This post is for all the people we hope to meet on Saturday, March 28th when we’re attending La Traviata at the Met, strolling through Central Park, or eating at Keen’s Steakhouse. While wearing clothes that look like this:

Yep, we’re going to turn heads and we hope it’s in a good way. And we hope that people smile, even point, and wonder what we’re up to. We’ll hand them “calling cards” with our names on them and a QR code that will lead here. So, for you new friends, here’s our FAQ:

What are you doing?

We are writing a period romance novel together! And to get it right, we have to do the hard research of partying like it’s 1899. That means attending the opera — the Saturday matinee performance of La Traviata featuring Lisette Oropesa in the role of Violetta, to be precise.

Mom And Dad Write A Romance

Before the Curtain, episode 3: Traviata Act by Act

Violetta broke our hearts in episode 2.5 and now we put her in context — what is happening in each act and what are the other two main characters, Alfredo and his father Giorgio Germont, doing throughout. In this episode we’ll even hear some of what they sing. It’s such a beautifully constructed story and the music is astonishing. Listen along as our tw…

Listen now

2 months ago · James McQuivey

This research trip also means we’re staying in a hotel that existed in 1899 — the Lotte New York Palace (@newyorkpalace) and dining at Keen’s Steakhouse (@keenssteakhouse) which was already delivering its famous mutton leg to diners (albeit only males) in 1899 as well. To get from one place to another we hope to take a carriage through Central Park. If we met you at any of those places, we hope we made your day a bit brighter! By the time you met us we have probably posted a ton of photos on Instagram, check us out there (and follow!) at @momanddadwritearomance.

Who are you?

Look, just between us, we’re not authors and we’re not influencers. I mean, we know how to use Instagram and build a Substack to host our little project. But there’s no money, no sponsors, we’re just a cute old couple (approaching our 60s now, gulp!) who believe that to remain a happy couple into our twilight years we have to take imaginative, creative, and romantic leaps together. Writing a romance novel is part of that, so is dressing up and going to the opera. And wait until we go to the Winter Ball at the Breakers in Newport this December! We hope to drag some friends along to that one. Maybe you’ll come, too and meet us there? Who says we want to hog all this romance and joy to ourselves?

But what about the historical accuracy of your book, your outfits, your…

Wait, did we plant you in the audience to ask that exact question? James might have, actually, because he’s the one obsessed with the history here. Take our opera outfits, for example. We’re dressed in Saturday matinee clothes appropriate to 1899 — not the fabulous evening opera outfits that would have been worn on a Tuesday night. The tiaras, the jewelry, the low-cut tops — all of that was evening attire. Matinee performances were preferred by many of the wealthiest because they had plenty of time after 3-4 hours of opera to attend a dinner and a ball afterward, dancing until the wee hours of the morning. But because the dinner and ball would require evening wear, the matinee attire was more typical of what are called Walking Suits for the ladies and Morning Suits for the men. We’ve sourced some spot-on items of clothing, including all the accessories. Here’s just a short list. For Megan: flowered hat, wrist-length gloves (elbow length were for evening wear!), buttoned walking boots (see below), an opera clutch, opera glasses, and so much more! For James: top hat, cravat (which he made himself), jeweled cravat pin, sterling silver cufflinks, gloves, cane (we’ll see if the Met lets us bring that in), and a lapel pin with some personal meaning.

We grew up listening to Cyndi Lauper tell us that Girls Just Want To Have Fun, but why should girls be the only ones? And won’t you come along? We’d love to have you follow, contribute, share ideas with us (so many of you are sending us private emails about your favorite Gilded Age items and locations, go ahead and post those on here!). Basically, it would be nice in this otherwise topsy-turvy world to share some moment of pure joy and frivolity together. And maybe a reminder that there are people you and us out there, people who believe in love (and, James insists on adding, historical accuracy). If you know someone who would enjoy that with us, please share this with them!

We are just 5 days away from listening to Lisette Oropesa perform the role of Violetta at the Met. We’ll be seated in the Parterre level, with a perfect vantage point to see and hear her sing what has become her signature role which critics say she has perfected by this point. This episode follows a 2022 recording of La Traviata featuring Oropesa. The podcast explains how to follow along if you want to hear full-length recordings instead of merely clips.

If that’s not working for you, go directly to this link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0AeidQCowiXRJEGmIFX3up?si=ba47f2602e7b48b2

Thank you for listening. If you enjoy, please let us know; and share this if can. You never know what might brighten someone’s day. Perhaps a thrilling high note is just what somebody needs to receive from you today!

A reminder that we shared earlier: These episodes are researched and written by James McQuivey who then runs them through automated voices to create the podcast-like conversation you are listening to, adding the final music and mixing. He thought Megan would enjoy it more this way, and you would, too, rather than have him drone on and on about all the cool stuff he read. Enjoy!

Now it’s time to understand the power of this single role, both the mechanics of what it takes to sing Violetta and the history of some of the most famous Violettas of opera days past — including Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba, then taking time to savor the career of Maria Callas. It all leads us to this month, when American soprano Lisette Oropesa will take the stage at the Met to perform this iconic role in a way that is thoroughly her own. These are all superlative women, literally — one the highest paid singer in history and another the most famous classical singer of all time. That’s fitting that such women give body to the voice of Violetta, also a superlative role in the history of opera. You’ll get chills, we can nearly promise it.

A reminder that we’re doing this whole series of episodes to get ourself informed enough, and by now even jazzed, to attend our first opera at the Met, where, on March 28th, not even a dozen days from now, we will hear Oropesa sing “Amami, Alfredo” and we and hundreds of others will be shaken to the core.

