I’d like to extend a big thank you to Stanley Hurd for so kindly asking me to review his second installment in his fantastic Darcy’s Tale Trilogy and for offering a spectacular giveaway in conjunction with my review!  Thank you, Stanley!  I greatly enjoyed reading and reviewing the second volume of Darcy’s Tale!  All the best with Volume Three!

Thank you to all of you who stopped by to read my review and shared your thoughts (and your Woots!)  😉  I’m so happy to hear how many of you are interested in reading this series.  And for those of you who have already read some of Stanley’s work, I so thrilled you think it deserving of praise!

In addition, a BIG thank you goes to Nancy Kelley for her lovely visit to Austenesque Reviews!  What an enticing excerpt she gifted us with! Definitely looking forward to reading Against His Will next month!   Thank you to all of you who stopped by to check out Nancy’s post and share your enthusiasm for her work!

Without further ado… the randomly selected winners of Stanley Hurd’s Darcy’s Tale, Volume II: Into Kent are…

Ceri

Theresa M.

Valerie R.

Ginger

Stephanie Carrico

…and the winner of Nancy Kelley’s Against His Will is…Raquel M!!!

Winners, if you can, please email me your addresses ASAP!  (Merry816[AT]aol.com)  I leave for England on Sunday and would love to ship these books out to you on Saturday so you don’t have to wait until I get back! 🙂

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A Special Sneak Preview of Darcy’s Tale, Volume III:  The Way Home from Stan Hurd

This was fun for me to write, since I teach fencing and the martial arts. It’s just how a fight always works out in your imagination, but never in real life; which, of course, is why they call it fiction.

The set-up is that Darcy has gone to London in search of Wickham and Lydia, and acquired some assistance in the form of one Corporal Sands, through the good offices of Colonel Fitzwilliam. Sands is a seasoned fighting man, given to whistling when things are going his way. Having found out from Mrs. Younge that the couple was in St. Mary’s parish, Whitechapel, the two men go there to search for them.

There is a description of the fencing terms at the end.

*****

They were to spend some hours in this manner, searching the close and weary dens south of the high street; it was getting on in the afternoon when they crossed Whitechapel and proceeded up Osborn. It was there they encountered their first incident of note: as the light from the sun behind the clouds began to fade, Darcy suddenly found himself set upon by two men; the first, wielding a knife that missed being a sword by inches only, stepped out directly in front of him; he was wiry and quick of movement, holding his weapon with practiced ease. The second, a hulking beast of a man, though unarmed, got between Darcy and Sands, obviously intent on delaying Sands from coming to Darcy’s aid.

When Darcy had been up at Oxford, he had, along with most young men of his class, taken lessons in the sword at a salle d’armes in town. Darcy had enjoyed the exercise a good deal, but there had been one individual whom Darcy never could abide, who was a most devoted student of the rapier; rather than undergo the daily aggravation of practising with this disobliging individual, Darcy had turned to the single-stick. His pleasure in the art had given him application, and, by the time he left, he was more than proficient. At the time it had all been rather for his enjoyment and convenience, but now it turned to material advantage, as a walking-stick differed from a single-stick only by the lack of a guard. He had the reach on his assailant by at least a foot, and addressed his blade en garde in third almost with amusement.

The footpad, seeing that Darcy had no intention of yielding easily, lost a good deal of his initial enthusiasm and swagger; he began circling Darcy, looking for an opening. Darcy took a quick scan of the footing around him, and noticed as well that the crowded street had become suddenly empty. From behind him, he could hear Corporal Sands giving out as good as he got; his cheery whistle told Darcy there was little to worry about from that quarter. The man before Darcy, waving his blade sinuously in front of him, made an exploratory lunge to test Darcy, but his distance was faulty, and he came within reach of Darcy’s arm; Darcy took his blade in fourth with a riposte volante to the left, which he carried down to low line, cutting back hard across the kneecap with the brass tip of his walking stick. As the man cried out, Darcy administered a soporific that quieted his cries: a solid coup de taille montante that caught the man on the left angle of the jaw, bringing his adversary an instant, alleviating sedation, temporarily putting him beyond the pain which his knee, and now his jaw, would know for weeks to come.

Darcy spun now to his rear, executing a passe avant to reach the other two, and finished with a heavy blow to the sinews on the larger man’s heel just as he took his weight on that foot to leap at Sands; while the timing of this manœuvre was entirely fortuitous, the results were both impressive and satisfying: instead of vaulting forward at Sands, the man’s leg gave way under him directly; as he fell, his skull came down on the curbing with a resounding crack, and suddenly all was still. Sands looked in surprise at the man on the ground in front of him, then to Darcy; over to the other man where he lay motionless, his knife still in his grip, and finally back to Darcy; he gave a low-pitched whistle and rubbed his cheek in wonder. While astounded at his good luck and the ease of his victory, Darcy met the corporal’s gaze impassively—though he held his features in check with difficulty; his elation at having the whole engagement go so perfectly, as thoroughly in his favour as any he had ever imagined as “Dirks Darcy” in the woods at Rosings, made him want to dance about and wave his fists in the air. Such a very un-piratical display would, naturally, rob his performance of much of its effect, so he contented himself with a little twirling flourish as he brought his stick back to its proper place under his hand. Sands went to the smaller man and, kicking the blade from his hand, reached down and retrieved it; he offered it to Darcy, who declined with a gesture. The corporal tucked the blade into his belt at the back under his coat by way of compensation for his troubles, and, with a new respect, gestured for Darcy to precede him.

Fencing vocabulary:

“En garde in third” means you have your sword (stick) angled up at your right side, covering the area between the hip and face. A “riposte volante”, or flying riposte, is a move where you deflect the opponent’s blade in a move that carries all the way past the end of their sword, and then you strike back in another angle. In this case, Darcy swings the stick across his body from right to left, ending with it a little past his left shoulder. He then swings it down and across the footpad’s knee from left to right. Next, a “coup de taille” is a forehand cut, like in tennis, which in this case is “montante”, or rising, so Darcy finishes with a rising strike to the left side of his opponent’s jaw, knocking him out. Finally, the “passe avant” is a crossing step that travels a greater distance than a lunge, so he could reach the man attacking Sergeant Cooper.

And, by the way, when I first wrote this Sands was a sergeant named Cooper; after writing this piece and doing some research, I found that the Horse Guards, which is the unit the sergeant was attached to, didn’t have sergeants! Only corporals were/are used as non-coms, and they were equivalent to sergeants in other branches of the army. So Sergeant Cooper got changed into Corporal Sands for the book.