Book Title: Novice Threads

Series: Silver Sampler Series

Author: Nancy Jardine

Publication Date: 15^th May 2024

Publisher: Nancy Jardine with Ocelot Press

Page Length: 356

Genre: Victorian Scotland Saga / Historical Fiction / Women’s Fiction

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Book Title and Author Name:

Novice Threads

by Nancy Jardine

Blurb:

A thirst for education.  Shattered dreams. Fragile relations.

1840s Scotland

Being sent to school is the most exhilarating thing that’s ever happened to young Margaret Law. She sharpens her newly-acquired education on her best friend, Jessie Morison, till Jessie is spirited away to become a scullery maid. But how can Margaret fulfil her visions of becoming a schoolteacher when her parents’ tailoring and drapery business suddenly collapses and she must find a job?

Salvation from domestic drudgery – or never-ending seamstress work – comes via Jessie whose employer seeks a tutor for his daughter. Free time exploring Edinburgh with Jessie is great fun, but increasing tension in the household claws at Margaret’s nerves.

Margaret also worries about her parents’ estrangement, and the mystery of Jessie’s unknown father.

When tragedy befalls the household in Edinburgh, Margaret must forge a new pathway for the future – though where will that be?

Excerpt:

The Victorian Backdrop

Sharing is caring. That’s an interesting phrase but sadly it isn’t really what happens to my main character, Margaret, as she is growing up. At least not with her parents…

Margaret Law, the main character in Novice Threads (Book 1 of The Silver Sampler Series) is born in September 1839, in the small town of Milnathort in Kinross Shire, Scotland. However, her story for my readers really begins when she is almost five years old. Margaret adores words and phrases. She’s desperate to learn to read and write and spends hours wanting to know what everything means, working out many things for herself but is often stumped by phrases which people use that don’t seem to mean anything sensible. The local dialect is even worse to understand. Most of the older people that she knows are generally bamboozling! At nearly five years old in 1844, Margaret knows in her heart that education is the key to her future and that knowledge is power, even if those aren’t quite the words ringing around her head.

In 1844, the Victorian era has been underway for seven years (if you count according to the reign of the monarch). Queen Victoria is still only twenty-five years old yet has been married for four years, and has already given birth to four children in quick succession – two boys and two girls. In the higher echelon marriages of the nobility, the two sons mean that Victoria has already produced ‘the heir and the spare’. But everyone who knows anything about the marriage of Victoria and Albert knows that the queen and her husband don’t seem averse to the act of procreation. Unusually, the couple seem to like each other (even though they are first cousins) which couldn’t be said for some of the ruling royal family before Victoria.

However, Queen Victoria’s popularity during the first decade of her reign has tended to fluctuate, some details of which have reached the newspapers that Margaret’s father is regularly reading in Milnathort. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland is reading these facts for themselves, but in the nature of humanity when something goes to print stories tend to spread by word of mouth, true or otherwise.

When Margaret is sent to school after she turns five she is ecstatic. Like a sponge she absorbs everything quickly and is enthralled with her learning. There would have been some mentions of Queen Victoria by her trainee schoolteacher, or the headmaster Mister Anderson, though what she would have been told would have been limited to some basic facts.

Margaret’s father, as a local business owner, is aware of the background to Victoria becoming queen though there are many historical details of the royal family that he would never dream of sharing with his only child. In fact, he rarely shares anything with Margaret at all except for his Sunday bible readings, him being a very devout and zealously religious man.

If he were ever to share any details of Queen Victoria, William Law might tell Margaret that back in 1819 – when Victoria was born – Victoria was the legitimate fifth-in-line for the monarchy. He might share that in 1819 Victoria would only become queen if her father, her grandfather, and two of her uncles died, essentially all of those in the succession line before her. Margaret might be shocked to learn that Victoria’s father died in 1820 from pneumonia before Victoria was a year old, pneumonia being a well-known and brutal ‘silent killer’.

However, I doubt that William Law would share any real details about Victoria’s grandfather ‘the mad king’, suffice to say that King George III was a very sick man when he died just six days after Victoria’s father. Explaining about the Regency period from 1811 to 1820 would have been glossed over. Margaret would probably have been told that since King George III had been very old and very sick for a long time he had needed his eldest son, the Regent, to help him run the country. After Victoria’s grandfather’s death, King George IV ruled on his own till he died in 1830. William Law would not be telling Margaret about King George IV’s mistresses, or about the monarch’s excessively lavish lifestyle, or the facts about his obesity, almost blind state from cataracts, and general disability by the time he died. Those scurrilous ‘facts’ were definitely popular in the cartoons of the time which were printed in the daily or weekly newssheets.

There would have been many details of the next king, William IV, that Margaret’s father would have definitely kept quiet about. He would have been far too shocked himself to talk about King William’s illegitimate son by an unacknowledged mother, or about King William’s subsequent long-term mistress, the ex-actress ‘Mrs Jordan’, who bore him ten children. Again, Margaret might just have been told that King William did eventually marry at the age of 53 but had no surviving legitimate children, which meant Victoria became queen when William IV died in 1837.

King William’s shenanigans with ‘Mrs Jordan’ were covered in many of the newssheets and there were plenty of cartoons to be viewed around the time of William’s breakup with ‘Mrs Jordan’ in 1811.

But Margaret’s father would never share anything like that with her as she was growing up.

Margaret becomes an avid reader, though, and when she gets a job as a tutor in Edinburgh, during her early teens, she has access to some of the juicy details of the royal family when her employer organises the use of a local lending library. Margaret borrows books every week to use to teach her young pupil but she might also be found snatching a quick look at some of the famous politically inspired ‘Punch’ cartoons in the weekly periodical which was started up in 1841, a cartoon style which imitated the earlier sketches from the late 1700s.

Buy Links:

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Author Bio:

Nancy writes historical and contemporary fiction. 1^st Century Roman Britain is the setting of her Celtic Fervour Series. Victorian and Edwardian history has sneaked into two of her ancestry-based contemporary mysteries, and her current Silver Sampler Series is set in Victorian Scotland.

Her novels have achieved Finalist status in UK book competitions (People’s Book Prize; Scottish Association of Writers) and have received prestigious Online Book Awards.

Published with Ocelot Press, writing memberships include – Historical Novel Society; Romantic Novelists Association; Scottish Association of Writers; Federation of Writers Scotland; Alliance of Independent Authors.

Author Links:

Website: http://www.nancyjardine.com/

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