For the Love of Animals by Victoria Chatham

 

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Anyone who knows me knows I love animals. Even the little critters that give me the creeps - hello, frogs - fascinate me, but my favourite animals are horses, dogs, and cats.  

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Animals have long had their place in literature. Think Bolingbroke’s horse Barbary from Shakespeare’s King Richard II or the grey Capilet in Twelfth Night. There is the ubiquitous Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Don Quixote’s Rocinante, and Marguerite Henry’s Sham from her book King of the Wind. Zane Grey named many of the horses in his western novels, as did Louis L’Amour. Smoky, Ginger, Merrylegs, Artax, The Black, and Joey are names I have known and love from the stories in which they appeared.

Who can forget Buck from Call of the Wild, or Bulls Eye, Bill Sikes’ dog from Oliver Twist, and didn’t we all love Perdita and Pongo, the Dalmatians from 101 Dalmatians? Stephen King’s Cujo might have given some of us nightmares, as did The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I don’t mind betting cute little Peg from Lady and the Tramp had you smiling again. Cats also have their place in literature, such as Tab from Watership Down and all those marvellous cat characters, Old Deuteronomy, Rumpleteazer, Grizabella, and Macavity from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

I write historical and Western novels, so it becomes almost impossible not to have animal characters. How did my Regency Lord get from his London residence to his country estate? He either drove his team himself or may have had a coachman. Even in the Regency era, a horse was relatively no less expensive than it is today. Stabling, feeding, shoes, and harnesses all took a toll on the pocket. The more animals there were, the more significant the expense. A team of four horses, plus a couple of park hacks in town and hunters in the country, added up to a minimum of a stable of eight horses.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

What I try to bring to my pages when I write horses into my novels is how that particular animal
impacts my hero or heroine. They usually have a part to play in showing off my characters’ skills, as they do for Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress. In Shell Shocked, set at the end of World War 1, the dog, Bella, helps her master recuperate from his experiences at the front, and what cowboy does not have a horse, and often a dog, both for work and company?

Animals, real or imagined, help ground us humans with their sense of immediacy, of being in the here and now. I not only write but also house and pet sit. Whether I’m checking on horses, walking a dog, or corralling cats, they will always carry over into my writing. Animals add so much to my life that I can’t imagine not having animals in my characters’ lives.

 

Victoria Chatham

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Regency Travel Part 2 – the Vehicles by Victoria Chatham

In my last post I wrote about the horses used for pulling vehicles in the Regency era. In this post, I will address the vehicles themselves. There is, I think, the romantic idea of what a coach and four should look like, largely engendered by illustrations for British Christmas cards. From those, it would be easy to think of the coach as being of British origin which is far from the fact. The English word ‘coach’ derives from the Hungarian post town of Kocs (pronounced koch) which  was introduced into England from France during the reign of Elizabeth 1, reputedly by Henry FitzAlan, 19^th Earl of Arundel.

The coach, as we think of it today, is a closed-cab heavy, four-wheeled vehicle drawn by four or six horses. This, together with harness, coachmen, and grooms is termed a turnout. The Four-In-Hand Club of many a Regency tale grew out of a driving club formed in 1807. Four-in-hand means to hold the reins controlling all four horses in one hand, the left, while the whip is held in the right. A ‘veritable whip’ would be someone having mastered the art of driving a coach and four.

The Four-In-Hand Club dictated that their members wear ankle-length drab coats (drab is an undyed light brown wool) fastened with large mother-of-pearl buttons beneath which they sported blue waistcoats with inch-wide yellow stripes. The Barouche Club rules stated that the horses should all be bay and wear silver-mounted harnesses with rosettes at their head.  

Gigs, curricles, chaises, and phaetons are the usual vehicles of choice by Regency characters. A gig was a light, two-wheeled cart with fixed shafts drawn by one horse or pony. The curricle was also a light, two-wheeled vehicle but big enough for a driver and passenger. This was the most favoured vehicle for the young man about town, particularly if he could afford a carefully matched pair of horses to pull it. The chaise or post-chaise was a versatile closed-body four-wheeled carriage. It could seat two or four persons and could be drawn by two or four horses which, because the chaise was designed as a fast means of travel, would be changed every ten- to fifteen miles.

