England, 1794: What a time to be alive!
Charlotte Goddard has spent her life performing. First, as Charlie, the stable hand raised in breeches by her highwayman father, and then as Beau Scamp, the notorious road thief whose reputation does considerably more work than her actual skills.
When a botched robbery brings her face to face with Lady Catherina Pemberton—the childhood friend Charlotte has loved since she was twelve—she finds herself talked out of fleeing to America to avenge her father’s death and instead talked into the most ill-advised disguise of her career: maid to the woman she’s desperately in love with, in the house she’s been robbing, and under the noses of everyone who wants her hanged.
A screwball Georgian caper with real blood in its veins. Beneath the wigs and pistols, a tender meditation on grief, class, and the difference between a hiding place and a home.
For fans of Emma R. Alban, TJ Alexander, and Cat Sebastian
England, 1794: What a time to be alive!
Charlotte Goddard has spent her life performing. First, as Charlie, the stable hand raised in breeches by her highwayman father, and then as Beau Scamp, the notorious road thief whose reputation does considerably more work than her actual skills.
When a botched robbery brings her face to face with Lady Catherina Pemberton—the childhood friend Charlotte has loved since she was twelve—she finds herself talked out of fleeing to America to avenge her father’s death and instead talked into the most ill-advised disguise of her career: maid to the woman she’s desperately in love with, in the house she’s been robbing, and under the noses of everyone who wants her hanged.
A screwball Georgian caper with real blood in its veins. Beneath the wigs and pistols, a tender meditation on grief, class, and the difference between a hiding place and a home.
For fans of Emma R. Alban, TJ Alexander, and Cat Sebastian
1794
On a heath outside West London
You might wonder how a young woman disguised as a man ends up pressed against a craggy oak after sunset, frantically fumbling with an older woman’s corset while the corset owner herself, one Lady Pemberton (yes, the Lady Florence Pemberton of Noyes Hall), cries out for “the thrust of your sword!” The answer, I’m afraid, involves a great deal of poor planning, a death in the family, and an alarming number of attempts to prime a flintlock pistol while hanging upside down from said oak tree.
The evening had started off well enough. I’d invented an entirely new command with which to threaten stagecoach passengers; quite different from my late father’s, whose rumbling “Stop!”, while to the point, lacked the creativity of his drunken retellings. Mine had been working a treat for two months that summer, earning me nearly one hundred guineas worth of pretty treasures thus far.
“I’ve cocked my cannons, and my aim be true,” I bellowed with as much alto bravado as a twenty-year-old woman can muster while good horse Tedmund shuffled hooves into the soil. Then I pivoted my Queen Anne flintlocks on the coachman before he could reach for his rifle. “Stand! And deliver!”
But the man did not grab his musket, nor stand, and instead withdrew a long tobacco pipe from his coat.
“Ooh,” came a rising, quivering howl from inside the carriage, definitely female in nature, definitely familiar, and definitely unencumbered by any adjoining shouts from male passengers. Why on earth was Lady P traveling alone again, with only an unarmed driver, on a known thoroughfare of thievery? Hadn’t I just robbed her of a dozen pearls two weeks previous?
“I—” My throat caught. “Now, madam! Out with you!” I gave a leg to patient Tedmund, coaxing him up to the carriage, a pistol still trained on the driver. He sighed and reclined for a good long sit.
The coachman, that is, not Tedmund.
The small door swung wide, banging against the side of the carriage.
Out poked the woman’s silver-blonde curls and freshly powdered face. “I haven’t the time, young man. I’m expected at home. You come to me.”
I eyed her coachman again, who was now plugging leaf into his pipe.
Could be a trap. It should be a trap, considering the woman’s high station and our previous entanglement. Two against one at the very least. She might well want revenge. A guard or two might lie in wait behind those poplars just down the road. I’d seen Papa take on three men at once that had surprised him in such a way.
The leather of my saddle creaked as I peered into the coach, which was lit by a single candle and filled with the scent of rosewater and wood wax. Besides Lady Pemberton’s overflowing blue gown and plaid wool blanket, there seemed no other place to hide. Still, she might yet have something firm with which to strike me, hidden betwixt those abundant folds.
She offered a gloved hand. “Haven’t you anyone else to ravish?”
There had been no threat of such an impropriety, I’ll have you know.
I turned her hand and raised its palm to my lips, saying low and huskily, “M’lady, had I known it was you, I would have yielded.” I kissed the satin glove. “’Tis a quiet night. And my reputation precedes me, leaving this route quite abandoned.”
Florence Pemberton settled back into her cushions with a spark in her eye. “I suppose you’ll want to give me a once-over then. I could spare a few minutes.”
But I still didn’t trust the coachman, whom I didn’t recognize. My father had known most of the drivers in these environs, and Roger Jones of the manor should have been on duty tonight.
