I am such a night-girl tonight! It’s 2:15 in the morning and I am not even sleepy yet. Possibly because I slept in til 9:30 this morning, then had a two-hour nap this afternoon. MAYBE.

Very cool things have happened lately: My birthday (yeah I know I’m obsessed) was very nice. I am almost finished work for the summer (one more day!). UK Big Brother is SCANDALOUS and entertaining, I doubt I’ll be all that interested in US Big Brother this year. Two wigs arrived in the mail on Friday: this one and this one (sans cheerleader outfit). I am reading the most… unbelievable… book. Seriously. Don’t read on if you don’t want spoilers:

So this girl, Beatrice, really really loves her family’s land. She really loves it. I cannot stress how much she loves this land. Growing up (late 18th/early 19th century) her father treats her like a little boy, teaching her to ride horses, showing her how all the farming works, etc. etc., while her sickly brother is away at school. Her brother comes back from school when he’s 16 or 17, she’s like, 15 and Doing It with some peasant guy (not that that has anything to do with her brother coming home). Her brother catches her and the boyfriend humping, and instead of being all “You varlet! Unhand my sister!” he crawls around on the floor, kisses their boots, and begs them to whip him… so they know they can keep Doing It without fear of parents finding out. Then one day the father mentions how when she gets married someday in her future, she’s going to end up moving away to her husband’s home and she is completely SHOCKED because she really loves the family’s land and can’t leave it. So much so that she and her boyfriend plot to murder her father. So, the boyfriend goes ahead and murders her dad… then she’s annoyed that he did it so she traps him in a bear trap which cuts off his legs but his mom finds him before he dies and spirits him away somewhere.
Beatrice decides that since Ralph (her legless lover) is gone, and she needs to find a way to hold on to the land, the best course of action would be to start making it with her brother, Harry.

Her brother.

So they start getting it on, and manage for the entire summer, before their mother decides it’s time for Harry to marry this girl Celia who is basically a wuss. Beatrice can’t exactly say “Oh no Harry can’t marry Celia, because I’m banging him!” so she goes along with it, becoming friendly with Celia, thus finding out that Celia is completely afraid of The Bone and doesn’t want to have anything to do with Harry’s Little Harry. Beatrice suggests that she go on the honeymoon with them to keep Harry “occupied” (ha ha, no, Celia doesn’t know what this means- she just thinks that the nice sister will take him out on tours of farms while she shops, or send him out on errands while she and C kick it at the theatre). So off they all go, and things are going swimmingly for Bea, humping her brother at night and hanging out with her sister-in-law by day. She does let Harry “deflower” Celia but that just kind of cements Celia’s fear and loathing of the peen. Until — oops!– Beatrice realizes that she’s pregnant.

With her brother’s kid.

She doesn’t want to tell Harry, because it might make him think that what they were doing was wrong, and he might send her away from the land that she loves, so she doesn’t. She does tell Celia that she’s pregnant and suggests that since Celia’s barren (because, having knocked boots once and not fallen pregnant IMMEDIATELY, OBVIOUSLY Celia’s ladybits are dysfunctional), Celia and Bea hatch a plan to make it look as though Celia’s the one having the baby. Oh and – she tells Celia that she got pregnant by fainting and falling off her horse one day. When she woke up, her dress was all messed up — that means that someone slipped her the Love Hammer when she was sleeping.

So. They send Harry home to check on their mother’s health, saying they’ll follow the next week if mama’s health is really bad (they’d had a letter saying she was sick), or see him when he comes back. Turns out mama’s health is bad enough – so Harry’s staying in England (they’re in France) but they send him a letter saying “Oh uh, yeah, Celia’s up the spout, she can’t travel, but don’t come here because what happens if mom dies?”. So they spend the next six months in France, Beatrice gives birth, gives the little girl to Celia, and they head home where Harry is none the wiser and the baby (Julia) is the apple of everyone’s eye. Except for Beatrice who doesn’t really like her that much because she wasn’t a boy.

Beatrice and Harry continue with their shenanigans, Beatrice builds a room in the attic where she can tie Harry up and beat him (cos remember, he likes that), Celia loves the baby and decides that she will move into Harry’s rooms so that they can keep trying to make more babies but I swear, the amount of doing it that Harry and Bea are doing I’d be surprised if he had any ManPower left for his wife. Then Beatrice meets this doctor, John, they do the Nast, and she realizes she’s pregnant the next day (so, once again, her brother’s kid). She decides that instead of all the deception of trying to pawn the kid off as Celia’s, she’ll just do the right thing – marry John right away, and pretend the baby is his.

The only problem is that when the baby’s born, supposedly at 7 months’ gestation, John, the DOCTOR, realizes that um, yeah, this isn’t a premature baby. He gets really drunk and passes out. Harry is all “Hey you gave birth 10 days ago and your husband is passed out drunk and my wife is taking care of the baby sooooooo – we should totally bone”. Beatrice is like “Oh, alright then”. But they’re in the middle of things and their MOM walks in and sees them and has a heart attack. She’s still alive, but not for long – they wake up drunken John, who hears the mom saying “OMG NO HARRY AND BEATRICE WHAT ARE YOU DOING” over and over. He tells Beatrice to give her something like 4 drops of laudanum every 4 hours, to help her sleep. Instead Beatrice tells Celia that the orders were to give her the entire bottle of laudanum, so Celia does, and she dies. Because she would have told people about Harry and Beatrice, you see.

John kind of goes mental, because he doesn’t know whose kid it is, only that it’s not his, plus Beatrice is like “YOU WERE SO DRUNK YOU TOLD ME TO GIVE MOM THE WHOLE BOTTLE AND NOW SHE’S DEAD YOU TERRIBLE MAN”, AND he’s pretty sure he’s figured out what caused Mama’s heart attack. So he drinks all the time. Beatrice thinks this is great because maybe this way she can get him to sign over all his money so that she can buy the land for her kids… so she keeps putting bottles of whiskey in his bed. Eventually she and Celia have him committed to take care of his drinking problem. Celia writes to him every week but Beatrice tells the hospital he’s at not to give him any letters and to send them all back to her, which they do.

A whole bunch of shenanigans go on with the land and having to mortgage some of it out so that she can buy off some cousin who would be next in line to inherit should Harry die without a male heir (because remember, he has no idea that the second baby- a boy – is his, and the first baby that he thinks is his wife’s but is actually his sister’s is a girl) and being really mean to the tenants on the land whereas before the tenants were treated really well. They fence off the common land, don’t let the tenants grow their own food, and stop paying them for their work so they all start starving and killing themselves.

Then who should come back but… Ralph The Legless Boyfriend! Turns out that in the time that he was gone, he became some kind of vigilante working for the rights of tenants and against the gentry.

And Ralph the Legless One burns down the house and kills Harry and Beatrice and she’s totally fine with that (she’s like “Oh yay! Ralph! Hurry up and kill me I’ve been waiting!”). In the epilogue, Celia (Harry’s wife) and John (Beatrice’s husband) are raising the babies, Julia and Richard.

There are two more books. I have this weird scuzzy feeling that Julia and Richard are going to end up married or something, thinking that they’re cousins while they’re really brother and sister/cousins. Is a scuzzy feeling going to stop me from reading them? Heck no. It’s total shades of VC Andrews, but just the trashy summer reading I need.