Book series

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First seven sentences in WIP Wednesday

The journey begins with the first step.

I’ve typed THE END in Unkept Promises. I’ve also written the first paragaphs in To Mend the Broken Recluse, so I’m thinking about ends and beginnings. This week, how about putting seven sentences in the comments. You choose what they begin: the book, a chapter, a new scene.

Here’s mine.

The crows rose in a flock over the tower on the borders of Ashbury land, a cacophany on wings. Val straightened and peered in that direction, shading his eyes to see if he could tell what had spooked them. It was unlikely to be a traveller on the lane that branched towards the manor from  the road that passed the tower. After three years of repulsing visitors, the only people he ever saw were his tenant farmers and the few servants he had retained to keep the crumbling monstrosity he lived in marginally fit for human habitation.

He bent back to the plough, but called the team to a halt again when a bird shot up from almost under their hooves. Sure enough, a lapwing nest lay right in the path of the plough. Val carefully steered around it. He knew his concern for the pretty things set his tenants laughing behind his back, but they didn’t take up much room, and they’d soon hatch their chicks and be off to better cover

Okay. That’s eight sentences, but I won’t count if you don’t.

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What Ash Wednesday has in common with creating characters

Outward signs. We burn last year’s palms from Palm Sunday and mix them with consecrated oil mixed with incense, also from last Easter. Inner meaning: we burn all the failed attempts of the year to make a new beginning.

I have been thinking about outward and visible signs of what is inward and invisible. Rituals, actions, habits, practices. They all hint at inner beliefs and motivations. This month, I’m slaving over the backstory, character, and inner motivations of characters for the next four books (one novella and three novels, one of which I need to have completed by the end of May). They’re all crowding my head with scenes that are giving me glimpses of my character’s inner self. But, I have to ask, do they show the character’s true self? Or do they show the mask they display to the world? To write them, I need to know both.

I’m religious, which (to me) means that I love the rituals and practices of my church. I’m also (I hope) a person of faith. I believe, and I try to act accordingly. The books I enjoy, and the books I try to write, are about characters with depth. I want the words I use on the page to hint at dimensions to the character that I don’t spell out in words; not just the rituals and practices, but the beliefs and motivations. And I want them all to be different — not the same hero and the same heroine in book after book with just the physical appearance and the name changed.

My husband has been watching best man speeches on YouTube. (No, I don’t know why, but he has.) The jokes and male-to-male insults of a best man speech are a ritual that indicates the support and affection of the selected friend for the groom. Outward signs with inner meaning.

At Mass today, they had the ashes ceremony for those who missed it last Wednesday, on Ash Wednesday. That day marks the beginning of a period of fasting, abstinence, and prayer in preparation for Easter, more than six weeks away, and the ashes are meant to remind us of the shortness of our lives (‘for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’, says the priest as he marks the forehead of each believer with a cross made from a mix of ashes and oil). They also call to mind the ancient practice of wearing sackcloth and ashes for remorse or mourning. Outward signs with inner meaning.

Oddly enough, one of my characters is a widower who may or may not be called Ash. That’s his name, in the notes about his story that I made close to six years ago; a shortened form of his title. However, in the last month I’ve given him a backstory that includes an unfaithful wife, a manipulative older brother, and a couple of daughters, one (and possible both) of whom is definitely his niece, rather than his own child. This means he hasn’t been Earl of Ashbury for very long, so he might think of himself as Val or Fort. I’m still working on it. Inner motivations. He’s a grumpy devil, and a recluse. He arrived home after his brother’s death three years ago to find that his brother’s widow has sent both girls off to boarding school, washed her hands of them, and departed for parts unknown. He has left them there, figuring they’re better off without him. I’m also still working on his heroine, but I need to know her a lot better before she turns up at his house with a carriage full of children, including his own two, refugees from the cholera epidemic sweeping the school.

I know that he will refuse her admittance and she will demand it, and refuse to move on since two of the girls (including his niece) are showing early signs of the disease. I know she shows her anxiety in contempt for his reluctance, not realising he is already thinking about how to help her. I know that he’ll marshal his pitiful complement of servants to look after the well girls and join her in nursing those who have become ill.  Outward signs with an inner meaning.

I know those things, but I have a lot more work to do before I start to commit the random scenes swirling around my brain onto a page.

