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    Persuadable
    Persuadable
    Persuadable
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    Persuadable

    By Katherine Woodbury

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    About this ebook

    Jane Austen's "Persuasion" has the reader rooting for the protagonists to rekindle their estranged affections. But what of the novel's nemeses? In the end, the wily and impious Mr. Elliot casts aside his carefully groomed reputation and persuades the infamous Mrs. Clay to become his mistress.

    But every persuader needs a persuadable partner, and Mrs. Clay is no ingénue; she'd send a Willoughby or a Wickham packing. Though no less calculating than those romantic villains, Penelope Clay and William Elliot discover in each other the kind of kindred spirits they fail to find among the titled Elliots.

    While highlighting and transfiguring classic scenes from the novel, this unconventional new version provides a romantic pairing on a par with that of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. In the process, "Persuadable" illustrates an eternal Austen truth: love is wholly individual, no matter the age or time-period.

    Who says a couple of shameless gold diggers can't find true love?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeaks Island Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2013
    ISBN9781301919741
    Persuadable
    Author

    Katherine Woodbury

    Katherine Woodbury reveres Jane Austen, Columbo, classic fairy tales, and cats. The author of twenty-five published short stories and seven novellas, Katherine (Kate) has spent her writing career tackling mermaids, bemused cops, Greek heroes, Joan of Arc, a devil's assistant, aliens with wings, and a not-quite-dead Viking funeral bride. More recently, she's turned her writing hand to a mystery series with a no-nonsense detective and paranormal elements. All good mysteries are grounded in social behavior. Kate began her apprenticeship of human idiosyncrasies with tributes to eighteenth and nineteenth century classics: A Man of Few Words (based on Pride & Prejudice), Persuadable (Persuasion), and Mr. B Speaks! (Samuel Richardson's Pamela). Next came the Victorian fantasy series, The Roesia Chronicles, so far including Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation, Richard: The Ethics of Affection, Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah, and Tales of the Quest. As well as a writer (and reader) of fantasy, history, mystery, and romance, Kate (Katherine) enjoys watching classic sitcoms, collecting manga, and her day-job: teaching humanities courses at Maine community colleges.

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      Book preview

      Persuadable - Katherine Woodbury

      Persuadable

      Persuadable

      Another look at Jane Austen’s Persuasion

      A novella

      by

      Katherine Woodbury

      based on characters created

      by

      Jane Austen

      Copyright © 2016 by Katherine Woodbury. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Peaks Island Press. Edited by Eugene Woodbury. Cover graphic by Elena Schweitzer. Cover painting by Thomas Gainsborough (courtesy Wikipedia Commons). Cover design by Eugene Woodbury.

      Chapter 1

      Penelope Clay

      Penelope Clay decided to marry Sir Walter a month after she returned to Kellynch.

      Sir Walter hadn’t changed in the years since Penelope escaped her home town. At a local ball sponsored by Sir Walter and his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Penelope watched him strut stiffly about the town’s assembly hall, nodding ponderously to the attendees.

      Ah, Miss Merriweather, how fine you are looking—you’ve taken my advice about avoiding too much sun.

      He’d made similar circuits when Penelope was a fresh nineteen-year-old. His wife was alive at the time; she paced alongside him, hand on his arm, smiling gently on Sir Walter’s victims. People in town claimed that the lady of Kellynch Hall had been an ameliorating influence on the good baronet; since her death, he had become . . . complacent was the term people used. As far as Penelope was concerned, he was still a fulsome peacock with an avuncular manner.

      His deficiencies were all to her benefit.

      Ten years before, Penelope Clay, née Shepherd, fled Kellynch Town to marry Mr. Clay, the least objectionable of several possible beaus.

      The first was a philosophical youth who boarded with a nearby family and wanted to preach his seemingly profound view of the world to Penelope: As you know, dear Miss Shepherd, most people in trade don’t value artistic accomplishments.

      They usually indicate their value with money, Penelope pointed out, after which the philosophical youth promptly lost interest in continuing their friendship.

      The second, a friend of the grocer, considered himself a Lothario. With winks and nudges, he invited Penelope to ask him about other pretty ladies he’d courted. He promptly lost interest when Penelope failed to take the gambit.

      And then there was her father’s clerk who slept in her family’s parlor and looked surprised when Penelope refused his half-hearted proposal.

      Are you pursing a duke? her mother queried waspishly. Your father’s sister pursued unattainable men and look what’s happened to her.

      Penelope’s aunt boarded above the town’s millinery and supplemented an allowance from Penelope’s father with occasional earnings from decorating hats. Penelope acknowledged the unsatisfactory nature of such a life and set herself to endure Mr. Clay.

