At last, Unkept Promises has gone to the proofreader, and I’m two chapters in to the novella for the next Bluestocking Belles project. Where to start is always a question — I often cast around for a while, and I don’t always get it right.
This week, I’m inviting you to post the first few paragraphs from your work-in-progress. Here’s mine.
If the two of them made it out of the near-invisible city streets alive, Matilda Grenford was going to kill her sister Jessica, and even their honorary aunt, the Duchess of Haverford, wouldn’t blame her. Angry as Matilda was, and panicked, too, as she tried to find a known landmark in the enveloping fog, she couldn’t resist a wry smile at the thought. Aunt Eleanor was the kindest person in the world, and expected everyone else to be as forgiving and kind as she was herself. Matilda could just imagine the conversation.
“Now, my dear, I want you to think about what other choices you might have made.” The duchess had said precisely those words uncounted times in the more than twenty years Matilda had been her ward.
When she was younger, she would burst out in an impassioned defence of whatever action had brought her before Her Grace for a reprimand. “Jessica is not just destroying her own reputation, Aunt Eleanor. Meeting men in the garden at balls; going out riding without her groom; dancing too close.”
Was that the lamppost by the corner of the square? No; a few steps more showed yet another paved street with houses looming in the fog on both sides. Matilda stopped while she tried to decide if any of them were in any way familiar.
Meanwhile, she continued her imaginary rant to the duchess. “Even in company, she takes flirtation beyond what is proper. This latest start — sneaking out of the house without a chaperone or even her maid — if it becomes known, she’ll go down in ruin, and take me and Frances with her.”
Matilda had gone after her, of course, taking her maid, but she’d lost the poor girl several mistaken turns back. Matilda had been hurrying ahead, ignoring the maid’s complaints, thinking only about bringing Jessica back before she got into worse trouble than ever before. Now Matilda was just as much at risk, and she’d settle for managing to bring her own self home, or even to the house of a friend, if she could find one.
Haverford House, for preference. Turning up anywhere else, unaccompanied, would start the very scandal Matilda had left home to avoid. If Jessica managed to make it home unscathed, it would have to be murder.
In her imagination, she could hear Aunt Eleanor, calm as ever. “Murder is so final, Matilda. Surely it would have been better to try something else, first. What could you have done?”
Matilda startled herself with a bark of laughter that echoed oddly in the fog.