“The air is temperate. I’ll have you disembark.” I swung my leg off Tedmund, dismounted, and tucked my remaining flintlock into my leather belt.
“As you wish,” she said with a sniff.
I unfolded the steps and offered my hand. She regarded it for a moment, then set her fingers in mine.
Lady P was a widow of forty-six, whose beauty had grown brittle since I was a small lad-lass working her husband’s stables. Still fetching enough in the starlight, all shimmering ringlets and pale silk. What struck me wasn’t her finery, but how impossible it seemed that we were the same species, let alone the same sex. Was she truly made of finer stuff, or was it all just expensive wrapping?
I wasn’t above investigating the truth beneath it all.
“My lady.” I escorted the gentlewoman behind the coach, well out of the coachman’s sight, and presented her to the starlight upon the dark road, where our exchange might have maximum impact. Thankfully, I was just taller than her, so that she must gaze upward and yield the upper hand. I am tall for a lad-lass but not so much that I stand broad and bold next to the male sex, so I am careful with whom I face-to-face on nights such as this.
With a squeak from the carriage, the coachman climbed down and sauntered off in the opposite direction, the smoking spice from his pipe conveniently adding to the ambience.
I fingered Florence Pemberton’s hair, complimenting the cascades of ringlets dangling about her face, murmuring something about “ribbons of gold” and eyes that shone “like midnight on the Caribbean Sea,” a place I’ve yet to visit but earnestly tried to imagine.
“I shall make you very rich,” she whispered. “Or whatever your sort deem rich.”
“And I shall make you quite ecstatic.” Yet only in my imagination and from books did I understand what this was to mean.
Still, I am a quick study, and before I knew it, Lady P had advanced me into the wood and up against the self-same oak—the stalwart, judgeless anchor of our story.
“Your face,” the matron’s fingertips brushed my cheek as she whispered, “so smooth for a man so wicked. Nary a whisker in sight.”
Good Lord.
With heaving breast, the woman’s passion grew wild and carried me off kilter so that I very nearly forgot to pluck the ivory brooch from her collar. As I kissed down her pale neck, her hand wandered up my thigh. And as you suspect, dear reader, I would soon be caught out by the absence of desired implement, but hark, was saved by the clop of horses galloping in from all directions.
I pulled away. So, it was a trap after all, and I had more urgent matters than the discovery of my maidenhood.
“What on earth,” the gentlewoman gasped. “Oh, oh!”
A gruff baritone called out, “Lady Pemberton, where are you?”
Another one. Younger. “My lady, are you hurt?”
“Of course not, you fools!” Lady P’s shocked outrage told me that they had followed without her permission, and that perhaps the coachman had been in on it all along.
She straightened her countenance and strut-stumbled from the woods to greet them, hopefully concocting a story to save her own reputation and thus my skin in the process.
I did not waver to find out but instead scrambled upward, knowing I could not outrun them. As the horsemen thundered past the tree into the woods, I hoped to have outfoxed them. I only required Lady P to lie, to insist I had galloped off. But alas, poor Tedmund stood along the verge, grazing on grass, bemused by my predicament. When the soot came off his one white sock, they’d surely know who the highwayman was and locate me in the stables.
“Where the hell are you, you bloody cur?”
“We’ll hang you from this very tree!”
“Get her to the coach. Keep her safe. Fan her off!”
Fan her off indeed.
I knew those voices. It was Roger Jones and his lads. I’d been their target plenty of times, even without a mask. This would not only cut my road career short, but also my life. Acorns pelted the ground as I scrambled higher still, the oak branches sturdy at first and then thinning out, reaching as they do for sunlight in the day.
A loud CRACK fired from below, and a ball whizzed by like a question.
The following screech told me Lady Pemberton was not quite sealed up, nor going quietly along with the plan to end me before my time.
Roger unloaded his musket with another BOOM up into the oak. A nearby heart branch split and plummeted to the ground. I lurched and tumbled backwards, managing only to hold on by the backs of my knees—a reluctant acrobat.
More pellets ripped through the leaves as I swung back and forth, and my tricorne dropped to the earth. My mask stayed on, but my long hair threatened to untie.
Jim Jones’s upside-down face came into view in the flickering firelight of a torch. He and Bill were attempting to climb up after me, with moderate success. I pulled from my belt one Queen Anne pistol only to remember that while, yes, I had “cocked my cannons,” I had stopped loading them for fear of actually killing someone or shooting my own foot off. No longer willing to consider pacifism, I fumbled for my shot bag. Sweating and trembling, I rammed the powder, patch, and ball into the barrel.
I meant to fire a warning shot, but of course, being upside down and hanging by the legs, I spilt much of the gunpowder intended to stay in the flash pan, and when I pulled the trigger, the hammer didn’t swing fast enough to spark the rest before it had all fluttered uselessly into the air and dangerously close to my face.