Postillion boots
Note the right boot is larger

This type of carriage could also be driven by postillions rather than a coachman. The postillions, often in the livery of their employer, rode the horse on the left side of the pair, their right leg being protected from the central wooden shaft and the right hand, or ‘offside’ horse, by a heavy, rigid boot. Horses are typically mounted on the left, or ‘nearside’, this method left over from medieval times. Right-handed knights wore their swords on their left side to make the sword easier to draw. Mounting their horses from the left side was simply the means to not have the sword in the way when they swung their right leg over the saddle.  

Ladies who enjoyed the sport of driving might be seen out and about in a phaeton, an open well-sprung four-wheeled carriage with the pair of back wheels larger than the front pair. It could be drawn by one or two horses and the very skilled or daring whipster, either male or female, might opt for the high-perch phaeton. The unfortunate downside of this particular vehicle was the fact that it was notoriously unstable, particularly when cornering and especially in the hands of an unskilled driver.

High Perch Phaeton

There were also barouches, landaus, and hackneys, the latter developing into the familiar black, two-wheeled conveyance drawn by one horse so familiar in Victorian times and continuing today with the familiar black London taxicab. Travelling anywhere during the Regency era could be fraught with danger, from the notoriously bad roads made worse by inclement weather, attacks by highwaymen, poor maintenance which could cause the harness to break or wheels to detach from the axles or inexperienced or careless coachmen.

Inspiration for my heroine's driving scenes in His Dark Enchantress came from the notorious Lady Letitia Lade and from more recent history, Mrs. Cynthia Haydon. Here is a short excerpt.

Lucius’ prized Hungarian horses, polished so they gleamed like copper and harnessed once more, were hitched to the barouche without further incident. Jem and Sid held the leader’s heads while Emmaline draped herself in the driving coat and settled herself on the box. Juliana handed her a three-cornered driving hat and settled herself against the buttoned velvet squabs as Noble swung up onto the seat beside Emmaline.

“Have no fear, Mr. Noble, I had an excellent teacher.” Emmaline carefully threaded the reins through the fingers of her left hand. “I drove a pony and trap when I turned six years old, a pair when I turned nine, a tandem when I turned eleven and my first four-in-hand on my fourteenth birthday. His Lordship shall not be disappointed.”

He might not be disappointed, Emmaline thought as she pointed the leaders out of the yard, but he would undoubtedly be furious.

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Victoria Chatham

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Listen to Your Characters by Victoria Chatham

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When talking to readers who do not write, the question of how an author creates characters is often raised. 

I am quite fortunate in that I don't often have problems visualizing them. I get the hair and eye colour, their body type even before I have named them; I write out a timeline for them and create their birthday. Using astrological signs is one way of determining their strengths and weaknesses which is often an indication of how the conflict in the story might develop. If they have siblings can also affect their character depending on where they come in the lineup. A firstborn, for instance, is often an A-type personality.

The one thing that often causes an 'oh, yeah', kind of look is when I say I listen to my characters and go where they take me. But, if you are the author, I'm asked, how that can be? Don't you just have them do this or that and move them around like pieces on a chessboard? Well, no. That would lead to creating a cast of cardboard characters, so I do not ignore what they tell me. All of my characters are very different. Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress and Juliana in His Ocean Vixen, are both pretty feisty, outside the box kind of gals. Olivia, in His Unexpected Muse, is quite the opposite. She has reasons for being quiet and shy and I found it much more of a challenge to tell her story. 

I love each of my leading ladies. They have made me laugh, given me headaches, surprised me in some of the things they have done but never, ever, bored me. I hope that comes across in my writing and that my readers enjoy my characters as much as I do.

Victoria Chatham

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