Some heroines face huge challenges, and those are my favourite sort. Do you have a WIP excerpt to share? Mine is from the beginning of my newsletter subscriber story for next week’s newsletter.  (If you’d like to read the rest and don’t get my newsletter, click on the subscribe tab, above/)

The oiled cloth over the cart had thinned in places, and the persistent rain had found every crack and hole. The water insinuated itself in drips and trickles and rivers, pooling in the base of the cart until Lily was sitting in an inches-deep lake that continued to grow.

The baby was dry, at least. She’d managed to find a relatively undamaged part of the covering to sit under, wriggling until the damaged places leaked onto her back and not her chest where Petey slept, bound inside her shawl.

Lily tried to sleep, too, but between the wet and the worry, she was as wide awake as she had been when the carter picked her and Petey up hours ago. She was grateful, of course, for the ride, but each turn of the wheels took her closer to her destination and having to give Petey up.

That is, if they would take him. They wouldn’t turn away their own kin? Not at Christmas?

“They will love you, Petey,” she assured the baby. He was the dearest of infants, sweet natured and cheerful. Surely Daisy’s family would be thrilled to have him? “I will pay them for your board, or at least for a few months. Once I have a new job, I will be able to send more.”

Her one-sided conversation was interrupted when the cart stopped. Mired again? But no. The voices of the carter and another man filtered through the drumming of the rain, and then the cover was twitched back.

“We won’t reach Little Crawston tonight, Missus. We have to stop. Better get yourself and the wee ’un out of the rain.”

He helped her over the side of the cart, and set her on the ground, then gave her a push in the direction of a lighted door. “Go on inside. No going any further tonight.”

Lily hurried out of the rain. What choice did she have? But if she spent the few coins she had left on a night’s accommodation, would she have enough left to leave money with Daisy’s family? She had already paid the carter for the ride. And she needed a few coins, too, to get her to a big enough town for her to find work as a maid. No point in trying to get another governess job, not with the most recent reference she could show being three years old.