We’re not big opera people. In this regard we’re probably the public that Timothee Chalamet had in mind when he recently suggested both the opera and the ballet are on life support. As a media scholar (James got his Ph.D. in Mass Communication at Syracuse), it’s easy to diagnose why opera, along with most traditional live theater experiences, were so replaceable in a mass media environment, when it became exceedingly cheap to film something once, replay it on movie screens a thousand times, or to broadcast something once to an eventual audience of millions.

But now we’ve entered an era of personal media, where everybody lives in a bubble of their own curation, aided and abetted by algorithms designed to feed them more of the same thing. We get endless variety offered in response to whatever we click on once. But if we never make that first click, we’ll never even know that there’s a world behind it worth exploring.

This experience is us clicking on opera. It doesn’t mean we’ll be Met patrons for life. But there’s no harm in exploring what opera could have been saying to us all this time. So far we’re discovering a vast treasure of cultural richness that has been hiding in plain sight. Listen to this episode if you need even the slightest evidence of that. What these sopranos have accomplished over 125 years of interpreting this amazing work is moving to the core. We may never become opera followers, but we will forever be changed.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoy, please let us know; and share this if can. Somebody out there needs to hear Patti, Melba, Callas, and, most especially today, Oropesa and feel their heart sink and soar at the same time.

If this is your first peek at what we’re doing, you just need to know that we’re a madly in love couple writing a romance novel together set in the late Gilded Age. Thirty five years of marriage is a topic we understand, writing a romance novel is, well, novel for us, so we’re digging deep into the research to make sure we make this book worth reading. Since the central part of our story as we’ve mapped it out depends on our lovers attending the opera seated across from each other in the Met’s Diamond Horseshoe — on dates with other people! — we feel we need to attend a Met opera so we can render it more fully for our characters. That’s why we’ll be attending La Traviata, in period attire, at the end of March and we couldn’t be more excited. Or more intimidated since neither of us have ever been to the opera.

These podcast episodes came out out our eagerness to fully prepare for the experience. We had compiled probably 50 pages of notes about La Traviata and realized we had no easy way to condense and consume them together so we generated a podcast that would make the topics easy to parse but intriguing to follow, originally structured in 5 different segments that then blossomed into a total of 6 when we realized we needed a whole episode just on Violetta (episode 2.5, coming soon!).

In this episode we hint a bit at the process for assembling these recordings — it’s very time intensive but rewarding and we may explain in more detail later. We also make reference to some timely issues, including Timothee Chalamet’s summary dismissal of opera (and ballet). Take that, Mr. Chalamet!

All we ask is that you listen and enjoy, and then start adding your comments and questions so we can know if what we’re doing is appealing to anyone. And if it’s making you want to attend the opera, all the more reason to comment below. Thank you!

You may have seen us posting pictures of our 1899 attire — it’s all part of research for our romance novel we’re collaborating on, painstaking research, we assure you — and we have an incredible day planned filled with sight-seeing, opera-watching, leg-of-lamb eating (that’s not a joke, looking at you Keen’s Steakhouse), all in our late Gilded Age clothing.

One thing we have spent less time on, however, is preparing for the actual opera itself. Yes, we have to write a whole seven chapters where our hopeful lovers attend the opera on the season opening night in December of 1899 (accompanied by the wrong people!) but how can we possibly do this if neither of us has ever been to the opera? So, we’ve committed to spending 3.5 hours in the Met itself listening to what is arguably one of the most famous operas in history and want to know what in the world we’re doing.

That’s where the dozens of articles, book chapters, and other references came in, not to mention the many, many YouTube videos about La Traviata, highlighting the arias, the performers, and the staging. But it was starting to seem like too many things strewn across too many different media. That’s when one of us had an idea: Convert all those notes into show notes for a podcast and then, well, produce it!

The good news is that one of us has all of those skills just lying around, so it was a matter of squeezing in time on nights and weekends (got up this morning at 5 to put an extra couple of hours in before work) and voila, you have episode 1, affectionately titled “What’s Opera Doc?” for reasons you will find out soon enough if you just click the play button up there.

Episode 2 will be finished over the weekend, and then we have to get 4 more done in time for the long drive to New York from Boston in a few weeks. We should be able to make it.

We would love it if you listened, liked it, and shared it with others. This is taking more time than planned, and though we love every minute of it, it will be easier to find those minutes if we know people are enjoying it. Thank you!

Note: If there’s interest, we’ll eventually share how we pulled this together, it involves a lot of experimental tools plus hours of tweaking to get it right. Not to mention leaving so many juicy bits on the cutting room floor because we can’t pack everything of interest into even six podcast bits. It’s a lot like working on a novel, come to think of it.

I take thee at thy word, indeed, maiden!

What’s in a name? In choosing a character’s name for a play, a novel, or even a TV cartoon, the name comes to mean everything. Would you have devoured a series of books about Muggle-raised Randy Pincher? Would you so avidly follow the exploits of a band of intrepid sleuths and their mutt Puppy Doo-doo? I dare say you would not.

Which leads us to our current conundrum: We don’t know what to name the lead characters in our romance novel. Set in 1899, our destined (or star-crossed?) lovers come from families with names that are perfectly fit to their respective roles and times. The Harringtons of New York, connected to old New York money as they are, command respect before they enter the room. The Dunbars, formerly of Pittsburgh and now more recently of Cape Ann north of Boston, bear a heritage of hard-working Scots ingenuity. In fact, every member of these two soon-to-be-entwined families has a name pregnant with profound meaning that reverberates within their fictional world as well as our real one.