      Mr. Clay was from Cambridge where he worked for a solicitor. He and Penelope met when he delivered some leases to Penelope’s father, who managed Sir Walter’s land. Invited to dinner, Mr. Clay regaled Penelope with tedious stories about the exact nature of his work, stories which always seemed to end with people off-handedly complimenting his efforts but not actually promoting him.

      Mr. Clay was dull but at least he was employed and reasonably attentive. So Penelope married him and moved to Cambridge.

      She grasped in only a few months that she must either learn flattery and tact or become one of the nagging, sharp-tongued neighborhood women who mocked their husbands publicly. Penelope didn’t see the point—open abuse didn’t make a husband any easier to live with or the hearthrug any less dreary or the husband’s pocket any more open.

      Not that Mr. Clay made much money. He left little to his widow and sons when he died. Penelope, eight-year-old Robert, and five-year-old Charlie had to relocate to her parents’ home after the funeral; Penelope did not, however, plan to settle into widowed obscurity, smiling gently on her active boys from a chimney corner.

      Luckily, she’d had sons, not daughters. Her mother preferred males in the household and was perfectly willing to endure a boy’s cleverness (that in a girl, she would label insolence) and animal spirits (rather than fuss) for the pleasure of bragging about her grandsons to the neighbors.

      Penelope knew: No one will brag about me. I’ll have to claim my future without assistance.

      This time she would marry for money, ensuring a university education for her sons. Penelope didn’t have much maternal feeling—except to be pleasantly surprised that her sons weren’t dunces. But she owed them a future.

      For herself, she wanted long-term security and independence from her parents. She had seen too many women, widows of tutors and surveyors, forced to move into tiny rooms from which they wrote desperate, begging letters to friends and family. Penelope woke sometimes from nightmares filled with tatty furniture and dirty window panes, overcome by a sensation of drowning. She would never suffer such a life. She had been a passable wife. She would be one again.

      She already knew she could tolerate a boring man.

      Sir Walter was boring. He was also husband material: he did not drink to excess, did not invite (any kind of) scandal through sexual misconduct, had not beaten his late wife and did not beat his daughters. And he was marvelously prone to flattery.

      Unfortunately, Kellynch was not the relaxed neighborhood of Cambridge, nor was it the loud but friendly dining room of the Clays’ lodgings, which they’d shared with five other families. Penelope could not approach Sir Walter directly.

      He had three daughters. The youngest Elliot daughter was married and living away from home; Penelope remembered her vaguely as a scattered-brained, whiny child. But the two older daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, were still unmarried and living with their father. Penelope eyed them now from her position in the assembly hall.

      Skirting the partners for the next dance, Penelope paused near Anne, standing beside Lady Russell, and waited to catch the middle Elliot daughter’s eyes whereupon Anne gave Penelope the gentle, almost seraphic smile of her late mother.

      I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Clay, Anne said; Penelope made a suitable response though the loss was a year away, and by now she barely remembered her husband’s vague personality.

      Lady Russell greeted Penelope perfunctorily, her eyes traveling over her to another attendee: "Mrs. Burland, what did you think of Seasons? Isn’t Thomson a remarkable poet?"

      Lady Russell presumed to be an intellectual, Penelope remembered. She supposed she could impress Lady Russell with allusions to Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott. Toadying to Lady Russell might bring her closer to Anne; Lady Russell was a great friend of the baronet’s family. But after watching Anne mingle amongst the attendees and noting Anne’s friendly detachment, Penelope concluded that declaiming bits of literary minutiae into Lady Russell’s ears would be an ineffective use of her time.

      I could know Anne Elliot for years and still never make a mark.

      Anne was gracious. Penelope knew from town gossip that Anne was liked. But she seemed to exist in a bubble of utter remoteness. How many people did get close to her?

      Penelope would have better luck with Anne’s sister Elizabeth.

      The eldest Elliot sister swanned about the assembly hall, following her father’s ponderous circuit. She bestowed regal smiles on attendees and seemingly friendly commentary: Oh, Mabel, what a darling gown. You are so nimble a seamstress! Her tone was so gracious, simpering Mabel never noticed the implicit criticism: the gown was obviously altered.

      Unlike Anne, Elizabeth ended her parade amid a coterie of girls who appeared abashed and gratified by her attention. Penelope noted that they were not the brightest girls in town, but then those girls would not give Elizabeth so much deference, baronet’s daughter or not.

      Penelope wafted closer to Elizabeth’s coterie and waited to be acknowledged (she had been reintroduced to Elizabeth shortly after returning to Kellynch).

      Mrs. Clay, Elizabeth

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