Dancing the Maypole
Share/BookmarkThe Hired Wife
Marshall Godfrey the 8th Viscount Raynham is in need of a wife, but his strenuous efforts to acquire one through normal channels have failed. He's out of patience and out of time. His twin sisters are being launched into society, but he can only hear within a very short distance. How can he protect them if no one tells him what people are saying? His plan is to hire a woman to hover at his shoulder and repeat into his ear what people are saying, but he can't take a secretary into polite society.
The fourteenth applicant is a thin bonneted creature in old ill-fitting clothes. She slowly unties the ribbons and removes the hideous hat hiding her face. She isn't ugly, but. Marshall's unfavourable assessment is suspended as the small window behind the solicitor's desk becomes a golden square. Sunshine breaks through the overcast sky, bends around several corners and showers the woman with light. She looks like she's stepped out of the Dutch paintings he saw on his grand tour. Poetic words sprout through his melancholy like brightly coloured tulips. She's plain, but there's something pleasing about the woman with honey coloured hair.
She can't possibly be the one. She probably has an irritating voice. She's probably in love with some Vicar. She probably smells like a close stool. She'll probably be unfit for purpose. He meets her curios expression with a scowl, she looked hungry. If she passes all the tests she'll be more inclined to become a temporary wife.
Background to The Hired Wife
The idea for The Hired Wife was born years ago after reading an article in an English newspaper about an aristocrat who’d married a farmer’s daughter. They met at a dinner party and when she asked him what he did for a living he handed her his business card. She read the word Marquis and commented that, that was an interesting name. He had to explain it was his title. Clearly she’d never read any historical romances! They’re a really cute couple, but it was the fact that he has a physical handicap that sparked the idea for this story.
I knew from the start that my hero, Marshall, had a severe hearing impairment; the same hearing impairment as my husband. Before meeting my husband it never occurred to me that we all have different hearing. Obviously I knew some people couldn’t hear well and some were deaf, but it’s actually a lot more complicated than that. Our hearing is as individual as our ability to perceive colour.
If I stand within five feet of my husband and I have his attention I can talk in a fairly loud-normal tone and he can piece together what I’m saying using lip reading to fill in any holes. If I step back two more feet he won’t hear anything unless I shout and even then he just hears noise. He prefers me to be immediately to his right ear where I have to be careful to speak in a soft normal tone or it’s too loud and it hurts his ear! If I turn my back to him while I’m talking he hears only noise even if I’m right next to him.
How do you find love when you have to move into someone’s personal space (which usually makes people extremely uncomfortable at the best of times) and put your ear near someone’s mouth to really hear what they’re saying? Today there are many mechanical and technological aids that make it easier for people with hearing impairments to find love. I suspect most of the aristocracy inflicted with this handicap would have ended up in arranged marriages and hoped for the best.
It must have been phenomenally difficult for people hard of hearing two hundred years ago. Even growing up in the sixties my husband faced incredible prejudice. The powers that be had decided that they could teach children who were deaf and hard of hearing…to hear! This really happened. Needless to say, some children didn’t learn much because the educational authority at the time thought that teaching deaf children sign language would impair their ability to learn to hear. The mind boggles. My Goblin is very smart, but of course many people including some of his teachers equated hearing impairment with a low IQ. He still faces this mentality on a regular basis as my hero would have done daily.
I looked up historical hearing aids and found some really fascinating tools people would have used in the Regency period. Women were lucky because they could use fans to help channel the sound into their ears. There was also this metal fan someone invented that could be place against the teeth; it channelled the sound through vibrations in the teeth to the ears. I don’t know how well it worked. And of course they had ear trumpets which came in various sizes and designs for both men and women. I consciously chose not to use hearing devices in the story, though Marshall would have needed ear trumpets for certain occasions. I also chose not to write out what Marshall’s words would have sounded like, but he would have had a pronounced problem with pronunciation.
Marshall only advertised for a servant, but it wasn’t unheard of in 1800 for people to advertise for a spouse in a newspaper! After starting The Hired Wife I came across the website for the Chawton House Library. This organisation saves and promotes early women writers and their work and have put various novels on line. I randomly chose one called The Enchantress published in 1801 and found to my delight that it starts out with the hero having put an ad in a newspaper to find a wife. The novel starts with…
IN the most fashionable newspapers in the month of March, 17, appeared, for several successive days, the following advertisement.
"A MAN wants a wife. If any woman of sense, virtue, and spirit, will venture to answer this notice to Q——, at the —— Coffee-house, —— street, she shall have no reason to repent her condescension."
Some would argue that it’s impossible to find love by answering an ad, but I would have to disagree! I met my Goblin after answering his personal ad on a singles website for members of our church. I suppose it wasn’t as romantic as tripping over a crack in the sidewalk and falling into his arms, but we lived on opposite sides of the world so that probably wouldn’t have happened…probably. The last ten years have been the happiest of my life; I’m so glad I answered that ad! My Goblin’s hearing impairment has turned out to be a blessing. I can listen to my music really loud all night if I’m on a writing streak and his sleep is undisturbed. I can sing off key and he doesn’t notice. I can listen to the same song fifty times in a row really loud and he can’t hear it to be irritated and threaten to divorce me to retain his sanity. Lucky me!
The heroine of The Hired Wife is named Mary Donne. Both of her names are woven into wordplay throughout the story so it’s important to understand how her name is pronounced. This is why when Marshall addresses her it’s spelled Merry Dunne. She’s named after John Donne, an English poet (1572-1631). Poetry is woven through the story. Marshall loves poetry and enjoying having it read to him. John Donne is one of the main poets I use, though there are a number of others. I love Donne’s poetry, though some of his poems make me feel really stupid as it takes me several readings to understand what he’s talking about. I didn’t use any of those poems in the book. Donne must have had a beautiful voice (he was renowned for his sermons as the Dean of St Paul’s). It was Donne who wrote, “Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” After working on this book for four years, I feel like I should be ringing bells to celebrate its completion.
I’d like to thank my sister Sarah for reading the unfinished manuscript and pleading with me to finish it so she could read the ending. I promised her I wouldn’t work on any other romance until The Hired Wife was finished and I didn’t. I hope you enjoy reading The Hired Wife as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
