#regency elvis

It didn’t take one as experienced as yourself and your maid longer than five minutes to don one’s evening gown in private and add the last touches to the arrangement of one’s hair.

You had been gone from your bridal party more than twenty.

Yet no one noticed.

Too busy in the adjoining sitting room discussing your business behind the closed door, such as marriage was a woman’s business, or perhaps your mother knew you needed such peace before stepping out and spending the evening making happy over your engagement.

A Husband.

You were bound to be given to one at some point but that didn’t help one resign oneself to it as much as one might hope. Yet it wasn’t a shock, not if you were being honest and it helped perhaps that he was your father’s acquaintance and that anyone so young and penniless and handsome as to have caught your girlish yearnings beforehand had, in a polite fit of heroism, gone off to France and got themselves summarily pulverized by Napoleon's artillery. Finest cannons in the world, it was said, killed half a generation of young Englishmen in the flower of their youth.

So now, adorned with spring blossoms about your virgin head and stood in your childhood room for close the last time, you hoped those bright young men were pleased with themselves for leaving you in such a lurch.

There were worse fates than marriage to a very wealthy, very reticent, very bewhiskered stranger. Cannon balls to the gut, for instance, or a hussar’s saber to the neck. That’s what you told yourself hourly in these days of lonely, neglected engagement. But according to your mother’s friends, commonly chittering over your head as they readied you for the day and even now in the adjoining room, heedless of your prolonged absence, you were facing a martyrdom of sorts.

“-such rank and such commendations, they are the product of wartime and now that peace is in sight, really Hortencia, what will there be of their social standing? Your poor girl. This match is a disgrace waiting to happen.”

“The Prince is bound to tire of Mr. Presley’s fashions and his sports, then where will the new couple be? Where will you stand? How can you bear it, Hortencia?”

“His commonness aside, it’s in poor taste of him to marry the daughter of one’s investor. It speaks of…of leverage.” This later part was hissed as if it were a terrible scandal.

That was very much the point of your marriage, you had surmised -leverage. But with the slowly tanking fortunes of your own noble family, just about anyone who condescended to marry you would be in a position to be a savior, one might as well have a wealthy and impressive savior, if one was going to be saved, than have a squalid and portly savior, no matter how very royal and inbred his noble blood. Not that the ladies saw it that way.

Common, quite common your groom was, and yet far too wealthy to be ignored. Companion to the Prince Regent, Arbiter of Dandified Refinement and a coal mining tycoon from the country. Filthy rich, passably handsome from your brief observations and rich. Did we already mention that? That he was Rich?

You were going to enjoy a wealthy husband, you were determined, and you were going to aid your poor, cheated parents as best you could in your new wifley position. Which was more than what those chattering crone’s outside could boast in terms of their own daughter’s loyalties or affections.

You dismissed your maid and twirled before the mirror, allowing yourself one last moment of peace and preening -eavesdropping, too- before joining them. You looked very fresh. That much was commendable, you hoped you didn’t look too young or if you did, you had hopes he wouldn’t mind. Not that first impressions mattered much, the engagement settled and the contracts drawn up, but you did so wish to not be spurned. You had only met him once, and you’d been a child then, tiny gloved hand shaking his when you should have been curtseying, he was younger then, too, and happy and gay enough to laugh it off.

That was before her.

You hadn’t met him since, though at times he was at the far upper end of your fathers table or across the room at court or else straddling the enclosures at ascot. But he had been younger then, merrier, less…hairy, less maudlin and less tanned than he was now.

But all of this erstwhile gallant merriment had been witnessed by you from a distance, and you had not seen much of him at all during his brief marriage, his wife’s preferment of town and its vanities grew with his one disillusionment of them. They had taken to the country in what one supposes was an attempt at refocusing. Harmonizing, a chin up try at domesticity and fidelity.

What occurred instead had the whole nation reeling in scandalized shock.

“There are far more unsuitable candidates in the upper echelons of society,” your mothers voice floated in, soft yet strained in her effort to

maintain civility with her supposed friends, “she could do far worse. A girl can grow used to the mature habits of an older man, she does not grow used to cruel caprices of vain peacocks.”

”Hortencia, it is natural to console oneself in the face of tragedy, but dear friend, you are handing your child to a wolf.”

You wanted to snicker at the thought that mother’s friends had waited until days before your wedding to showcase their tender, loving concern. You would be glad to move to the country with your new husband, to leave behind such stupid circles, loneliness on the open moors of Northumbria was welcome compared to the shiny cesspools of London and Bath.

