Welcome to Beatrice Knight’s All Things Regency research blog and author parlor!

A man in possession of £12,000 a year and his own teeth is not to be sneered at. After five failed London Seasons, Charlotte Winford is past being picky. She has enraptured a gouty squire with a pig-farming empire. Admittedly, he is no Adonis and has a horror of educated women, but it’s not raining suitors in the ballrooms of 1813.

Only duty would induce war-hardened Jasper Alverstone to attend an Almack’s ball. The most hunted matrimonial prize in England, he is not above skulking in dark corners to avoid ambitious mamas. Unfortunately, he is now head of his illustrious family and must honor his father’s will, even if it means marrying an insufferable heiress who loathes him. No sooner has that lady thrown his dance offer in his face when he overhears some sapskull making the world’s worst marriage proposal. He is stunned to recognize its fleeing recipient as a country damsel he saved from ruin seven years ago–gallantry that almost cost him his life

With old scores to settle and secrets to hide, he and Charlotte form an uneasy alliance that will alter their lives, and those of their families, forever. Set in turbulent times, Alverstone is a sprawling saga of love, family, adventure, and war.

Brainless fops and desperate wallflowers thought their prospects could get no worse, with the Thames frozen over and every ball cancelled as the 1814 Season opens in a blizzard.

Enter Lady Violet Alverstone, diamond of the first water, heiress to a vast fortune, and inseparable from best friends, Rose and Sylvie Winford.

Dubbed ‘The Three Graces’ the girls embark on a spree of flirtation and misadventure that enthralls the vulgar press and horrifies their families. Reports of their exploits even reach the battlefields of Europe, where Tristan Alverstone and Percy Winford are fighting Napoleon as the war enters its final phase.

After breaking one rule too many, the girls are banished abroad to a disciplinarian great aunt in Brussels, under orders to mend their ways.  Gallivanting about the Continent sounds thrilling until they meet their new governess, Miss Julia Morden. A dragon hired by desperate parents to reform wayward young ladies, she has ice in her veins and a bewildering knack for staying a step ahead of her charges.

On the eve of Waterloo, the girls hatch a plan to give her the slip and see their brothers on the battlefield. Little can they guess what Fate has in store.

Volume 2 in the sweeping Alverstones family saga, The Three Graces transports the reader from the ballrooms and country estates of Regency England to the heady chaos surrounding the final defeat of Napoleon.

An illustrated Who’s Who of the entrepreneurial women who dominated Regency women’s fashion.

• Profiles of London’s leading modistes
• The first extensive list of modiste/dressmakers working during the Regency era
• Timelines for key trends in Regency women’s fashion
• Fashion plates and detail illustrations
• Fabrics, colors, and costuming

A go-to reference for anyone interested in Regency fashion history and costuming.

The Vatican is not happy with Sister Cecilia. The college of Cardinals turned a blind eye when she discovered a cache of medieval love letters and used them to write a bestselling novel. They were also benevolent when the nuns at her ramshackle English Priory converted their historical Mary Garden into a cash cow.

But the latest shenanigans are intolerable. Not only have the sisters erected a shrine to a disgraced member of their order burned at the stake for heresy, they’re demanding a Vatican pardon for her. That’s a rosary-rattler no one saw coming.

It gets worse. When the story was splashed across the Mail on Sunday, medieval manuscript collector Nathan Doyle took the next flight to Rome. A former Intelligence Officer, he’s convinced that Sister Cecilia can unravel a mystery he’s been trying to solve for a decade.

He wants to set up a meeting, and he’s not an easy man to refuse.