He harassed Napoleon's entire coastline. She held a kingdom together. History ignored them.

I am almost there! A Dance with the Wayward Duke (the book that was supposed to be a novella and then had the audacity to become something considerably larger) is in its final stretch of revisions. The novella is on preorder and set to release on July 28th, and it tells the story of a pirate duke, a former ballerina, and a bargain that will make the ocean boil. This novella is very special to me because the main characters were inspired by two of the most unsung heroes of the Napoleonic age, and today I want to tell you about them.

The Sea Wolf

His name was Thomas Cochrane, and the French hated him so specifically and so personally that they gave him a nickname: Le Loup des Mers. The Sea Wolf. A name Napoleon himself was said to have coined.

When Cochrane was finally captured by the French in 1801, the French captain refused to accept his sword, an acknowledgment, from an enemy, of what his own Admiralty could never bring itself to say out loud: that this man was extraordinary.

During a single month in 1808, with one ship, he kept the entire coast of Languedoc in alarm — without losing a single man. He once seized a Spanish fortress, set booby traps, held back thousands of French soldiers with a crew of a few hundred sailors, and walked out under artillery fire to retrieve a fallen flag. The Admiralty’s response to this feat was a reprimand for excessive use of powder and shot.

At the Battle of Basque Roads in 1809, his fireship attack devastated the French fleet — but his commander Lord Gambier hesitated, the moment was lost, and when Cochrane dared oppose the motion of thanks for Gambier in Parliament, the establishment closed ranks. His naval career was ruined. The man the French called the Sea Wolf was quietly put ashore and left there.

He was brilliant, impossible, constitutionally incapable of flattering a superior he considered incompetent, and completely right about almost everything. History, eventually, caught up with him. But not before it made him pay for being inconvenient.

The Diplomat’s Wife

Her name at birth was Amy Lyon, daughter of a blacksmith from Cheshire. By the time history needed her, she was Lady Hamilton — wife of the British envoy to Naples, friend to Queen Maria Carolina, and one of the most quietly formidable diplomatic operators in Europe.

When the French Republic declared its explicit threat to invade Naples, Emma and Sir William worked to turn Queen Carolina toward a protective alliance with England — a diplomatic coup that drew Nelson into her sphere. When Napoleon threatened the city in 1798, Emma used every political skill she possessed to persuade Nelson to come to Naples’s defense. He arrived. He was entranced. The rest is the most famous love story of the Napoleonic era.

What history preferred to quietly set aside is what happened after. When Nelson died at Trafalgar in 1805, his explicit instructions to the government to provide for Emma and their daughter Horatia were ignored entirely. They showered honors on Nelson’s brother instead. Emma spent a year in a virtual debtor’s prison before fleeing to France. She died in poverty in Calais in January 1815, weeks short of her fiftieth birthday, without seeing the end of the wars she had spent her life helping to fight.

She had risen to become one of the most famous women in the world. After her death, she was condemned by a new Victorian age that had no compassion for a woman who had dared to live on her own terms. Her house was destroyed. Her belongings were sold. History moved on.

The Book They Inspired

He has taken enemy ships, fortunes, and glory at sea. Now he wants her.

In postwar Brighton, celebrated ballerina Marguerite d’Ailes is finished with uncertainty. She wants the warmth of Naples and the promise of a future in a court that values talent, not birth. When she learns that Britain’s new ambassador is a notorious member of the Wayward Dukes Alliance — famous for refusing marriage — she decides he will be perfect as her passage south.

But Tristan Blackmere, Duke of Stormhaven, is no polished diplomat. A legendary naval commander known as the Sea Wolf, he has survived by cutting away everything superfluous. When he sees Marguerite, instinct takes over. She is a prize. And prizes are meant to be taken.

Bound together on the open sea, their bargain traps them in close quarters and closer temptation. Each night draws them closer. Each day sharpens the clash between what they want — and what they refuse to surrender. Because the ocean strips everything bare. But some desires cannot be cut away.

Lord Tristan Blackmere carries Cochrane in his bones — the brilliance, the difficulty, the constitutionally catastrophic diplomacy. Marguerite carries Lady Hamilton in her ambitions and her warmth. She has studied Emma’s life the way other women study scripture — as proof that it is possible, that a woman born with nothing can rise, can matter, can hold a kingdom in her hands through sheer intelligence and force of will.

One of the great joys of writing historical romance is this: I get to take the brilliant, the overlooked, the magnificent and the failed — the people history used up and discarded — and give them the ending they deserved. Cochrane died reinstated and celebrated, eventually. Emma Hamilton died in Calais with nothing. But in my pages, their echoes get another chance. Tristan gets to be recognized. Marguerite gets to rise. And the Naples that failed Emma Hamilton becomes, in A Dance with the Wayward Duke, the place where two impossible people finally find someone worthy of them.

📚 A Free Read That Will Wreck You (In the Best Way)

The Heiress and the Duke by Rebecca Paula — USA Today bestselling author — is exactly the kind of story that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Nellie James grew up in Whitechapel and came out of it lethal, sharp-witted, and commanding the loyalty of an entire criminal empire. Oliver Sinclair, the reclusive Duke of Acklery, is sent by Special Branch to dismantle everything she’s built — and finds himself completely undone by her instead. A criminal queen. A dangerous duke. An alliance that threatens to burn London to the ground. Completely free, and absolutely not safe for your heart.

👉 Get your free copy of The Heiress and the Duke here

Now I want to hear from you.

History has always had a talent for forgetting the people who were too brilliant, too inconvenient, or too far outside the accepted lines to be celebrated properly. Who is your favorite unsung hero? The person who deserved far better than they got, whom you wish more people knew about?

Tell me everything. I collect these names like other people collect stamps.

With love and a novella that grew up when I wasn’t looking,

Giovanna 🎀