“Kiss me,” he ordered.

“Diana, do you know that tricky new step where you take two chassée steps forward, then cross over, and chassée three steps sideways, and—”

“No, teach it me!” begged Diana, slipping out of his arms. “Two forward—I suppose it’s backwards for me? Oh, bother! There’s no room! George, do look at my vase! It’s for you, but Uncle John’s suspicious about it. But comparing it with this little piece—” She lifted the piece of china that hung on her long gold chain.

George took it in his hand.

“Diana, this isn’t—?”

“Yes, it is. To—to remind me of what temper can do.”

“Feel in my breast pocket,” he said. She thrust her hand in. Her fingers encountered a broken piece of china.

“George! You didn’t—?”

“Yes, I did. Same idea. A reminder. All that remains of the Ming Vase.”

Diana flung her arms about his neck.

“Ahem!” coughed Haskin, from the doorway.

THE END

READING “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”

Am I the only one weirded out that the hero’s name in this story is “George”?

I’m not, right?

Because, as mentioned elsewhere, Georgette Heyer’s father, too, was called George – she was named for him, of course – and if there is anything ickier than making your father the romantic hero of your narrative, I do not know what it is.

Unless, of course, your story is not so much a romance as it is an observation on the manifold unexpected trials of married life, and you have taken your parents as your subject. In which case, you’d think she might have tried to disguise it better. Sylvia and Diana are pretty obvious analogues, too: Sylvia’s etymology leading directly from Silvanus, the Roman god of the forest, and Diana, of course, being the Roman goddess of the moon and, tellingly, the hunt. Coincidence? I doubt it.

It’s interesting that for someone so notoriously private in her later life, Georgette Heyer was quite indiscreet as a young writer.

Her four contemporary novels – the much-aforementioned Instead of the Thorn (1923), Helen (1928), Pastel (1929) and Barren Corn (1930) – were vehemently withdrawn from publication by Heyer in the 1930s (alongside The Great Roxhythe and, oh the injustice! Simon the Coldheart), and while their relative quality has often been cited as the reason for this decision, it has been more convincingly speculated that it is those novels’ revealingly autobiographical natures that may have given Heyer cause.

In Instead of the Thorn, heroine Elizabeth is a pretty conclusive case-study in asexuality (which it is indelicate to guess about, but is certainly not inconsistent with what we know about Heyer); in Helen, a would-be author of Great Novels deals with the sudden death of her beloved father and resulting writer’s block (Heyer’s own, very beloved, father died in 1926, which led to a two-years-long lull in her until-then prodigious output); in Pastel, heroine Frances loses the handsome love of her life to a fascinating rival and settles for the stolid Norman (again, not inconsistent with what we know about Heyer’s early romantic life, and her husband Ronald); and in Barren Corn we see a husband emotionally abuse and gaslight his wife over her perceived imperfections, until eventually she becomes suicidal—along with a very real hatred of Communism. (However drawn-from-life the former might be, the latter unquestionably reflects Heyer’s own political opinion.)