Except for the first names of our two leads. Currently, because we don’t know what else to call them, we have named them after us: James Harrington, meet Megan Dunbar (pronounced “Mee-gun”). Notice anything unusual about these name choices? Of course you do — these are our names, James and Megan, your authors and guides to the world of 1899 on the edge of the new century.

One of us really likes the idea of using our own first names for our lead characters while the other, well, not so much. That’s why we need your help. Will you hear our case below and let us know what you would prefer: To read a book where the lead romantic interests are clearly named after the couple who wrote it, or to charter unknown territory with names unencumbered by any association to the real world?

Watch the video below, hear out our cases, then vote. Add your comments below, too, so we know how you really feel!

Thank you in advance for taking the time and helping us out. We’ve got the same vote going on on Instagram; between that input and this, we will collect your feedback and announce what we’re doing early in March. Until then!

Words written: ~25,000 of an expected 80,000, representing 15 chapters out of 51
Chapters plotted out in detail: 15 drafted, ~10 in detailed outline, 26 or so in skinny outline
Decisions made about characters, settings, and plot points: All of them! (we just had an hour-long session this morning to review some of the later chapters and we’re confident where the plot points will fall).

It’s getting exciting, as is our “research” trip we’re planning for March 28 to see La Traviata at The Met in period attire! Of course, we know nothing about how to do this and we’re making it all up as we go so who knows how many chapters we’ll end up with and how many words. One thing we know for sure, at least 5,000 of the current 25,000 words we’ve written will end up getting cut. We’re getting our feet on solid ground, we’ll go back and trim when we have a better understanding of how to do this. Which leads to this confession:

We don’t know how to write a period romance

Did we say we’re making this up as we go? Please understand, we realize romance is a serious business and the real pros don’t do what we do and they end up with books that sell, which we may not. Selling our book would be amazing but it’s not our primary goal, so genre readers may especially find our approach out of sync with expectations. Hopefully they’ll come to understand that that’s okay. Historical fiction readers, including those who love period romance, may get out their red pencils when they read what we post below and that’s okay, too! At present, we’ll share some of the decisions we’re making and conclusions we’ve arrived at before we paste in the two excerpts we promised.

Period Fiction Can’t Be Period Perfect

There, we said it. From our experience, we find two things about period fiction that can trouble a writer and that are definitely troubling us. First, is the desire to situate modern characters in the past and enable them to be amazing figures in their time period by simply thinking, speaking, and acting more modern, more in line with things we prefer and evidencing mores which we approve of and might assume readers would as well. We absolutely want to avoid this. There’s a place for it, evidently a large one, since most period fiction we encounter falls into this pattern pretty comfortably. But because that market is pretty well served, we might be tempted to swing the other way, to pack this book with proof that we did the historical research and these people could be real! To wit, below is an actual paragraph from our draft that will not make it to the final cut — even though it pains one of us severely to have to cut it:

But Charles was persuasive, especially on the topic of Jane Avril, the wild woman of the eccentric dances that were not even whispered of in New York even though they were proudly displayed on the Lautrec posters people collected as fast as they could be pasted to walls to announce a new performance. Charles had argued, correctly James admitted, that because this woman was a singular performer with no precedent and likely no able imitator, refusing to see her perform would be like refusing to see the famed Sarah Bernhardt don a man’s attire and play Hamlet, something James fully intended to do while in Paris.

This is a historian’s dream! That we could name check Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, and Sarah Bernhardt all in a historically accurate context (Bernhard really did play Hamlet in Paris in the summer of 1899). One of us loves this achievement — we won’t say who but if you know us at all, you know who he is. Note from said individual: Did you know that Ms. Avril didn’t perform that summer because she left the city to deliver her child, the result of a pregnancy which she had kept hidden from her thronging audiences as long as she could? Betcha didn’t! Our lead character did, though. Whether you’ll read about it in the final book or not is another matter.

Alas, hitting historical proof points, as fun as it is, is not the goal, either. We’re writing a story about two destined lovers whose path to love is fraught with difficulty and doubt. Jane Avril is a footnote to a footnote. Sigh. Which leads to our second conclusion.

Period Dialogue Is Fun, Let’s Keep It That Way

Avoiding the two above extremes of historical fiction — go modern or go arcane — would seem to suggest one might resolve such a conundrum by aiming for a felicitous fortuneteller (aka, a happy medium, hehe, see how fun that is?). In our plans we have swung back and forth. We’re unduly influenced by the snappy dialogue in HBO’s The Gilded Age, of course, but those events were set 15 years before our book and the language had changed. And how do we know the language had changed, and among whom, and how much?

The truth is we don’t, really. The year in which our story commences, 1899, was a real and symbolic turning point in many domains. Literally on the edge of a new century, it was also the middle of a ten-year span that would see the rise of the automobile and airplane, the shift from Wagnerian opera to mass audience music like jazz, and the emergence of the liberated 1920s where even elite families cast off many of their most proper strictures, or at least their youngest members did. Writing for 1899 makes it hard to strike the right balance because we could make a case for people indulging in the ornate speech of the 1860s-to-1880s, which was notoriously florid, or seep into an easier-to-write-but-less-fun-to-read 1910, pre-war American informal fluidity.

Our proposed solution is, to our lights, ingenious: We don’t choose! Instead, we’re borrowing heavily from period fiction. Not fiction about the period, but fiction written in or near the period. We have so much to choose from! Henry James is all over these decades leading up to the New Century; Mark Twain himself coined the term The Gilded Age, after all; and though Edith Wharton wasn’t an acclaimed novelist yet, she would write books that captured this era. And those are just the names you’ve heard of. There are many, many more. We’ve been poring over their words and imitating their dialogue — do pray that we will all be delivered from the dense dialogue of Henry James!

