Flappers & Fiction

Timothy Chubb is a warm-hearted but terrifyingly stubborn man who hates two things: railroads and being contradicted. This spells disaster for his meek daughter Lucy, who loves a freight agent but is being forced to marry a dry lawyer to satisfy her father’s prejudice. The wedding day arrives with the bride in tears, but no one has accounted for Aunt Harriet’s heavy hand with the “Bermondsey punch.” It seems a kitchen error might be just the thing to derail the plans and rewrite the bride’s future before the wrong groom arrives.

High upon a rocky New England hill, nineteen-year-old Lillie Kittridge whispered a foolish wish to meet a wicked man. Moments later, a rattlesnake struck, and a handsome stranger appeared to save her. Keith Rantoul seems like the perfect hero for a girl bored by her parents’ naive silver honeymoon. But while the Reverend and his wife see only romance, their old friend Judge Horne detects a different kind of danger. As Lillie prepares to forsake everything for love, she finds that the most venomous serpents often hide in plain sight.

Raised within the gloomy walls of the Chateau de Bieuvre, Yseult d’Arminge knows little of affection until a brief, sun-drenched summer with her cousin Jacques. But silence and separation are cruel guardians. Believing herself forgotten, she allows the convent’s ambitious Superior to maneuver her into a union with the elderly Due de Nemouse. When the truth of Jacques’s devotion is finally revealed amidst the wedding fête’s cruel splendor, Yseult faces a heartbreaking choice between a sacred vow and the only love she has ever known.

What can a pair of boots tell you about jealousy? More than any face, if this story is to be believed. When an artist’s antique foot-stove conjures a vision of colonial life, he follows his own Continental boots into frozen lanes, a candlelit church, and finally a moonlit clearing where swords cross in mid-air. The rivals are known only by their footwear, yet every shuffle, kick, and defiant heel-grind speaks volumes.

A diamond ring vanishes on the same morning it should have been given back. Patty Graham, freshly engaged and already embroiled in a furious quarrel with Dr. Wentworth over the tiny, scarlet-throated humming birds adorning her new bonnet, has lost the one object that could make her grand gesture of rejection possible. What follows is an afternoon of tangled rose bushes, an unwelcome proposal from the neighbor, and a funeral bouquet carrying something far worse than grief.