A Wicked Conceit by Anna Huber (e novels to read TXT) 📕

eyes lifted to meet mine, warming at the affection I knew he would see reflected there. “I’ll write tomorrow.” His mouth took on a roguish tilt as he pulled me closer. “But for tonight . . .” He exhaled a weary breath. “How about we sleep?”

I laughed softly, the same fatigue dragging at my bones. No one had ever said that parenthood was for the well rested. “That sounds . . . heavenly.”

He smiled and then pressed his lips to mine, kissing me long and deep. But just as we both turned to crawl beneath the covers, a tiny cry sounded from the cradle. My head dropped forward in defeat.

He touched my hand gently. “I’ll get her.”

I smiled at him in gratitude before lowering my head to my pillow. I decided I’d never loved him more.

As my eyes drifted shut, I briefly wondered if the events surrounding Emma’s birth would be the end to our misadventures, but as always, time would only tell. Given our history, I wouldn’t have wagered on it. And while I silently resolved that Charlotte and Rye’s wedding should be peaceful and merry, I had learned long ago that such things were rarely in my control. Even when it came to matters of art.

Historical Note

So first up, let’s address the elephant in the room—the cholera pandemic. Prior to the 1820s, cholera had largely been confined to the Indian subcontinent. But beginning in that decade, it started to spread, first along trade routes and then farther afield. In December 1831, it reached Britain, despite a mandatory quarantine placed on ships and their crews arriving from ports in afflicted areas. It quickly spread north and south and continued to advance around the globe.

Britain would experience multiple outbreaks of cholera throughout the nineteenth century until they finally addressed the underlying causes of the spread of the disease. But in 1831–1832, the majority of physicians believed people were infected by either something they ate or a miasma.

For decades before the actual bacteria which causes cholera reached Britain, people used the term loosely to describe anything that gave them digestive problems and loose stools. This was why when cholera actually struck, the medical community persisted in linking it to something ingested, whether it was rotten food, a mineral poison, or a bad combination of items. Intemperance was also linked to it in this way, and for other reasons.

Miasma theory was the predominant medical theory by the brightest minds of the age to explain how diseases spread. The belief was that bad, noxious air emanating from things like rotting corpses, marshy land areas, and other putrid matter actually exhaled vapors which caused people to fall ill. This “influence in the atmosphere” was also believed to afflict those who had weakened themselves by exposure to certain behaviors, places, or “exciting causes.” In this way, they promoted the idea that only people of “irregular habits” should fear diseases like cholera. So as long as you were good, clean, and temperate, you could escape the scourge.

Thus, it wasn’t difficult to see how the concept of contagion was confused and correlated with religion, piety, sin, and the idea that cholera was God’s punishment for certain people’s intemperance and immorality. Multiple pamphlets from the time period rail against people’s sinful natures and call on the government to make changes to the laws to save people from their iniquities.

Some useful measures were actually undertaken. A Central Board of Health was first established, based in London, and other cities throughout Britain formed their own boards of health that reported to the central branch. In this way, they were able to disseminate information to the public in a more organized manner through the Cholera Gazette. Broadsides were also posted, advising people of things like what foods to eat, how to clean themselves and their homes, and to be mindful of the weather and the suitability of their clothing for it. The buildings in infected areas were whitewashed and cleaned. However, these efforts could only do so much when, in their ignorance, they failed to address the true cause of the disease: the open cesspools contaminating the sources of their drinking water. Rarely were quarantine measures recommended because cholera didn’t seem to spread by contagion but more often by indirect personal contact.

It wasn’t until 1854, when Dr. John Snow was able to trace the source of a single cholera outbreak in London to a specific water pump, and then a decades-long fight for germ theory to overtake that of the miasma theory, that the real cause of cholera was pinpointed and accepted. Once significant sanitation improvements were made and clean water supplies were secured, then cholera was largely eradicated from many parts of the world. Though today there are still areas of the globe without these two crucial elements that struggle with the disease.

The mindset and general knowledge of the populace was unsettled at this time, and there was great fear among some citizens that doctors were allowing or causing people to die of the cholera in order to use their bodies for dissection in the anatomy schools. A fear that would continue to grow into the summer of 1832 and result in multiple cholera riots.

The plot of A Wicked Conceit was greatly inspired by the book Murder by the Book by Claire Harman, and the murder of Lord William Russell in May 1840. The man executed for Lord William’s murder was his valet, François Courvoisier, who claimed he’d been inspired by one of the plays staged from the book Jack Sheppard, which were a smashing success in 1840 London. Novels about criminals were all the rage in this era, forming a new genre of “Newgate novels,” as they were called, after the infamous prison. And none more so than Jack Sheppard, the tale of the eighteenth-century unabashed thief, who escaped jail numerous times, written by William Harrison Ainsworth. The book had already inspired a minor crime wave across