Doing so is partly why we have to cut 5,000 words from our first draft. Because why say, “I thought she said so,” when you can write, “Perhaps I am mistaken in my sense of things, or perhaps it is the case that in the moment in which my senses conveyed what they perceived to my sensibilities, my own mind played some trick upon me; but I do believe that is an accurate report of what she did, indeed, say.”

Okay, maybe we’re not going that overboard. But there are many, many indeeds, we must admit.

All this to say, we are leaning more on the dialogue from authors writing in or near that time to describe how our own characters — who are, after all, fictional characters themselves — might have spoken. And it is fun, fun, fun. If you care to quibble over whether we added a few too many adverbial phrases, you are free to do so. But know that our goal is not verisimilitude but rather fiendish fun. We do hope you will be patient with us, um, indeed.

One last note you will see in these excerpts: We don’t have names for our characters yet. For now, we’re using our own names James and Megan. And one of us has really started to like that and wants to release the final book with those names preserved. The other would like some other, really, any other names. Very soon we will ask you to help us make this decision. But for now, in these excerpts, you’ll be reading James and Megan.

Setting the scenes: James’s scene takes place in Suite 1, Mov. 6 - Allegro Moderato (piqued your interest there, didn’t we!). That’s all we’ll say. Megan’s scene takes place in Suite 2, Mov. 4 - Andante Cantabile, after James’s scene but not immediately so. Enjoy and be kind. And, um, onward indeed!

Suite 1, Mov. 6 - Allegro Moderato, The Sweetheart’s Gambit

The next morning James awoke, his resolve still firm. He summoned the staff and gave them their instructions. He moved through his rooms with a clipped efficiency, directing the valets as they slowly stripped the Rue de Monceau of his presence, piece by piece.

He had not yet spoken to Grand-mère, but of course the staff and perhaps even the very house itself was breathing the news of his departure. The moment would come when she would summon him and inquire, perhaps even make demands, but for now, it seemed, she held her peace as he methodically disturbed his own.

In the late morning, a footman climbed the stairs to the etage where his rooms were, appearing at his door just as he was finishing his inventory of a newly packed trunk. The footman maintained the unreadable expression one in his profession should as he announced, “Mademoiselle de Montreuil is in the petit salon, Monsieur. She is accompanied by her aunt, Madame de Valois.”

James paused, adding one last silk waistcoat to the trunk. In a moment, James understood how Grand-mère would play her part of this match. He had thrust, her silence had been her parry. Now her counter-attack had arrived.

Continue Excerpt No. 1

Suite 2, Mov. 4 - Andante Cantabile, The Inland Harbor

Her father’s study was a carefully constructed fortress, the air flavored with the slight metallic tang of a multitude of cyanotype blueprints spread across the deeply grained oak desk. To her eyes, it was all as majestic as he; she loved to enter it when it was full of the energy he naturally exuded when constructing the future. For in this space, while he was yet among his family in their home, he was also far away, removed to a vision of their future that was, in truth, his present.

The clouds of earlier had mostly cleared but the sun’s last edge was dipping below the curve of the earth, casting its last orange and red hues through the West-facing windows, painting the wisps of cloud visible over the water through the North-facing bay window. The orange glow warmed the odds and ends of his refuge, tobacco tins, a spyglass, and the ship models he studied in between reading factory plans and mansion blueprints. Amid this glow, Gordon Dunbar was hunched over a drawing of a brick and granite turret, his spectacles perched on the very tip of his nose. He looked every bit the man who had forged an empire out of fire and glass – robustly broad-shouldered, with hands that looked as though they were accustomed to hauling iron rather than annotating architectural plans, much less signing contracts. When Megan entered, he didn’t look up immediately, his finger tracing a line on the blue-papered design with a reverence one might expect to be reserved more appropriately for scripture.

Continue Excerpt No. 2

We hope you enjoy these and we look forward to hearing your reactions and gathering your feedback. Soon we’ll ask for help with the names, so start collecting your arguments for or against using our first names for our lead characters.

Leave a comment

He had not yet spoken to Grand-mère, but of course the staff and perhaps even the very house itself was breathing the news of his departure. The moment would come when she would summon him and inquire, perhaps even make demands, but for now, it seemed, she held her peace as he methodically disturbed his own.

In the late morning, a footman climbed the stairs to the etage where his rooms were, appearing at his door just as he was finishing his inventory of a newly packed trunk. The footman maintained the unreadable expression one in his profession should as he announced, “Mademoiselle de Montreuil is in the petit salon, Monsieur. She is accompanied by her aunt, Madame de Valois.”

James paused, adding one last silk waistcoat to the trunk. In a moment, James understood how Grand-mère would play her part of this match. He had thrust, her silence had been her parry. Now her counter-attack had arrived.

He found them in the ornately decorated petit salon, the choice of room already a move toward intimacy rather than receiving them more formally in the grand salon. Surely Grand-mère’s hand was in this choice, she would have directed the staff to expect to receive visitors in that room. Shortly after she sent a messenger running to the Montreuil home, that is.

James entered and nodded to the aunt, a woman whose face was a testament to decades of bored attendance at social functions, who was already settling into a deep bergère chair in the corner, her chin resting on her chest, her breathing rhythmic and shallow. She was the perfect, silent sentry, a role aunts had always played in these situations and more necessary in the conversation that was about to transpire.

Roseline had not taken the sofa as would have been expected. Instead, she stood by the window, the afternoon light catching the daring curve of her gown. It was a sweetheart-cut, a style far more suggestive than the usual afternoon attire of a young woman of her rank. The pale cream silk dipped low, accentuating her upper torso and the delicate line of her throat. In this he felt compelled to credit her – she looked less like a pawn and more like a queen who had decided to take the field herself.