“And his wife not yet dead!” Mrs. Turvydrop would be the one to object to that aspect.

In your occasional fits of honesty regarding the entire situation, you had to admit that the living existence of his divorced young wife, somewhere thriving in the continental Riviera, gave you a mild panic. The church was not at all fond of such breaking of covenants, but the woman had been in the wrong, there was a lover, there was a midnight abandonment of her husband‘s house, and there were the acquittals for manslaughter given to your groom.

Indeed, were it not for this public shame hanging over his otherwise irreproachably fabulous career as a national success at everything he set his hand to, you doubted that Mr. Presley would even consider marrying someone with so little to offer as yourself. Life is full of things we wish were different, and you wished your fiancé did not have a living first wife. So did Mrs. Turvydrop, it seemed, although you doubted the deadness of the previous Lady Presley would have done much good to the reputation of a man so ruggedly unconcerned with convention.

“His wife was adulterous. The Bible and the church give room for such annulments.” Your mother was at the ready, though her voice was weary. “This marriage will be Sanctioned before God, it is all quite proper, I assure you.”

“Indeed, but is he? A prince's companion is no recommendation for a husband.”

“Truly!” Another voice rose up to agree, “it leaves open all sorts of speculation as to what kind of man would drive his young wife to such extremes! She was every bit as sweet and delicate as your child. To have been driven to madness from such a genteel beginning suggests much blame on his part.”

“He is common. What did they expect?”

“Common? He is uncouth, why his taste for food and confectionery is so bizarre as to be nearly repulsive, forget that it is served on gold plates.”

“You could even say, without much speculation, that it serves to reason his marital tastes are similarly appalling.”

“Rough appetites those mining men.” Lydia Carmichael’s voice agreed and you laid your hand on the knob, knowing your procrastination was inexcusable but far too invested in the subject being discussed to think of interrupting. “What if he -what if he’s brutish?”

“Yes!” Countess Jessop warmed to the theory and a Cacophony of scandalized voices rose like girls adding to a ghost story in the upstairs attic of a finishing school. “What if he was so…so brutish…that his poor lady wife had to flee from him?”

“Horse flesh and steam engines.” Mrs. Turvydrop sagely expounded, “It’s the only thing I’ve heard tell that interests him.”

“And a good waistcoat.” Countess Jessop tittered.

“Mark my words Hortencia, he has foul designs for your child.” Lydia Carmichael sighed, “He’ll break that girl like a licorice stick.”

“By your own admission he’ll likely be too busy with horses and steam engines to bother with her.” your mother returned wryly and filled yourself with smug comradery for her wit, you opened the door and presented yourself to the doubters.

The picture of you was hardly settling.

Virginal and swathed in blushing pink silks, your copious flowers were perhaps overdone but you looked a May Queen, airy and bright, like one touch of a masculine finger on your porcelain self would wilt you like a peony, breathed upon too hard.

Your eager face questioned your mother, a silent, unspoken query: “do you think he’ll like it? Will he like me?”

Her eyes filled with tears, seeing in you her promising young babe and a bound bride all at once. She saw you briefly as a man might, and she trembled at the sudden vision she had of Elvis Aaron Presley, Esquire and Dandy sinking his teeth into you like a delectable pastry.

18+ blurb, warning sexual content ahead, arranged marriage, romance novella style stuff

Imagine this: Regency Elvis whose wife has recently left him for a foreigner, taking with her his only child -a daughter who cannot inherit. He needs an heir.

Zero promises of love or fidelity or even bare respect for his new wife but…there’ll be position and status and jewels so long as you perform your wifely duties without complaint.

Jaded and lonely, I need freshly betrayed Elvis buying off a nobleman for his daughter, a Baron who’s mortgaged his estate for debts, Mr. Presley gets the association with your family’s nobility and you get the much needed wealth that new money brings.

And so your new husband comes in nightly in an embroidered robe and a solitary lit candle to consummate your union. He’s got all that chest hair displayed and a lil ponch of a belly showing out his robe as he slowly undoes the tie every night, never rushed, and you can feel the jitters down to your toes every time as you hug the sheet to your chin.

*Let go, Darlin,* he’s always murmuring as he pulls the sheet from your grip, *must do what needs done*

He fucks you hard and fast for such a delicate woman and then tosses you spending money to make up for it.

