Priscilla has had many offers of marriage, but as ill-luck would have it, none of them took her to the altar. Fate appears to be nothing more than a heartless fiend who finds great pleasure in poking Priscilla with a stick, but when the Earl of Warenne comes to pay his addresses something strange starts to happen. Has she been the unluckiest woman in the world, or the luckiest?
Background to Lucky in Love
The idea for this “shorter” story was born in December 2006. The character’s names were in place and I knew about the wager, but that was it. At the end of November ‘07 I’d been trying to work on The Hired Wife, but that story wasn’t happy with me so I put it aside and decided I’d write a short story as a Christmas present to all my Members. Come December 25 it was nearly finished, but not quite. So this will be a Happy New Year present! I’ve had one cold or flu bug after another all December (another one coming on today). So it’s a miracle I wrote anything let alone a story over 30,000 words. I’ve never actually written this much in a month before so to break my record while sick is amazing!
There are several themes running through this story. The main one is luck. I didn’t know that it would be; I have no idea how a story will unfold as I write. The characters tell the story; I’m just the glorified secretary. When it came out that Edmund’s nickname was Lucky it all fell into place. How lucky was that?
I recently came across the book, The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman. I’m still reading it, but I finished his other one about spotting Gorillas. He’s a scientist who studies weird things…anyway he became interested in how some people perceive themselves as lucky and others perceive themselves as unlucky. He found some really fascinating patterns in the lives of lucky people. Basically it turns out that lucky people do make their own luck. It’s all about how we perceive what happens to us. Lucky people have just as many bad things happen to them, but they tend to see the positive as opposed to the negative. Richard Wiseman’s four principles of being lucky are (these are his words) 1) Lucky people create, notice and act upon the chance opportunities in their life. 2) Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings. 3) Lucky people expect good fortune…their expectations about the future help them fulfil their dreams and ambitions. 4) Lucky people are able to turn their bad luck into good fortune. I really like how he stresses that we can all make our lives luckier by changing our perceptions, attitudes and learning to see possibilities. No one is born unlucky! We can all be lucky if we want to be!!!
Another important aspect in the story is Edmund’s personality disorder. When these traits started appearing in the story I assumed he had OCD, but that didn’t really feel right. And sure enough, when I looked it up on Wikipedia at the bottom of the article on OCD was a link to OCPD. I’ve copied the information below from the Wikipedia site…
“Obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), or anankastic personality disorder, is characterized by a general psychological inflexibility, rigid conformity to rules and procedures, perfectionism, moral code, and/or excessive orderliness. Those who are suffering from OCPD do not generally feel the need to repeatedly perform ritualistic actions, a common symptom of OCD. Instead, people with OCPD tend to stress perfectionism above all else, and feel anxious when they perceive that things are not "right". People with OCPD may hoard money for future use, keep their home perfectly organized, or be anxious about delegating tasks for fear that they won't be completed correctly. There are four primary areas that cause anxiety for OCPD personalities: time, relationship, uncleanliness, and money. There are few moral grey areas for a person with fully developed OCPD; actions and beliefs are either completely right, or absolutely wrong. As might be expected, interpersonal relationships are difficult because of the excessive demands placed on friends, romantic partners and children.”
I read somewhere that people with OCPD feel they are normal and so don’t have any inherent problem with their “symptoms”. The fact other people think what they do is strange is seen as strange. I quite like that! Who’s the one with the problem? As with most disorders, no two people are exactly alike, so Edmund doesn’t have to have every characteristic on the list to have the disorder. And because he has a “lucky” mind set he would see his “disorder”, if he knew he had one, as a good thing!
One thing that continues to fascinate me is how we all have our own perspective, our own truth. I find this, unsurprisingly, woven into most of my stories. I just love seeing people and situations from different perspectives. The Duke of Strathmore is a new character, who was born in this story. Around his character is a shifting perspective of the man. He’s a story within the story. I believe he’d be called a sub-plot, not that he’d allow anything so plebeian to be applied to him! I’ve started his own story and he slots in perfectly in my Regency world as if he’d always existed. Perhaps he did! Sometimes I wonder about all these characters that walk into my head…did I make them up or were they already there waiting to be called onto my mental stage? Who knows! Cue the music for the Twilight Zone!
I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it!