“Bonjour, Mr. Harrington,” she said, turning toward him with a smile that was perfectly composed. “I hope you do not mind the intrusion. We were passing by on our way to the milliner’s and I thought I might see if you were still planning to attend the garden party at the Hautbourgs this Saturday. I was so looking forward to our walk through their conservatories.”

As she spoke, she held out her gloved hand to summon him. He crossed to her, took her hand gently and nodded to her with a slight bow. This was the closest and the most alone they had been in all their supposedly coincidental encounters and he became suddenly aware of her feminine allure to a degree he had not yet. The timing of this recognition was irritating to him even as he took a deep breath to draw it slowly in.

Recovering from his bow he said, returning her elegant French with his best approximation of the same, “You are very kind, Mademoiselle. I would have loved to share that stroll with you.” He then turned and motioned to the sofas where they could sit and continue their conversation. “Indeed my time here in Paris has been wonderfully accentuated by our occasional conversations.”

“Your time here?” she replied, with a feigned innocence he admired. “Why, Mr. Harrington, you speak as though your time here is short, surely you are here another month yet, I have it on good word that we are to have the pleasure of your company the week after next at our family’s grand reception.”

He continued to be singularly affected by her, noticing the movement of her lips as she pronounced her French with such careful placement of the tongue, conveying a subtle warmth that either he had ignored until now or perhaps she had never displayed so expertly.

“Dear Mademoiselle, I am afraid my plans have shifted quite suddenly. An urgent matter requires my return to New York ahead of the original schedule.”

Roseline’s smile didn’t falter, but her eyes, dark and intelligent, narrowed slightly. “But of course, you have matters to attend to. Even as we,” the word we gave away that she was here on an errand not solely of her own design, “had hoped to find, er,” she tilted her head slightly, her hands gently clasped in her lap, and he saw the coquette emerge in even these slightest of motions, “to find matters that would be of interest to you here in our city.” And now a glance up from lowered eyelids. “Perhaps you might reconsider?”

James was not blind to the invitation nor to the presence of its presenter. Steeling himself, he spoke clearly. “Certainly I shall return to Paris when my business requires it – after all, the grand Exposition is next year, giving me more than sufficient reason to return in hopes of seeing the final designs of the concourses there.” He didn’t intend for his future intentions to exclude her, and when he realized he had done just that he hastened to add, “And we shall have ample opportunity to meet again then, just as we have so frequently and... spontaneously encountered one another throughout these past months.”

He let the words hang in the air, a plain accusation of the plans that had been laid for him, which he had only discovered in the library the day before. Plans which he was growing to understand she had been well aware of even as he had been left ignorant.

Roseline paused, a single beat of silence passing between them. She glanced toward the corner where her aunt had assumed a state of convenient slumber, which was likely a convenient ruse, a front that would permit Roseline to stray beyond the boundaries of appropriate comportment. She glanced for a moment, calculating. When she turned back to James, he could see that the mask she had so carefully maintained for this entire visit was being slowly set aside.

“We could spend our lives speaking in riddles, James,” she intoned, her voice huskier, lower. Her decision to call him by his Christian name was a bold and surprising move, James could see the family had been correct to put her on the board for this bold maneuver. Her delicate pose shifted only slightly even as her eyes and face altered before him to become plain. “But the time for riddles has passed as your decisions, motivated by whatever they are, has forced me to speak forthrightly to you.”

What went unspoken between them was unnecessary to articulate. She knew that he knew and he now knew the same. Instead of pieces put into play by their families, Roseline was insisting in this moment that she was master of this game. For a moment he admired this about her, seeing in her a fiery resemblance to Grand-mère, which disarmed him.

Seeing him alter his composure, however slightly, caused her to continue. “I have, shall we say, high hopes for our continued association.”

“Roseline – “ he used her Christian name for the first time and it arose in him in such a way that he could almost taste it, and for a moment it tasted sweet to him.

“No, let me speak,” she interrupted, standing abruptly, drawing him instinctively to his feet as well. The gap between them was modest and she stepped forward toward him, narrowing the distance that kept them appropriately apart. At this distance — her excited breathing, the color that that came to her cheek, all of it enfolded in the broadly floral scent of her perfume — he nearly felt that in this moment all his resolve might melt away and that it would bring to an unexpected but not wholly undesirable end the last twenty-four hours of emotional storm he had endured. Perhaps this was the climax of a long-resisted but ultimately correct path. He could live in Paris, he knew that. He loved everything about it here, and at such a far remove from his father’s control – although not Grand-mère’s – perhaps he and this bold, beautiful young woman could indeed choose to build something more than they were being handed.

Did she see this deliberation in him? She certainly knew how to strike the iron when it was heating to its most malleable point. “James,” she nearly whispered, in a dusky voice that even an Aunt attempting to discern through feigned sleep could not perceive, “I long for a life that is freer than the one I have been offered here.” There was an insistence on her face that he found powerful, compelling.

“Mademoiselle,” he attempted to interject, inserting a separating distance between them with formal titles and reminders of propriety, even as his own heart beat madly over the many conflicting urges he felt in this moment.

She continued, “Paris as we know it is already a museum, and I am one of its exhibits. An alliance with an American... with you... it offers a path to a new union for us both, and our families, and our countries.” Clutching her hand to her breast now, she exuded a sincere energy that he feared he could not resist. “I want the American energy. I see that energy in you. It is in the way you stand, the way you look at the stones of this city as if you could command them.” Now he found her two steps closer to him and hadn’t even been aware of her movement. She reached out, her fingers ghosting over his sleeve. Instantly his mind recalled the touch of the girl in the Boulevard de Clichy the night before. But where the girl in the alley had been desperate, Roseline was precise in contrast. Her hand moved to lightly rest on his chest.

