FRAPED, adj. This isn’t the first time one of KJ Charles’s novels has used a word that inspired me to write a newsletter. Charles’s latest romance novel is The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (m/m, both cis and gay, historical) and it takes place on the coast of Kent in 1810. The two main characters, one of whom is from London and the other from Kent, have this exchange:
“You look fraped. Everything all right?” Gareth didn’t know what fraped meant, but he had no doubt he looked it.
“Fraped” as an adjective isn’t listed in the OED, but my best guess is that it’s related to “frape, frap, also frape-boat,” referring both to a boat and the ropes that are used to tie it up. I checked Green’s Dictionary of Slang as well, just in case, but there was no fraping to be found.
Going only by my own reckless speculation, I guessed that since a fraped boat is tied up, a fraped person is metaphorically tied up—distracted or stressed out. That’s certainly true in Gareth’s case above.
I don’t like to send out a newsletter solely on guesswork, so I’m pleased to report that a little more searching turned up A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect, put online by the Kent Archaeological Society in 2008, which reports that the verb “frape” means “To worry; fidget; fuss; scold.” It can also be a noun meaning an anxious person, usually a woman. No connection to boats is mentioned, so I’m just going to have to believe that one in my heart.
The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen is brimming with other words and expressions from Kent. They play such an important role in establishing the setting of Romney Marsh, a tight-knit coastal community where strangers are “outmarsh” and the Marshmen speak a regional language meant to keep it that way.
Gareth is outmarsh and more: he’s never really belonged anywhere. Sent away in childhood by his awful father, he lived in London with an uncle who mistreated him. His happiest moments are during an affair with a nameless stranger, a man he only calls “Kent” and who calls him “London” in turn, but he ends that very brusquely when his father dies unexpectedly and he inherits.
His inheritance takes him to Romney Marsh. It doesn’t seem like a place he will ever belong or love. It’s isolated and seemingly without attraction. The local people speak strangely and he offends them by condemning smuggling, a practice so widespread and so fundamental to the economy that essentially everyone is involved in it. In the house Gareth inherited from his father, he finds a half-sister he has never met, his father’s housekeeper/mistress, and an enormous quantity of research about beetles and the other fauna of the area, his father’s only passion in life.
The regional language and the regional nature go hand in hand. Gareth is perplexed by them at first and then enamored. I want to linger over a couple of lines that showcase the wonderful specificity of this book’s setting:
The Marsh was a strange and unsettling place at night, with its frequent thick mists, treacherous footing that could go from thick tussocks of grass to water in an instant, and the cries of night-birds—owls, curlews, and the eerie boom of bitterns, like hollow moans from a tomb.
Isn’t this a lovely sentence? The names of the birds evoke hooting (owl, curlew). When the bird name has too many consonants to sound like a cry (bittern), we get instead the beautifully vocalic “eerie boom,” whose ghostly “oo” is rhymed in “tomb” while the sentence sombers into the repeated [m]: moans from a tomb. Even the doubled use of “thick” feels purposeful, switching from a description of insubstantial mist to sturdy tussocks of grass. We’ve got land and water mixing and birds that sound like ghosts—which are, of course, death and life mixing. Romney Marsh will overturn all your expectations. And one more: it seems remote and desolate, but on closer inspection, it teems with life. In the rest of the book, there are birds, frogs, newts, beetles, even a slow worm. (North American readers, we don’t have those. They are neither worms nor particularly slow, but instead legless lizards. If you just said to yourself “isn’t a legless lizard a snake?”, you’re kind of right, just not taxonomically.)
A Eurasian bittern photographed by Paul Coombes. Image from this website. By the way, it is 100% worth a minute of your time to learn what the heck these birds sound like. “Boom” is the right word.
So Romney Marsh is a marginal place, not quite land and not quite water. The story is about smuggling, a marginal crime that is not technically legal, but mostly harmless. We meet Joss, a smuggler—a criminal whose power derives as much from taking care of his community as it does from illegal activity—and of course there is Gareth, a man newly and unexpectedly elevated to the rank of baronet—the most marginal of aristocratic titles, coming with some small amount of privilege and wealth in exchange for heightened visibility that puts him outside of common society. Gareth doesn’t want that; he’s gay in a time where sex between men is a crime, further marginalizing him. You see how clever this setup is for asking questions about what is legal versus what is moral—and also how important the sense of place is to this story about what is possible in the margins.
Gareth doesn’t see what is possible at first. Having re-encountered his lover “Kent” as the smuggler Joss in the worst possible circumstances, with many obstacles in their way, he thinks to himself:
London and Kent might have had something, another-when and otherwhere. He was not going to think about Gareth and Joss, here and now.
A gorgeous line. Even in thinking that his love is impossible, Gareth frames his yearning in two Kentish terms that Joss has just defined for him, “another-when and otherwhere,” some other time and some other place. As beautiful as they are, those words have a limited range; you can search London forever and you will never see them in the wild. They—the words, but also Gareth and Joss—belong in Romney Marsh. Words, like beetles, thrive in their native environments.
So Gareth walks the Marsh, observing words and creatures. He appreciates the beauty of both. He and Joss are both people who pause to remark on the small, the specific, the unremarkable. Even the unwanted. Romney Marsh is beautiful because of the things you can find there that don't exist otherwhere. Newts, beetles, birds, slang, smugglers. The person you're in love with is beautiful because of the qualities that make them themself.
These things are rendered more special, not less, by other people not having seen them properly. Gareth’s family didn’t want him, but Joss does; Joss’s family does want him, but they don’t all see him for who he truly is. Gareth does. There's such an insistence on looking in this book. It's what makes people fall in love. Noticing, considering, understanding, cherishing what other people don't.
I usually send Word Suitcase on Sunday, which today is not, but it turns out that hosting a Passover seder while parenting a sick, cranky baby is a lot for one weekend. I will be back in your inbox in a week or two because I have other books to tell you about—it didn’t feel fair to put the short reviews next to this one!