“As you requested: You said you wanted him to rot on the other side of the world. Although given how hot it gets in the penal colonies, he may well roast, rather than rot.”
“Then they are gone, and we can forget all about them.”
“I already have.” Rafe skated in a slow circle around her. “I would much rather think about you, for I intend to take you into that cabin, where it is warm and cozy, and spend the rest of the day making love to you.”
“Perhaps you will. But first…” She slid out of his reach, teasing him with her playful, enticing smile. “First you will have to catch me.”
Thea winked, spun around on the ice, and skated away.
Rafe forced himself to wait, watching her skirts swirl around her. Love and desire filled him, leaving little room for air. He would need air, he reminded himself, for what came next.
So he breathed all the way in, and all the way out.
Then, smiling, he gave chase.
Author’s Note
Plants, whether for food, textiles, or medicines, were a major factor in European colonial expansion, and botany was both big business and big science. I confess that, before starting research for this story, I knew little of the history of colonial exploitation of medicinal plants, with the exception of opium. As is often the case, much of what I learned had to be omitted from the novel itself.
The plants named in Rafe’s greenhouse, and their purported uses, appear in historical sources cited in books and journal articles on colonial botany and medicine. These studies examine how Europeans gathered, exploited, and tested the knowledge of enslaved and indigenous people—while often simultaneously persuading themselves that the knowledge of enslaved and indigenous people was somehow lesser, and thus erasing their expertise. Works I consulted include Londa Schiebinger’s Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2017) and Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004). See also the list of resources on my website.
Cannabis came into use in medical treatments in the UK during the 19th century, although the British knew of its properties long before then, as documented in James H. Mills’ Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928 (2003).
The medical and intoxicating properties of cannabis are mentioned in several texts published in the UK in the 18th and early 19th centuries (often appearing as “bhang,” “bangue,” or “bang”). Europeans who traveled to Asia and the Middle East had been gathering such information since the 16th century, but their accounts were often embellished or distorted to sell titillating tales of exotic vices. It was not until the 19th century that British scientists and doctors turned their serious attention to it, although work was often hampered by their prejudices against Indian medical systems and religious practices.
William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, an Irish doctor who conducted experiments using cannabis in Kolkata in the 1830s, is credited with introducing cannabis into British medicine. For subjects such as this, I work on the principle that, where one person has entered the history books for an accomplishment, many other people were conducting similar work earlier and around the same time.
The British government primarily valued cannabis plants for hemp, essential for a maritime nation that needed the fiber to manufacture sails, ropes, sacks, etc. The “hemp plant” had long been an important crop grown in Britain; for example, Queen Elizabeth I issued a decree ordering large-scale landowners to grow it. The British were therefore keen to encourage its cultivation in India, and it was a source of conflict that Indian producers resisted changing their cultivation methods.
By the 1870s, cannabis was being used in the UK to treat mental illness. At the same time, others were claiming that cannabis induced mental illness. This latter view, combined with growing international alarm about narcotics, eventually prevailed, leading to the prohibition of cannabis in the UK in 1928.
In this novel, Martha’s unnamed medicine is fictional; although she based it on bhang as it was known to the British at the time, she used her own expertise to make modifications and create something new. Although I drew on accounts of William Brooke O’Shaughnessy’s experiments, its effects are not intended to accurately portray the effects of cannabis or bhang.
I am indebted to a clinical psychologist for her suggestions for depictions of Katharine’s condition, which would likely be diagnosed today as bipolar I disorder and psychosis. Her symptoms are not intended to be universal.
The UK implemented considerable reforms in the treatment of mental illness over the 19th century. Influencers (referred to by Rafe) were William Tuke, a Quaker and successful tea and coffee merchant, who opened the York Retreat in 1796; and Philippe Pinel, a French alienist who developed the “traitement moral” or moral treatment. Pinel and Tuke were working independently, but both instituted much gentler treatments than the “mad-doctors” of the day: