This week, I’m thinking about first meetings. My Maximum Force story is percolating in my head, and I’m also planning the first meeting scenes in books 3 and 4 of Children of the Mountain King. As in Unkept Promises, the heroines of those two books met their heroes when they were still schoolgirls, and I haven’t decided whether the scenes will be in flashback, or just narrated as a memory. Max’s heroine, Serenity, is an adult, though — whatever the elders of her cult may think.
Today, I’m inviting authors to give me an excerpt with the first meeting between the hero and the heroine. Mine is from the first chapter of Unkept Promises. The first two chapters are set seven years before the rest of the book. Jules has been captured by smugglers and locked up in a cell.
The light came as a surprise, shining like a beacon from the other side of a barred opening set high up in one wall. Standing, Jules managed to reach the bars and pull himself up, to look through into another cell very much like his own. A man lay still, curled on a mess of rags and clothing. His eyes were shut, and he had not responded to the girl who crouched beside him. She was a skinny child, still boyish in shape, but Jules did not suppose that would discourage the smugglers from making use of her body or selling her to someone for that purpose. He made an instant vow to save her, whatever the cost.
The girl held the candle she had lit away in one hand to cast its light without dripping its wax, and brushed back the hair that fell over the man’s forehead. “Oh, Papa,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Miss,” Jules hissed. The girl startled back from her father. Her face, already pale, turned whiter as she faced the door, putting her body between herself and the unconscious man.
“I’m a prisoner,” Jules reassured her. “In the next cell.”
The girl held the candle high as she stood, peering towards the sound of his voice. He kept talking to guide her. “Lieutenant Julius Redepenning of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, Miss. I am going to get out of here, and I’m going to take you and your father with me.”
The face turned up to him was just leaving childhood behind, but the eyes shone with intelligence and her response indicated more maturity than he expected. “I hope you can, Lieutenant. But if your cell is as sturdy as mine, I beg leave to reserve judgement.” She sighed. “I am sorry for your predicament, but I will not deny I am glad to have company.”
“May I borrow the candle?” Jules asked. Her eyes widened in alarm and he rushed to add, “just for long enough to check my cell. They left me without light.” Without food or drink, either, but he would not tell her that. Perhaps the smugglers intended to supply him, and if they didn’t, he would not take the supply she needed for herself and her father.
She passed the candle up, her worry palpable, and he hoisted himself higher with one hand so he could stretch the other through the bars. “I will be careful, Miss, I promise.”
“Mia,” she said. “Euronyme Stirling, but formality seems out of place, here.”
He returned her smile. She was a brave little girl; he had to find a way out for her. “Call me Jules,” he offered, “as my friends do.”
He rested the candle—a stubby bit of wax with a rope wick—on the sill between the bars and dropped, shaking the ache out of the shoulder that had taken most of his weight. When he reached the candle down, Mia let out an involuntary whimper at the loss of light.
“I have it safe,” he said. “You shall have it back in a minute.”
“I do without it most of the time,” she replied. “It’s just—I have always known I could light it again.”
Most of the time? “How long have you been here?” Jules asked, keeping his voice light and casual against the lump in his throat at her gallantry.
First meet it is. This is from The Price of Glory—which I put aside and need to pick up again.
“Hamed, explain! Who disturbs our peace?” Khalil demanded.
The servant poked his head around the curtain. “A hakima, master.”
“In front of our establishment?”
“She wishes to enter the house of Mahmoud the rug merchant. He attempts to drive her away.”
Mallet, halfway out the door, driven by an instinct to protect a woman, didn’t pause. He understood hakima to mean healer, one of Muhammad’s corps of women trained in the practice of medicine. Why does a rug merchant object to her presence?
A crowd had gathered by the time he stepped into the street; it milled around the rug dealer’s stall. Overhead three ladies leaned out windows Mallet assumed opened from the man’s residence, watching the dispute. A massive bear of a man blocked entrance to the stall, a thick quarterstaff held in both hands crossways, as if he meant to repel boarders.
Mallet reached the edge of the crowd of avid onlookers, but he couldn’t quite see the woman or make out what she said. Whatever it was, the man took a menacing step forward threatening someone with the staff. Shouldering his way forward, Mallet caught sight of a diminutive figure holding her ground in front of the rug merchant.
“It is the will of the khedive, and for the good of your house Mahmoud,” she declared in a carrying voice. Mallet had heard that many of the hakima were Abyssinian, former slaves from Ethiopia or Nubia; this woman’s cultured, unaccented Arabic surprised him. He saw only her back, unbowed, neither defiant nor subservient. She ignored the curses of her opponent. “Do you wish me to return with police?”
The man rang more curses on the much-hated police, made up as it often was, of Albanian veterans of the army that had driven out the French on behalf of the Ottoman sultan thirty years before. He wisely stopped short of cursing Muhammad Ali Pasha himself.
The big man raised his staff and Mallet pushed forward to stand next to the woman, his eyes fixed on the quarterstaff. “What sort of dog beats a woman?” he demanded.
“A fearful one,” murmured a soft but emphatic voice at his right elbow. “And he is not a dog.” She raised her voice and spoke to the man threatening her in a firm voice. “My vaccinations will do no harm, Mahmoud. They keep the pox from your house. The Khedive so orders it, to keep the pox from this city.”
The hands gripping the staff loosened and the man glanced up at the women in the windows, and back at his opponents. “You do not know your place, woman. You will make my wives unruly.”
“I will make them healthy,” she replied calmly. Mallet looked down then. For a tiny woman she had backbone. Most Egyptian women went in public unveiled, but this one had her face covered, something he had only seen before among the highest classes. Her skin, what he could see of it, appeared to be sun browned but not black. No Abyssinian, this one. She ignored him.
“You rule your house with wisdom,” the woman said to her adversary, her voice gentle, “and thus you will want to keep sickness far from it. I will bring my services with your blessing and benevolence.”
Mahmoud peered up at the windows again. “The butcher’s wife had a fever for two days after your vaccinations.”
“Chills only, and for two days only as I warned her. Now she will be safe from the disease for her lifetime.”
After an uncomfortable pause, one hand let go of the quarterstaff and the end dropped to the ground. The woman next to Mallet took a step forward.
Mahmoud wavered, his gaze darting around the crowd. “Be gone. There is nothing for you here,” he growled at them. He looked back at the woman. “My mother will accompany you. You will obey her in all things,” he insisted.
“Of course. It shall be as you wish,” the woman said bowing slightly.
The crowd began to drift away at that, disappointed that the conflict ended, uncertain who won the encounter. Mallet knew the woman did; the house of Mahmoud will endure vaccination today. She turned and peered up at him.
“Your assistance was not needed, but well meant,” she said in her precise Arabic. “I thank you.”
Richard, too stunned to reply, watched her open-mouthed. The gaze that met his held absolute confidence and authority. A mystery lurked in its depths. The eyes were a stormy blue-green, something not impossible in Egypt, but uncommon, extremely uncommon, just like the woman herself.
An intriguing first meet. Mystery, empathy, the works.