“I am a woman of my world, James, but I am also a woman of flesh,” she whispered, looking up at him, affording him a view of her delicate face, her gaze bold and unwavering, and the curve of her body. Her hand pressed more confidently now. “I feel a warmth within me when you are near. I am confident that I could be, that we could be…. Do you not feel the same?”

James felt the roar of his own blood. He avoiding looking at the swell of her body, the rise of the cream silk, avoiding acknowledging the vitality he had been wrestling with that now suddenly surged toward her. He saw in his mind the fire the artist had drawn in him, and he wondered if the fire he felt inside now was the closest he would get to it. For a moment, he lingered almost lovingly in an imagined life with her — a luxurious existence where they both used their families’ lands and gold to build the world anew.

Was this the cage he should ultimately settle in? If he were to ultimately come to rest in a cage of some kind, why not this one, indeed? A cage which first Grand-mère, then father, and now this beautiful heiress had designed for him, gilded more elaborately than he could have ever hoped. His body seemed to urge him to surrender, his mind was of no assistance in the matter. But it was his heart that ultimately spoke to him with the most force.

The image of the artist had stirred him, but now the words the artist offered returned to him with a new authority. “Money is also a cage, Monsieur, ne m’y enfermez pas avec vous.”

James first gently, then resolutely, took her hand from his chest and, summoning every ounce of resistance he could find, he stepped back and effected an almost regal stance, separating their bodies just enough to interrupt the flow of her heat through him.

Clearing his voice, he finally spoke, “You are a remarkable woman, Mademoiselle,” his voice regaining its structural stability and power. “I wish you the fulfillment of every desire which you so honestly shared with me now. I shall never forget the trust you placed in me to share it so, and I will never betray it.”

He stood taller, the polite parrying of the afternoon replaced by a cooling, final clarity.

“My matter is indeed urgent. More so than I understood even just this morning. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am,” he hesitated, “unable to serve in the role that has been cast for me.”

Roseline looked at him, her face hardening into a mask of regal indifference that rivaled his grandmother’s. She didn’t argue. She didn’t plead. She simply withdrew her hand and smoothed the silk of her skirt.

“Then I wish you luck with your building, Monsieur Harrington,” she said, her pronunciation of his name suddenly taking on a foreign tone, as if the syllables offended her French tongue. “I wish you a good journey and,” now her haughtiness broke somewhat, “everything your heart truly desires.”

He gave a slight bow at the waist, nodding respectfully. It was a draw, in his estimation, and he remained inclined as she turned toward the sleeping aunt, and saw her supposedly sleeping form miraculously arise, Lazarus-like, jumping to her feet to accompany her niece. James watched them depart, the cream silk of Roseline’s gown shimmering one last time before she vanished into the vestibule.

He stood alone in the petit salon, the silence of the house settling over him like a shroud. He only now understood the completeness of her effect on him, leaving his body wrung out, with a light sheen of perspiration covering him from head to toe. This feeling drove out what was left of his desire for her, leaving a hollow ache and a simultaneous, soaring sense of relief. He had survived the sweetheart’s gambit. Now, there was only the journey across the sea in search of the truth of the world he intended to build, guided by his wistful heart.

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The clouds of earlier had mostly cleared but the sun’s last edge was dipping below the curve of the earth, casting its last orange and red hues through the West-facing windows, painting the wisps of cloud visible over the water through the North-facing bay window. The orange glow warmed the odds and ends of his refuge, tobacco tins, a spyglass, and the ship models he studied in between reading factory plans and mansion blueprints. Amid this glow, Gordon Dunbar was hunched over a drawing of a brick and granite turret, his spectacles perched on the very tip of his nose. He looked every bit the man who had forged an empire out of fire and glass – robustly broad-shouldered, with hands that looked as though they were accustomed to hauling iron rather than annotating architectural plans, much less to signing contracts. When Megan entered, he didn’t look up immediately, his finger tracing a line on the blue-papered design with a reverence one might expect to be reserved more appropriately for scripture.

“Windyside grows another foot every day, Father,” Megan said, her voice melodic and composed. She leaned against the heavy doorframe, observing the room—the leather-bound ledgers, the smell of woodsmoke, and the unyielding force of her father’s ambition that grounded it all through the floorboards and into the stony outcrop that defined the bluff.

“It’s more than inches and feet, Meg,” Gordon grunted, finally looking up. His eyes crinkled with immediate warmth, a light of pride reflecting in the glass of his spectacles. He gestured to the blueprints. “And while I have you here, before the thing is constructed and is literally locked in stone, what of the name Windymere?”

“Instead of Windyside? I quite like the name as is,” she replied, almost brusquely, as if he were taking away a favored doll and she did not know why.

“Hmm. Windymere seems to speak of my people’s roots.”

“Your people wouldn’t have named where they lived Windymere, as somebody else would have named it for them!” she blurted out, continuing her defense against his assault on her suddenly tenacious grip on the old name they had used informally as a family for the two years they had been here in the cottage.

“Alright then, for you it is Windyside, and may those winds ever blow!”

“They already are,” she replied, aware that she was moving too fast into the conversation she had hoped could emerge slowly, carefully.

He paused, though whether to reflect on the name or the implication of her words, it wasn’t clear. Thankfully, he returned to his visions and plans. “That’s all very well. For this Windyside will serve as a tribute to our family now and for the next hundred years, rather than a monument to the last hundred.” He returned his glance to the papers before him. “Or at least it will be if I can figure out how to strengthen it against the salt and sea of this windy ledge,” he conceded, revealing the humility behind the strength, that combination which made him such a force in his business affairs.

