Thanks for the nice feedback. I read and appreciated it a couple of days ago, but I've had to have my Grandma hat lately. Got my writer's hat back on now, so ...
Wow, that's some backstory!
I do that level of detail for all my main characters. Normally, the bits I need just get woven into the story and the reader never sees most of it. For the way I work I have to know a lot in order to write convincingly about them, but I also do it because it's fun. So, for example, I had asked myself: why do Lavinia and her father speak such good English? Where would he, and then she, have learned it? And, then I just went on from there. One thing leads to another and ...! :-)
When you think about it we have even more backstory for Lois & Clark, only we call it episodes.
I was sure Lucius was going to walk in on their tryst and Cedric would end up in some dungeon.
That would have been awful, but cool! It wouldn't work here, though. The house isn't old enough to have a dungeon. Maybe my next story should be in a castle--plenty of places there for lots of cool stuff to happen!
HAD she been seduced by Claude and able to keep it quiet?
Short answer: no. Lavinia is a lady and still a maiden. I know she's a bit unconventional, but she's had an usual upbringing. She's been mistress of her father's house since she was 15, began running the chateau's estate when she was 19 and now at 24 she's had to escape deadly peril, leave her homeland and start a new life as a refugee in a new country.
When she met Claude, she was 19 and a bit naive. He was her first "crush" and she thought she was in love with him. While she was having fantasies about wedding gowns, having his children and growing old with him, he was busy looking down his nose at her English antecedents, and scheming how he could get his hands on anything valuable in Bernard's house that he could parlay into money for gambling. He was a first class selfish bounder, but not an evil seducer. She feels betrayed by his empty promises and also deeply hurt that someone she thought loved her was actually only interested in using her--in every sense of that word. That kind of thing can definitely rock a person's self-assurance.
I know that Lois slept with Claude in the show, but that was the late 20th century, not the late 18th century.
Where shall our young lovers (people in love, that is) go from here?
I'm going to post a couple more parts today, so we'll see. :-)
