As if a young American heiress didn’t have enough to worry about when making her debut in London society, Virginia Bonynge had to make her splash while her parents were in the midst of a feud with another prominent American family; the Mackays.
Bonynge and Mackay had astonishingly similar backgrounds. Both were Irish immigrants. Both spent their early working lives in the mines around Virginia City, Nevada. Bonynge left the mines to become a stockbroker and Mackay gained his wealth from his mine-contracting business. Both met their wives in Virginia City in the late 1860s. Rodie Daniel, the future Mrs. Bonynge, was struggling to raise her daughter, Virginia, while her husband served a sentence in San Quentin for killing a man in a fight. She and Bonynge fell in love. She divorced her first husband and married Bonynge who raised Virginia as his own daughter. The family moved to San Francisco where Bonynge continued to amass his fortune.
Back in Virginia City, Louise Bryant, a young widow with a small daughter of her own, was taking in sewing and laundry to earn their keep. The local Catholic priest brought her plight to Mackay’s attention, and before long, the two married and also moved to San Francisco, where Mackay became a client of Bonynge’s.
John William Mackay
The bad blood came years later, when Bonynge made some unfavorable public statements about Mackay’s business schemes. This began the cold war between the men that would heat up to a Hatfield-McCoy style feud. By 1886, both families had settled in London. Louise Mackay, a social climber, had already tried to gain social prominence in San Francisco, New York, and Paris but found all her millions still couldn’t open those doors. She decided to try her luck in London society. The Bonynges came to London in the hope of achieving a brilliant match for Virginia.
The first strike came from the Mackays. Presentation at court was vital for acceptance in society, but shortly before her presentation, a London paper revealed that Rodie Bonynge was divorced, which meant she had to stay home while her daughter was presented, a huge embarrassment they attributed to the Mackays. In turn, the Bonynges provided some details of Louise Mackay’s past as a laundress in Virginia City.
The attacks went back and forth for years. Both families hired agents to feed information to the newspapers, who gleefully printed each nasty word. The final strike came when Virginia Bonynge accepted the proposal of Ronald Greville, the eldest son of Lord Greville. Almost immediately, word got out that Virginia was not the daughter of Mr. Bonynge, but of a murderer who served a term of imprisonment in San Quentin. Since Mackay (and Bonynge) were in San Francisco at the time, the story must have come from Louise Mackay.
Though the scandal ended her engagement, many stood by Virginia and the Bonynges including Princess Christian, which allowed them to maintain their social standing. The story spread however, and back in the US, Bonynge sat down with a reporter from the San Francisco Call, where (without naming him) he discussed Mackay’s attempts to libel him. Mackay was outraged and upon spotting Bonynge at a bank where he also had business, strode into the office and punched the man in the face. The men, both in their sixties, fought until bank employees managed to separate them.
Viscountess Deerhurst from The Lady’s Relm, 1904
Eventually the feud was called off. Both families had attained their standing in society and Virginia received another offer of marriage from Viscount Deerhurst, heir to the Earl of Coventry. After all she had to deal with, one hopes it was a happy marriage.
, but this wasn’t her wedding. Yet, the title indicated this story would be about a wedding, so I needed a bride and groom, right? I discarded idea after idea. Every cover I thought of seemed contrived and really didn’t express what actually happens in the book. I agonized over this, trying to make something work. I just couldn’t come up with a cover image that went with the title and the story. Then it dawned on me, I had the wrong title.
of a quiet ceremony, and George Hazelton offers his family home in the countryside for the festivities. The groom’s family joins Frances and Lily at Risings where a shooting party is already in progress.
pril of 1899, just as the year’s social season begins. Book two in the series takes place in July, at the end of the season when the social whirl has died down. Book 3 revolves around a country house party in October, and the book I’m working on now takes the characters back to London in November of the same year. I don’t have any plans at the moment for a Christmas setting for Frances and her friends to solve a crime, but I can tell you how the characters will be celebrating the season.
ated the work of Agatha Christie, from cozy to hard-boiled crime stories. I thought I knew quite a bit about Christie, but I learned a lot from my fellow panelists. I also managed to meet up with two of my agent’s other clients. Meredith Schorr, who has published several rom-com novels and Drew Murray, whose first thriller will release in 2020. It was a whirlwind weekend, but so much fun. And I came home with lots of books!
ir physical books.
deadlines, edits, and marketing responsibilities, I have much less time to indulge in a good book. Once I turned in book three in the Countess of Harleigh series, that was the end of my contract. I did accept a contract for another three books in that series, but not before taking a little break where I spent many lovely hours with some fabulous books. I thought I’d share a few of my favorites with you this week.
ends. That puts a more chilling twist on the term cozy doesn’t it?
both in Ann Arbor and Detroit. One reason I was excited to chat with them is that they both do something that up until now, I’ve hesitated to do—incorporate real historical figures into their books as characters. C.M. Gleason writes the Lincoln Whitehouse mysteries where Abraham Lincoln himself is a character—not the sleuth. Fiorello LaGuardia appears in L.A. Chandlar’s Art Deco Mysteries.
doing so well with my blogging, I missed a post. My only excuse is I was working on the first draft of book 4, and when I’m drafting (as opposed to revising) I need to stay focused and get it done quickly or the story becomes too choppy. I’m 40k words in and I hope to be done with this draft in five weeks! (But I’ll try not to miss another blog post.) This time I have a bit of news and another heiress profile.
pleasant manner, and an iron will inherited from her father. Her determination to get her way both got her into a bad marriage and saved her from it.