He leaned back, his chair groaning under his weight, and reached for his pipe. “Coming here... it was for your mother’s breath, first and foremost. But it was for me, too. I spent forty years living inland, looking at vistas choked with smoke. Now, I’m looking at the horizon,” turning to her more fully, “and I can see a lot further.” His gaze fixed on her as he lit his pipe and drew a deep breath. She understood he was seeing the future again. Her future.

Redirecting the intent of his glance, she offered, “Your vision is quite full already, with the yacht you’ve ordered.” This reference made his face split wide into a brilliant grin.

“Yes, well, one must learn the ways of one’s peers,” he said, somewhat stuffily, before returning to his normal self, Pittsburgh man born and bred. “But one is also duty-bound to better them!” That racing sloop will hold its own against anything the New York set brings to the line next summer.”

“Master of the forge, master of the wheel,” she intoned almost reverently, though teasing at the same instant. “Is there anything you dare not master in your dash forward?” she asked, strolling through the final rays of violet light before the glow of the now-set sun would favor them no more, leaving them in the artificial light of his office gasolier.

Amused, he guessed at her reference, “It seems you have been to the carriage house to see the Winton?”

Now it was her turn to break into a grin and she let out a delighted guffaw, “Yes! It’s an absolute dream of a machine, a mechanical marvel! I rather expect Apollo himself to appear and command it.”

“It’s the future, Meg,” Father said, his rugged face somehow soft and determined in the same view. “That Winton will be doing twenty miles an hour while the rest of the world is still checking their horses’ shoes. I’m entering the new century with the engine running.”

“Quite literally!” she beamed, basking in the sustaining glow of their mutual admiration. With him, she knew herself to be completely cared for and safe. And soon she would leave the safety of the harbor he so carefully maintained for her, and for them all.

The energy of the moment subsided, the gas-electric chandelier above them happily conquering the lingering glow from the now-extinguished sun. It shone above them, casting its own shadows now, leaving one to rest on his face as he turned to face her, setting aside his pipe, and turning more serious of a sudden. “But the future I care most about, the one I want to see in vision and bring to reality most of all... it isn’t the Winton or even Windyside. It’s the horizon that lies ahead of my fine daughters as they must chart their courses.”

“Or wander their cart paths,” she muttered, attempting to postpone the gravity of what she knew must be said.

He stood up, walking around the desk to stand before her. He looked at her with a piercing, paternal intensity, his voice dropping into a rougher, more soulful register. “There will be no cart paths for you, my darling daughter, only broad highways to beautiful, ever-brightening vistas.” Presently he broke the gaze as well as his words and took her in a deep embrace, breathing deeply if somewhat raggedly of her essence, clinging to the moment, she presumed, in precisely the way she did.

“You, my love, the first fledgling to test the air. You are forever my beloved daughter.” Now breaking their embrace, he stepped back while holding both her hands firmly enough to be constant, gently enough to spare her the power his large hands could convey. “You stayed here, with us, these two years now, because of your mother.” His eyes moistened as he held back his words and, presumably, his tears. “You spent these important years of your life here for her, and I’ll never forget it. You know I love you girls but my love for your mother surpasses all the energy of my soul to convey.” He paused again. “Thank you.”

Tears now falling from her eyes, she rushed back into his chest to reclaim the embrace she knew she would soon have to leave for a time.

“It would have been harder to leave Pittsburgh society had Mr. Henderson proved to be the young man we all imagined he was.”

“That’s a name I never want to hear in this house again, nor in Windymere,” Father said without apparent malice.

“Besides, there are greater names for you to become acquainted with.”

“And if a great name isn’t what I want?” she tendered on her own behalf.

She felt his chuckle, pressed as she was against his chest, before she heard it. “Meg, you will have the privilege to choose what ‘great’ means to you. Whatever great thing you see in the man whom you accept to be your husband, that is what great will mean to me forever more.”

Megan pressed her wet eyes against his wool morning coat. “And I believe you when you say that. This is why no one will ever doubt that Gordon Dunbar’s daughters will honor him until the day they die.”

He finally broke their embrace, and she hoped he was as filled of her as she was of him, for they would both need the memory of it to sustain them. Had there ever been a father and daughter with so much mutual fondness and respect? If there had, she hadn’t seen it. Even her sisters had not yet learned how they could enter the bosom affections of this grand-hearted bear of a man. Hopefully they would yet. She knew to cherish it.

“You have packed your trunks?” he inquired, innocently enough that she felt he might be scheming something but could not apprehend what.

“Nearly so, I shall have just the two of them and there are so many petticoats to be reckoned with, but I will emerge victorious.”

“Then my apologies if I burden you with an additional load,” he began, her interest piquing further. “For I am afraid you will need to take a third trunk.”

“There’s no need, Father, I’m sure the two–”

“No protest will be necessary, nor welcome,” he beamed at her, knowing he held her curiosity in his spell. He took her by the hand and led her to the ornate wardrobe that sat against the East wall. With a simple motion, the mother-of-pearl handle opened its interior, or what little of it could be perceived, full to overflowing as it was with silk and gauze.

Overflowing with cautious pride, he reached in and carefully retrieved the gown from its hook. Looking alternately at it and at her, he seemed more a child than an aged industrialist. “I hope you will indulge a proud father.”

She did not hear him because she could not. Her senses were completely overwhelmed by the majesty of what emerged from the pressed confines of the admittedly large wardrobe. The silk gave a soft, rhythmic hiss as it spilled from the wardrobe, a cascading waterfall of Elephant’s Breath grey that appeared to swallow the light from the room. It seemed to never cease emerging, revealing itself first to her eyes, then her mind, and finally her heart. Her hands, in their turn, could not help but rise to her mouth.