Fathoms below, inside the coach, Lady Pemberton pleaded with Roger to leave me be, but his sons kept climbing that cursed oak.
“Come down and fight by blade,” spat Roger.
Jim swung his sword. “Ye coward jolterhead, we’ll lob off your knob.”
“Aw, give over, ya sods,” I muttered and curled up my torso again to tap a bit more gunpowder into the flash pan. “There we go. Ye gods, don’t let my frizzen be frozen.” This time, I managed to keep the pistol upright and aimed square at the forehead of Bill Jones, who stared in blank-faced horror, two tree limbs away.
Shoot, Charlie. My father’s voice roared in my head. Shoot, lad!
I had every reason. Bill Jones had whipped me pink with willow switches outside the stables far too many times for me to hesitate, and yet … what would it mean to kill a man?
You’ll be dead before midnight if they catch you.
I thumbed the cock back and squinted down the barrel.
Bill screamed and dropped from the branch with a thud and faint snap, then a yelp as he hobbled sideways toward the horses.
I pulled the trigger and cast an orange firefly in the night, with a snick-sizzle and CRACK that landed a shot at the men’s feet. Roger and Jim dragged a yodeling Bill up onto his horse, and Lady Pemberton warbled orders and threats from the carriage, oscillating between promises of compensation and unending punishment if they didn’t “stand down at once!”
I folded again, straining the muscles of my torso, to reload as upright as possible, but the heat of the iron burnt my fingers, and the pistol slipped from my grip, dancing from hand to hand, spinning and tumbling until it finally dropped and clobbered Jim on the head. Desperate and full of rage at myself and my attackers, I withdrew my other Queen Anne and loaded her far more adeptly, my brain matter completely focused on the task of staying attached to my spine.
“Ah-ha ai-hah,” I screamed incoherently, which was all I could manage presently. It struck even more bewilderment upon the Jones trio. And this time, when my Queen Anne let loose, I plugged the ground behind Tedmund, spraying clumps of dirt and leaves, sending him off into the woods past me, as well as coaxing the coach horses in the opposite direction.
The coachman, who’d been doing his business in the woods, scrambled after it while attempting to pull up his breeches.
Lady Pemberton’s bouncing howl faded into the night.
I shimmied higher into the oak until I could glimpse the stars. Energized with a delightful madness, I found the longest, thickest limb with which to climb to the neighboring oak. And thus it went until I was free of this night’s cock-up and back on poor confused Tedmund, whose one white sock was white again, the soot I’d covered it with to hide his identity having nearly all shaken off.
Charlotte Goddard has been going by Charlie for as long as anyone can remember. Her father told her it would be safer to be seen as a boy. But, what did that man know of safety? He was hanged a year ago for being a highwayman. But, subjugated by a wealthy family for generations, Charlie has continued his father's legacy by presenting as a highwayman who steals riches and romances willing ladies. But when his childhood friend, Lady Catherina Pemberton realizes that not only is Charlie the infamous Beau Scamp, but Charlotte, life gets much more complicated. Adding more complexity, Charlie/Charlotte has loved Catherina since they were children. And, unbeknownst to Charlie/Charlotte, Catherina knows that only women excite her romantically. But, can the two find a way to be together, support each other, and escape any societal expectations that may exist for women of their respective stations?
Author CM Harris has done an impeccable job of providing enough historical context to give "Beau Scamp" a profound sense of reality, but also writes with such passionate prose that readers will maintain hope that the two women can find a true way to believe in each other as well as establish a true life together.
While "Charlie" and Catherina come from impressively different socioeconomic classes, they do both feel restrained by the expectations of their sex and their station. Charlie believes that no one who is rich truly perceives those poorer than them and could not possible care about their plights--so taking their money and any of their morals is well within her rights. Catherina believes she must find a way to fit in with upper society or all of her life will be for naught. Yet, even with a convenient offer from a man who is also looking for an easy relationship knowing that they cannot be true loves, Catherina feels that she yearns for more.
Harris has portrayed each of her characters with vital clarity. Yes, there are villains in her story, but there were evil people like that in the late 1700s (and, as one could point out, there are still in the this millennium). However, Harris also shows how queer people and allies have existed, even if their lives, choices, and advocacy looked different than they do today.
Too often, queer characters (especially those portrayed in historical novels) meet untimely and/or horrific ends. Harris shows how two women, who are deeply in love, could find a way to commit their lives to each other and make a meaningful life together.
Yes, "Beau Scamp" is a historical romance novel with enticing and exciting intimate moments (and this alone is no small feat), but it is more than that: it is a reminder that the queer community has always existed, and will continue despite any obstacles erected by cruel actors. "Beau Scamp" is both an erotic and an empowering read.