A marriage under a license, in which one of the parties was described by a false Christian and surname held to be valid. (Cope v. Burt, 1 Hag. 434: S.C. on appeal, 1 Phil. 224.)

A marriage by license not in the man’s real name, but in the name which he had assumed because he had deserted, he being known by that name only in the place where he lodged and was married, and where he had resided sixteen weeks, was held a valid marriage. (R. v. Burton-upon-Trent, 3 M & S. 538.)

Even in Victorian fiction, this sort of marriage was upheld. In The Law and the Lady, Valeria Brinton consults a solicitor on the very subject.

At my request Benjamin put my case to the lawyer as the case of a friend in whom I was interested. The answer was given without hesitation. I had married, honestly believing my husband’s name to be the name under which I had known him. The witnesses to my marriage—my uncle, my aunt, and Benjamin—had acted, as I had acted, in perfect good faith. Under those circumstances, there was no doubt about the law. I was legally married.

Does that mean James Marshland wouldn’t have been guilty of some other crime for impersonating the deceased Captain Blunt? As with most legal questions, the answer is that it depends. In Belle, I chose to focus on the basic legality of the marriage—and on the moral justification for the hero’s actions—rather than delve deeper into other issues of criminality.

The Fall of Sebastopol

The Siege of Sebastopol lasted nearly a full year, from October 1854 to September 1855. Jasper’s account of the conditions he and his fellow soldiers suffered in the lead-up to the fall of the city was taken, in part, from an officer’s letter printed in the Reading Mercury (January 27, 1855). The officer writes:

I have thawed my ink to write, with the hope of saving life . . . [Your soldiers] have been left to die from starvation. For the last six weeks the rations issued have not been of a kind nor of a quantity to support strength or health. The clothing has not been sufficient to maintain the necessary vigour of the circulation . . . The men are now so sickly from dysentery and diarrhea, from emaciation and debility from disease marking the advent of scurvy and dropsy, not to mention affections of the feet and fingers that we cannot send them away from camp fast enough.

Similarly, a few of the lines of the newspaper article Julia reads from the fictional London Courant were partially excerpted from an actual report in Bell’s Weekly Messenger (September 15, 1855). The report, titled “The Fall of Sebastopol,” both declares the allied victory and laments the loss of all the “noble lives” sacrificed in achieving it.

Acknowledgments

During a difficult year, writing has been, at times, both a blessing and a burden to me. While it’s provided a much-needed escape from the grim realities of life, it’s also required a degree of focus that I was hard-pressed to maintain. In order to finish this story, I relied so much on the people in my life who left me alone when I needed to work, distracted me when I needed a break, and encouraged me when I felt too disheartened to go on.