“Father, it is the most exquisite gown I have ever seen!”

Megan stepped forward, fingers hesitating as they hovered over the bodice. Beneath a top layer of silk gauze, so fine it looked like woven mist, lay the heavy poult-de-soie. When her skin finally met the fabric, she was startled by its duality – it possessed the cool, substantial weight of mills and factories, yet it was surfaced with a shimmering, metallic thread that danced like salt spray in the sun.

She traced the asymmetrical drape of the gauze across the bust, her thumb catching on the intricate, silver-threaded embroidery that bordered the hem. It wasn’t merely a dress, it was a feat of engineering, a pigeon breast silhouette designed to command the space and air around its wearer, around her. And she would be expected to don it in just one week’s time! Gordon watched her, his face transformed. The firm lines of the man who commanded vast manufacture and export operations across the industrializing world softened into a look of pure, boyish rapture.

“Then you’ll accept it?” he whispered, his voice thick with satisfaction. She nodded raptly.

Clearing his throat gently but retaining the emotion plain on this face, he declared, “I want those great men and women of that ballroom to see you as I do – which they never can or will because to learn all that I see in you would take a lifetime – but I will be content if they see you in this and are compelled to surmise the rest.” He laughed, a deep, resonant sound, as he held the gown aloft, the smoke-grey train flaring like a trumpet. He may have had to depart Carnegie’s Pittsburgh, but here, in this moment, seeing the glow the shimmering silk cast upon his daughter’s equally radiant face, he looked as though he had already conquered every drawing room from Boston to Newport.

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Um, whose idea was this anyway? That’s right, two madly in love people happily married for more than 35 years decided to stoke the flames of our romance even more by writing one. It was going to be a small project, a fun thing for us to write together and privately enjoy. Then, one thing led to another and suddenly we’re 40,000 words into a massive historical romance novel set in 1899 and the principal romantic interests just barely met. Looks like we’re in this for the long haul. Which is great because 1899 — the turn of the century as it was called for the next 100 years — is the time of New York’s first subway contract, swirling preparations for the Paris Exposition of 1900, and (in our fictional world) the only winter ball ever held in Newport! Don’t you wish you were there?

Researching Out Loud

We live in Greater Boston, we love the Gilded Age architecture of our fair city, the Newport mansions, and of course the remnants of that era in neighboring New York City. When we undertook to write this book we thought we’d lightly situate it in some of that fabulous environment, add some ball gowns, throw in a few pearl chokers with sentimental brooches attached, and we’d call it good. But then we (well, one of us) got carried away and the next thing you know, we are researching what kinds of spats a man wears to a matinee performance at the opera in 1899 and what sort of walking dress a single woman would wear to visit a mansion with her aunt as escort. Especially because this is post-bustle dress Victorian age, at the height of the Gibson Girl craze. The rich costumes of HBO’s The Gilded Age would be hopelessly out of date in this period and so we have been scouring source materials to get solid leads on what our characters would actually have worn when attending Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette when it opened the Met’s season in December of 1899. (House of Worth, we’re looking at you.)

It is so fun to dig this deep! And it’s about to be even more fun. Because research isn’t just found in archives and history books. It’s found in the pinch of a high collar, the flow of an opera cloak, and the specific etiquette of an after-opera supper at a period Manhattan Steakhouse.

So, we’ve decided to live it.

Who We Are

We’re James and Megan. To our family, we’re just Mom and Dad (and even Nana and Grandad to our beautiful brood of grandchildren). We believe in love and marriage, and we believe in romance because we’ve lived it — wait until we tell you how we actually met, you are not going to believe it. But first this confession: We are not romance writers, we’re just romantics who got carried away with a fun project. And we’re not (heaven forfend) influencers, we just want to share what we’re doing — no scripting, no sponsors, no staging of exaggerated reactions.

Our Debut Mission: March 28 at The Met

The first major public effort of our research journey will culminate on March 28. We will be attending a matinee performance of La Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera, where famed soprano Lisette Oropesa will perform the role of Violetta. We will bask in the resonance of her voice from the equivalent of the “diamond horseshoe” of the 1899 Met, the Panterre level at today’s Metropolitan Opera House. And we intend to go fully dressed in as close to historically accurate 1899 attire as we can. Hence the questions over matinee opera attire (did you know it’s different than evening opera attire? Neither did we until we began researching!).

We have little budget here for this getaway to the city, so we won’t be having private fittings and bespoke garments tailored for us. But we’ve been finding some great things — my silver-finished, brass-handled walking stick just arrived in the mail today — and we are eager to share what we assemble along the way and give you the full scoop as we ride the carriage through Central Park on our way to stun the Met with our presence. All in the name of research, mind you.

Between now and then, we’ll be sharing:

• The Wardrobe: Megan’s walking suit and jewelry, my morning suit and top hat, and many various accessories, including the cravat I have to make to get the perfect match for my spats — we’ll share what we acquire and how it works for us.

• The Writing: We’ll launch weekly excerpts each Saturday from our novel-in-progress. Sometimes it will be finished text, sometimes rough outlines, and other times it will be backstory, all to inspire you to care about our lead characters and make you root for them to come together in the end!

• The History: This is where we (okay, one of us) can really go down the rabbit hole. We’ll share some of the historical context we’ve added to our characters’ backstories and share favorite nuggets we find along the way.

Join Us As We Party Like It’s 1899

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to step back in time—or if you just want to see if we can actually pull off a Gilded Age romance novel—we hope you’ll subscribe and follow along.

Next stop: Introducing our protagonists.