On firearms, trust and historical accuracy

Updated Sep 4 2024

• writing-practice
• close-reading

There’s a scene in A Governess’s Guide to Passion and Peril that has stuck in my mind, and I want to write through it to figure out why it’s niggling at me. (Spoilers abound, beware.)

Set-up: near the end of the book, Jane and Adrian, among others, are confronting Payne, the murderer, who is about to murder another of their party by making him appear to commit suicide (forced at gunpoint to jump out a window). This victim is allowed to hug his wife goodbye, and in a last ditch effort to save his life, Adrian also embraces Jane as a distraction, to pass her a pistol he has in his coat pocket. He does that thing I hate—“shoot when I give the signal” without saying what signal! I swear, if this happened to me, he’d be dead and I’d be standing there going, “but what was the signal!”

But I digress. That’s not the problem. Adrian does give a signal, Jane interprets it correctly, and shoots the villain. She’s the hero, she saves the day. Payne is not fatally wounded (she shoots him in the chest, but the injury is “not serious,” a Hollywood pet peeve of mine), they get a confession, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s played as Jane being a badass, and that she can do anything a man can do, and look how much Adrian trusted her, awww, squooshy feelings.

This is where I have the problem. And I’m going to set aside gender, because I’d have the same problem if these characters were two men or two women.

1. Nowhere in the book has it been established that Jane knows how to use a gun. She’s a young, newly-impoverished daughter of a diplomat and has been working as a governess. Many women of this era were markswomen; many were not. Maybe I’m pining for Pat and Fen here, but establishing her background with firearms (or lack thereof) during the locked-door house party would be a) great character work, b) groundwork for the later scene, and c) fun and flirty times. But we get none of that.

2. The pistol gets the Hollywood treatment—it’s apparently loaded, primed, and cocked, so all Jane has to do is point and pull the trigger. But this is 1869. In the Victorian era, pistols are notoriously fiddly, even unwieldy. To make matters worse, it’s a pistol Adrian got from a butler moments before this scene; it’s not even his own. He doesn’t load it himself, nor does he check to see if it’s been loaded correctly. Maybe I’m pining for Archie Curtis here, but the risk of misfires and injury is not insignificant. Or just the flat-out inability to pull the hammer, much less the trigger.

3. Let’s leave aside the magic aim, where Jane hits her target on the first shot despite the weight of the pistol, the recoil, etc. It happens. Either luck or accident, but it happens. It’s hailed immediately as a triumph, end of story, and we cut straight to a bedroom scene and then an epilogue where Jane and Adrian are picnicking and boating, kissing in a pond, living happily ever after. And maybe I’m pining for Arabella Tarleton here (are you sensing a theme?), but just up and shooting a man is no small thing. Earlier, Jane has gone pale and panicked, nearly fainted, over much smaller stressors. Finding the dead body that kicks off the action disturbs her off and on throughout the book. There’s no mental or emotional fallout from nearly killing a man herself, even if he has killed her father? If anything, that would make it more fraught, in my opinion.

So what looks like this moment of empowerment for Jane backfires, so to speak. Instead of Adrian trusting her with his life, it looks more like Adrian being reckless at best, intentionally endangering her at worst. Nowhere in the staging of the scene is it indicated that this course of action is their only option. Yes, if you’re determined to have a shootout, it’s more obvious to have her provide the distraction while he shoots, especially since it’s established the villain has been fond of her since she was a child. Yes, I understand wanting to subvert those expectations, especially the gender-based ones.¹ But there has to be some groundwork in place to make that role-switch ring true.

Otherwise, it looks like Adrian selfishly putting her in harm’s way—injury, misfire, the psychological weight of killing a man, possibly even killing Adrian himself or their other friends in the room. The text is frustratingly sloppy: Payne interchangeably aims a rifle, then a pistol. Continuity error? Or he has both? One in each hand? It’s not clear! The scene is not blocked out at all, much less well. They’re in an attic; how tight is the space, where are the others in the line of fire? Adrian lunges to draw Payne’s aim away right before Jane fires. Even the most experienced marksman could fail to hit a moving target under pressure—or hit the wrong one. If the ploy is successful, which it is, it still looks like he doesn’t think, much less care about the effect this would have on her. And instead of developing her character, this sudden temerity comes out of nowhere, negating what we’ve learned of Jane so far.

What’s more—Adrian is still calling all the shots, so to speak. It’s his (borrowed) gun, his plan, he tells her what to do and she does it. If flipping the script is the goal, we could have her say no, that’s absurd, *insert better plan here.* Empowerment and cleverness and a real chance for mutual trust, all at once.

I’ve already summoned KJ Charles and Alexis Hall to the chat, but that’s the level of attention in the writing that would make such a scene pay off. In Proper English, Pat is a sharpshooter and the romance develops as she teaches Fen how to shoot, in anticipation of having her defend herself. In Think of England, Archie, a career soldier, loses three fingers due to a misfiring firearm. In The Will Darling Adventures, set post-WWI, firearms are still tricky bastards—clips need to be loaded, or shots are missed, even by experienced spies, soldiers or henchmen. Phoebe and Maisie repeatedly look stronger and wiser for finding better ways to save the day. In Something Fabulous, the most absurd froth of tropes and anachronisms there is, nobody can pull off a successful dual because nobody has proper experience with firearms (save for Peggy), and when Arabella does shoot Valentine—the one shoulder injury that doesn’t peeve me because it’s handled so accurately—the various consequences of that play out for three books.

By contrast, I’m rattled for Jane, and don’t want to see her wellbeing entrusted to Adrian, much less carelessly ride off into the sunset. Who is going to look after her needs? I’m with Payne; he’s an idiot. She deserves better!

You’re overthinking it, Jamie. Yes, I know. I understand wanting the romantic Hollywood gloss, but too much of a gloss and it leaves me cold, and the HEA feels remarkably hollow. Sharper writing, more thorough character development, and attention to historical detail could have made that ending a much more satisfying one.