Reminds you after each visit to yoru chambers that you have a job to do. One single job.

*Gimme that son and maybe you’ll get that sea bathin’ ya been hankerin’ for*

(Elvis is from Yorkshire if he was ever transported to an English Setting AU, ok? No question, unless the question is Irish versus Yorkish)

Each time, when he finishes and pants into the humid crook of your neck, his hand blindly strokes away your tears and he whispers in gravelly apology, *I’ll leave ya alone, moment ya start to swell, I swear it, I’ll leave ya alone lil girl*

But that’s not why you’re crying, you wish he’d stay, he doesn’t know how cold you get when he leaves you and his sweat and spend cools on your skin and leaves you shivering.

You could curse the woman who laid here before you, who broke his heart and still haunts this place, like the wall opposite the bed with its outline of a portrait missing on the sun-bleached wall.

You wonder what she looked like, this missing wife.

You wonder if she secretly craved the burning stretch of him like you do, possibly not if she left for someone more…continental. Was he too voracious for her? Or was it the loneliness that finally ate her through like the moths who try the same with the bed canopy.

One night, Mr. Presley’s hand slips from your shoulder down to your breast, very rarely does he maul you there except in his direst paroxysms of pleasure, but tonight he slips and grabs and it’s so sore you nearly cry aloud from the ache.

*I swear I’ll leave ya be* he had said and you bite your lip savagely, cinch your corsets cruelly and wonder how to make him love you, tolerate you even. Anything so that you’re not left alone like he promises.

Are your breasts sore from being with child? You worry so.

So the next night you scheme, and when he shakes atop you and catches his breath and makes to roll away, you grab hold of him and keep him close.

*Six months* you murmur, and he seems confused by your meaning, *six month’s you’ve visited me nightly save for menses and Lent, and no child to show for it. Won’t you stay? Nurse says if the man remains…after…the chances are greater.*

Ensuing cockwarming between two people who’ve barely spoken outside of bed…little chats…because neither can sleep and in fact, he doesn’t really sleep that much at all, he admits.

*what do you do then? At nights?* you ask.

He reads a lot, he tells you and he’s got a telescope, and you tentatively ask if he’ll read to you.

He agrees with a shy *i-if ya want that, I will*

About the books. You asks if he will tonight instead of leaving and he says yes.

Then he hesitates and asks lowly, *can we…once more?…before?*

He asks if he can do it again, before he grabs the books, because he firmed up again while acting as a stopper in your warm cunt.

You’re already a wet mess down there and perhaps he moves you around, spoons you.

Puts himself back in and you’re so wet from what he gave you before and your excitement at the intimacy you feel in this movement.

And due to the difference in angle, for the first time, you actually come from the feeling of your husband inside you. His flaming hot body behind you, his thick arms wrapped around your body, the delicious rub of him in your womb.

And you’re quite sure you’ve already made a child but he doesn’t need to know. Not yet.

I once did a rather deep dive into the folkways and immigration patterns of certain areas in Great Britain coming to America and the results were fascinating. Much of British aristocracy, along with Huguenots from France, established our Southern American gentry. Predominately these British aristocrats migrated in the first wave during the Virginia Plantation of the 1600’s and settled the affluent Tidewater regions, as well as the coastal Carolina’s. That left our southern backwoods such as inland Carolina’s, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, etc. to be colonized by the second wave that were predominantly hard scrabble, hard working, hard loving commoners from the north of England, Scotland and Ireland.

So, y’all’s north settled our south -or the south as most of us would have known it in the 1800’s, only 1% being aristocratic or owning slaves, living the genteel lifestyle that’s now so typified. So in that way the Presley’s fit into northern England due to roots and culture if not much else.

But lastly, allow me to gush about accents for a moment. Yorkshire accents I once heard a professor say don’t so much have a brogue as they have a drawl. Perhaps the only drawl in all of Britain, and any bit of research proves this with the way y’all elongate your speech and round your sentences compared to the rest of the country. If I had to choose between listening to Sean Bean or Alex Turner talk verses the poshest heartthrob from Surrey -I’d chose the north any day. Y’all have the same gritty, earthy sweetness that a true southern drawl has, and in fact, we owe our drawl to ya.

Please feel free to ask more or add your own insights as this is coming from a southern girl who only ever got to drive through yorkshire while booking it up to Scotland. You’re the expert here.

While we’re at it…here’s a poll for the period drama lovers: