Available now
Yours, Very Truly
Hester Frampton invents a lady who does not exist, and the plain gentleman in her room writes to her.
Claim free copyThe Halcombe Gazette✦Halcombe-on-Sea, Dorset · May 1878✦A Most Unsuitable Governess — now out, and being talked about✦The season opens: twelve weeks to make a year's money✦Ladies of the Parade to play whist on Thursdays
The Inconvenient Women of Halcombe
Salt air,
sharp tongues,and slow-burning letters
Witty Victorian romances from a Dorset seaside town where nothing stays private for long — least of all a love affair.
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New release · Book Two
A Most Unsuitable Governess
She has no French, no references and no business being a governess. She’s also the best one Halcombe has ever had.
Holly Mintern has been a maid on West Parade for ten years, and in all that time her mistress has called her Mary. So when a letter arrives offering Miss Mintern a post as governess — and the Miss Mintern of the house has just eloped with a penniless officer — Holly reads it twice.
Her pupils are Constance, who is twelve and furious about it; Freddie, who has barely spoken since his mother died; and Dora, who has been wrapped in shawls all her life and would like to be let out. Their uncle, Laurence Penrose, is a London barrister who catches liars for a living. He sees through Holly inside a week. He doesn’t say a word.
With a Christmas play of Holly’s own devising in rehearsal and the other Miss Mintern due home for the holidays, what could possibly go wrong?
Book One · Free to readers
Yours, Very Truly
A woman who cannot get a character invents a lady who will give her one — and then starts handing them out to every other woman in town.
Hester Frampton has been let out of her own bedroom for the season and into work as daily companion to a difficult old woman on the Parade, who is in no hurry to write her the reference she needs to leave. So Hester writes one herself, in a hand that is not her own, signed by a lady forty years dead at an address that cannot answer back. It works beautifully. Then the plain gentleman lodging in her room — who is not a clerk at all — writes to the lady who does not exist.
“I remain, madam, entirely unrepentant — and yours, very truly.”Download your copy
The Halcombe Library
Forthcoming novels
Tales of the inconvenient women of Halcombe — and the men who eventually understand that “no” is a complete sentence.
Out now · Book Two
A Most Unsuitable Governess
Holly Mintern takes a governess post under a name that isn’t quite hers — and the barrister in the house works it out within a week.
Buy your copyThe next Halcombe story is in progress. Letters from the coast will carry the announcement.
Join the listA guide for the visitor
Halcombe on Sea, Dorset — population: opinionated
The Pier
Rebuilt twice, argued over daily. Where proposals are made and overheard.
The Gazette
Four pages of shipping news and three of implication. Circulation: everyone.
Cliff Terrace
Respectable frontages, unrespectable histories. Curtains twitch on schedule.
The Author
Nell Weatherby
Nell Weatherby lives in Dorset with her husband, two children and a thoroughly spoilt spaniel who considers every walk an expedition undertaken solely for his benefit.
A lifelong lover of the sea, Nell is happiest on the Dorset coast, preferably somewhere with a good view, a strong cup of tea and an old building with a story attached to it. Her fascination with Victorian Britain, particularly the lives of women who refused to behave quite as society expected, eventually found its way into her novels.
She writes warm, character-led Victorian romances about determined women, complicated men and the communities that bring them together. When she isn't writing, Nell can usually be found walking by the sea, disappearing into second-hand bookshops or investigating a piece of local history that was supposed to take five minutes.
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Letters from Halcombe
Join Nell's reader letters and she'll send your free copy of Yours, Very Truly, plus occasional news from the Dorset coast.