Mark has (for the most part) basically been adored by the world, and Jessica has been reviled by it. There are other ways that Jessica and Mark are opposite as well. I think this series was conceived of as, “Pick two natural enemies and then shove them together…” That’s why we have Ash and the woman whose life he ruined in Unveiled, and a magistrate and a criminal in Unraveled. Was that extreme contrast part of the vision from the very beginning? So, Mark’s a virgin and Jessica’s a courtesan. She’s battling a depression that stems from both emotional and biological causes. I could go into what caused this-a serious illness, a physical attack on her body that robbed her of the right to choose what happened to her, a miscarriage that ended a pregnancy, and a postpartum depression in its own right. When the story starts, Jessica is dealing with the aftermath of a serious depression. Jessica’s reflections on not feeling anything suggest that she’s experiencing some form of depression. (True fact: yes, they had condoms, but did you know they reused them? Say it together: Ewwwwww.) They couldn’t test for STDs back then, and they had almost no barrier methods worth speaking of. I find it harder to write men who’ve slept with hundreds of women. I don’t know why a virgin hero should be any more difficult to write than a virgin heroine. I don’t think there are any special challenges. For this book? Convincing my editor to let me write one in the first place. What special challenges are there to writing a virgin hero?Ī. There is, however, at least one instance of shambles yet standing as they stood in the Middle Ages, having retained their name and usage until our own times,-and that is at Shepton Mallet, Somerset.”Īllen went on to explain that you can tell from the construction and the curvature of the timber that the shambles at Shepton Mallet dated from around 1450. “A shamble was a stall used for the sale of meat and the application of the name exclusively to a meat-stall seems to imply that the shamble had some characteristic form, distinct from those of other market stalls… The word is nearly obsolete in its medieval sense it has got transferred to the place where the animals are slaughtered, and a slaughter-house is sometimes called by the ungrammatical name ‘a shambles.’ In several towns…there are buildings or streets which retain the name of “shambles” but as far as I can ascertain, these are not real shambles, either in form or in function. Frank James Allen wrote a little article about the Shepton Mallet Shambles in 1903.

The shambles that were in Shepton Mallet in Mark’s time were probably older than the public house. When I wrote that the Shambles in Shepton Mallet had seen as many centuries of service as the public house, I was actually toning things down a little.

Unlocked by courtney milan