Hello Riskies! It is with great sorrow that I announce that today marks my last Risky post. It’s been wonderful being part of your community for the last two years. Stay in touch! (The best ways to do that are probably to follow me on Twitter or sign up for my newsletter.

Next week is Halloween. I’m pretty excited because the BFF and I are dressing up as our two favorite wrestlers, who are also BFFs!

When I was researching Sussex for my Lively St. Lemeston books, I discovered that traditionally, Halloween in Sussex was a pretty romantic holiday! Or at least, it was a time when young people attempted to divine their romantic future. Here are two divinatory games/rituals that were played on Halloween:

1. Put two nuts in the fire, representing you and your crush. Then say “If he loves me, pop and fly; If he hates me, lie and die.” If the nuts burst or explode, scattering pieces, that’s a good omen for the relationship.

2. Everyone hangs an apple on a string in front of the fire, and then watches to see which fall first. The order in which the apples fall supposedly tells you the order in which the players will marry; the player whose apple falls last will never marry.

What are your Halloween plans?

As part of my recent research dive into All Things Hamilton, I read a book that had been sitting on my shelf for years, that I originally intended to read as research for my Regency spy story A Lily Among Thorns and never got around to: Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution by John Nagy.

While the book’s style is occasionally confusing and repetitive, and the book could have used both a more thorough edit AND a thorough copyedit, it’s full of great information and I thought today I’d share a few of my favorite tidbits.

1. In General Clinton’s papers is a codebook using Biblical words and places. For example, “synagogue” meant congress, “Jordan” meant the Susquehanna River, “Sodom” meant Wyoming PA and “Gomorrah” meant Pittsburgh. Not sure what the code authors had against Pennsylvania…

2. John Adams had a lot of trouble deciphering a correspondent’s coded letters and Abigail tactfully tried to help him out at a distance without deflating his ego: “With regard to the cipher of which you complain, I have always been fortunate enough to succeed with it. Take the two Letters for which the figure stands and place one under the other through the whole sentence…”

3. Molly “Mom” Rinker used to bleach flax on top of a high rock. “While performing this chore, she would sit and knit for hours on end, all the while observing British troop movements.” She then shoved her notes into the center of her ball of yarn and “accidentally” dropped it over the side of the rocks, where it would be retrieved by American scouts.

In fact, a number of spies during the Revolution were women (just as there were many black spies; spying is one of the few professions where it’s useful to be underestimated). Another great story involves (in Elias Boudinot’s words) a “little poor looking insignificant old woman” who came asking for permission to leave Philadelphia to buy flour and gave Boudinot a “dirty old needlebook” in which she had hidden a rolled-up scrap of paper accurately informing the rebels that “General Howe was coming out the next morning with 5,000 men, 13 pieces of cannon, baggage wagons, and 11 boats on wagon wheels.”

4. Eliphalet Fitch “contracted with Francisco Miranda, a Spanish official in Jamaica, to supply military stores to the Spanish under the cover of flags of truce for prisoner exchanges. The fact that Colonel John Darling, the governor of Jamaica, and Sir Peter Parker, a British admiral, were quarreling and not speaking to each other allowed Fitch to pretend that he had received permission for his flags of truce from one or the other.” A great story even apart from how whenever I read “Admiral Sir Peter Parker” I imagine Age of Sail Spider-Man.

5. Captain Noah Phelps infiltrated Fort Ticonderoga by “pretend[ing] to be a countryman who wanted a shave from the British fort’s barber”!

Do you have a favorite spy story?

Hi everyone! I’m reposting an old History Hoydens post today, about Regency ghosts. When I wrote it, I was working on a book with a ghost character. The book is now under my bed, but who knows what the future will bring? I still think this stuff is fascinating. The block quotes are from The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies.

The character I imagined was a murder victim seeking justice (or maybe vengeance…he wasn’t entirely a nice ghost), which has been a popular kind of ghost over the centuries—so popular, in fact, that murder investigations have been opened because of ghost sightings, up through the early part of the eighteenth century. In one case in 1660, a Westmoreland magistrate investigated the death of Robert Parkin because of a report that Robert’s ghost had appeared to a man in the parish church crying “I am murdered I am murdered I am murdered.”

In 1728, a Dorset coroner exhumed a body because of several sightings of the boy’s ghost. In this case the ghost didn’t even speak—its appearance was enough to indicated foul play, despite no previous suspicion about his death. Upon examining the body, the coroner decided he had really been murdered.

Murder victims sometimes haunted their killers: a servant who had killed his master and gotten clean away to Ireland was driven to turn himself in by a headless ghost who appeared to him every night demanding “Wilt thou yet confess?” Sometimes they haunted other acquaintances.

David Garrick in his iconic “just caught sight of the Ghost” pose, 1769. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the most upsetting incidents described in the book is this one:

The astrologer and occultist John Heydon (1629-c.1670) recounted how one of his mother’s maids was pulled out of her bed one night by the ghost of a lover named John Stringer, who had recently been murdered by a jealous admirer. Despite three doors leading to her bedroom being locked, the maid ‘had the right side of her haire and headclothes clean shaved or cut away’ by Stringer’s ghost.

That poor woman! Whether you believe in ghosts, or whether you think she imagined the ghost out of guilt and shaved her own hair, it’s an awful story. I hope the “jealous admirer” was prosecuted, and didn’t get to continue stalking and attacking her and her loved ones.

Sometimes ghosts appeared to strangers at the site of their hidden graves. This tied in with another ghost tradition, that souls who didn’t receive Christian burial would walk until their bodies were found and interred in consecrated ground. In 1806, in a town near Manchester, the townsfolk drained a deep pool after a recently missing man’s ghost repeatedly appeared over it at midnight, leading to suspicion he had been murdered. His body was actually found at the bottom, although the evidence indicated he had drowned accidentally. (Not…really sure what this “evidence” would have consisted of at the time. Since writing the original post I’ve read a lot about Elma Sands’s 1800 murder in New York, which also involved the body spending time in water, and there was more or less a complete lack of contemporary forensic knowledge displayed in the autopsy testimony by prominent doctors. So I guess what this really means is that the coroner’s jury ruled for accidental death.)

Francis Grose [in his 1787 A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions] wondered why the ghosts of those murdered did not go straight to the nearest justice of the peace, rather than hang about their burial place frightening passers-by. ‘Ghosts have undoubtedly forms and customs peculiar to themselves,’ he concluded. [Google books link for Grose]

Ghosts historically have not talked much, although apparently they talked more before the Victorian era!

“Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar.” Copperplate engraving by Edward Scriven from a painting by Richard Westall. London, 1802. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Completely silent ghosts became the norm to a much greater extent over the course of the nineteenth century. Generally ghosts who did speak were wrong-righting ghosts. (Although there were exceptions! In 1706 Mr. Shaw, a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, chatted with the ghost of a dead colleague for two hours before receiving his warning of untimely death.) Murder victims were the most common. (Conflicts over inheritance were also a big one: “Mother’s ghost appeared to me and she says I get the antique dining set!”)

Ebenezer Sibly, eighteenth century writer on astrology and the occult (and huge racist), insisted that only murder victims could speak (and possibly only those who had been killed in “circumstances uncommonly horrid and execrable”), because the traumatizing memory did “more powerfully operate upon the faculties of the apparition, so as to enable it to frame the similitude of a voice, so as to discover the fact, and give some leading clue to detect and punish the wicked perpetrator.”

What’s your favorite ghost story? (Either a famous one, or one that happened to you or someone you know…)

“Folkstone Strawberries or more carraway comfits for Mary Ann,” showing Samuel William Fores’s at the corner of Sackville Street and Piccadilly, c.1810, attrib. Isaac and George Cruikshank. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The above caricature shows a printseller/publisher’s shop window with what mostly appears to be books on display. Windows with lots of small panes were popular in Regency storefronts for at least two reasons (maybe more—I’m not sure how good the technology was for making large sheets of glass at the time):

1. Glass was still taxed by weight. A larger pane requires a thicker weight of glass. (This applied to greenhouses as well, by the way. You see them with lots of little panes.)

2. Shoplifting and property crime was endemic, and a small pane of glass was easier and cheaper to replace if someone broke it to steal your goods. (This was called “starring the glaze” by those in the biz, and here is how it was done, from a 1839 Commissioners Report:

One or two parties divert attention while another “stars.” This is either done by a diamond, or by inserting a small pen-knife through the putty near the corner of a pane and cracking it; the wet finger carries the crack in any direction; an angle is generally formed. The piece is wrought to and fro, and removed; if necessary, another piece is starred, to allow of the free ingress of the hand.

Read the full report to learn more about different theft techniques.)

Small panes also presumably meant it would take a lot more effort and time for thieves to access everything in the store window—and provided a convenient way to display more small wares, because as you can see in the above engraving, they built the windows with lots of tiny shelves to display items in every pane!

Here’s a still of a sweet shop in Bath from the 1995 Persuasion, from this excellent blog post at Jane Austen’s World. I looked at their screencaps a lot while creating the Honey Moon confectionary in my Lively St. Lemeston series.

More Georgian and Regency shop windows:

A much fancier confectionery.

A printseller. Crowds looking at the prints in printsellers’ windows seem to be a popular caricuture topic because I found LOTS of them. I especially love these dandies picking pockets from this wonderful post on dandy caricatures.

A cobbler/shoemaker.

This tavern in colonial America has ivy leaves in the window for Christmas!

A haberdasher.

A circulating library.

“Night,” from the Hogarth series “Four Times of the Day,” 1736. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The dentist/barbershop to the right of this Hogarth painting has a candle in every window pane, probably because at night the windows would reflect and amplify the light back into the room, serving as sconces.

Rundell & Bridge’s in 1822. (For those of you, like me, who are curious about the subject of the caricature: it looks like Lady Conyngham was a mistress of the Prince Regent and involved in political maneuvering about the Privy Purse, i.e. the Regent’s publicly funded allowance from Parliament.)

And here is one of my very favorite things in the Metropolitan Museum, an actual 1775-7 fancy Parisian storefront, carved from oak and stunningly beautiful.

Do you have a favorite shop whose window you like to look in when you go by? There’s a wedding dress store in downtown Seattle that I’m very fond of…

Hey y’all! Gambled Away, my anthology with Molly O’Keefe, Jeannie Lin, Isabel Cooper and Joanna Bourne, releases in just a few days. So I thought I’d do another installment on nifty items I came across during the research for it! (You may remember part 1, featuring guillotine earrings, E.O. wheels, season tickets carved out of ivory, and more.)

1. This beautiful seal fob of a bird flying out of a cage with the words “LA LIBERTÉ”. I would give anything to know the story behind commissioning it. It could be a mourning seal, because of the clouds, but I’d like to believe that it belonged to someone who got out of a bad situation and had it made to celebrate. I like to imagine that my heroine Maggie, who loves pawnshops and secondhand markets and French Revolution-y stuff (she and her best friend run a 1780s and 90s-themed gambling den), bought this somewhere and uses it as her seal.

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