I wonder if the whole story could happen around an Ash Wednesday?

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How to use the wheel on a sailing ship

I’ve been bringing my heroine and her entourage from South Africa to England in the latest draft of Unkept Promises, which has meant a lot of research about the type of ship, its size and configuration, what type of accommodation Mia might have found herself in, where she and children might be out of the way but also out in the air during the day, and all sorts of other things that I never mention in the book (but that I need to know so I don’t make any egregious errors).

At one point, she goes off to talk to the ship’s captain, and I set out to find out where the wheel was on a brig-rigged schooner. Which led me to wondering how the wheel worked, which led me to this YouTube clip. You’re welcome.

(The maker of the video notes that he didn’t include the use of the sails, a major factor in steering a sailing ship, as any yachtsman knows.)

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Introspection on WIP Wednesday

 

I try to write characters with side-kicks so they have someone to talk to. My hero of Unkept Promises has no-one for most of the novel, so readers need to see inside his head. ‘Show, don’t tell,’ they say, but don’t you sometimes find that your hero, heroine, or even villain is all alone and you need the reader to know what they’re thinking? Share me an excerpt with some introspection. Here’s a bit of mine, from Unkept Promises.

The house had been sold, the remaining servants had all taken positions elsewhere, so Jules was bunking down in the spare room at a friend’s place. He was sailing soon, and perhaps would never return. The navy wanted him in the Bay of Biscay: him and his ship. When the war was over, he’d retire. He had been at sea, man and boy, for nearly twenty years, and what he’d said to Mia had been echoing ever since. Once the war was over, the Navy would offer little chance for advancement. They’d have more captains than ships, and he had never been willing to use his family connections to edge out men as well qualified as him and perhaps in greater need.

Besides, he had a family. He wanted to build a home with them, see his children grow, wake up to his wife’s welcoming smile.

The cemetery was his last stop before he sailed. He stood before Kirana’s grave, the flowers someone had left long wilted on the mound of still raw earth. The tombstone he and Mia had planned was not yet in place, but he could see it in his mind’s eye. “Here lies Kirana Redepenning, devoted mother and friend. Taken from us far too soon, she will always be in the hearts of Julius, Euronyme, Perdana, Marshanda and Adiratna.”

“I will look after them, Kirana,” he promised. “They will want for nothing.”

 

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Tea with Kitty and Mia

 

Eleanor was delighted to have Lady Catherine Stocke and Mrs Julius Redepenning to tea with her this afternoon. The two had been friends since they met at Haverford Castle half their lifetimes ago, when they were children. Lady Kitty was one of Eleanor’s many goddaughters, and Mia was the daughter of the man who had, in that long ago summer, been cataloguing the Castle’s library.

It was not many years later that Mia married in Haverford Castle — married Captain Julius Redepenning, who was a cousin of Eleanor’s nephew, the Earl of Chirbury.

Eleanor knew that Mia hadn’t seen her husband since the day of the wedding, since he immediately returned to his naval posting in the Far East — and the native mistress who had borne his children.

“What brings the pair of you to London?” she asked, as she handed them their tea and invited them to help themselves to the delicately iced cakes. She had heard, but gossip could distort, as none knew better.

“I am sailing to the Cape Colony where the Captain is currently posted,” Mia replied. “Kitty has come to see me off.”

“How lovely,” Eleanor said. “You and young Jules are to be reunited.”

The amusement in Mia’s eyes suggested she knew that Eleanor was fishing for confirmation of the rumours, and she kindly obliged. “He has been away at sea and might not be aware I am coming,” she explained. “But my friend Kirana is very ill — consumption, I believe. I am going to nurse her, and to bring Jules’s children home with me if the worst happens.”

Eleanor, who had rescued a number of orphaned Haverford by-blows and given them homes, educations, and futures, found nothing to object to in that objective. “So I understood,” she conceded. “I have been telling the harpies I totally approve, and you will apply to me, Mia dear, if you need any help.”

This happens just before Mia leaves for the Cape Colony, and the bulk of Unkept Promises begins.

 

 

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The disease that made you in fashion

One of the biggest killers of humankind in history (apart from other humans) has been a tiny organism we now call Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In ancient Greece, it was considered the most prevalent disease of the age. Throughout history, it has been feared and the symptoms treated with despair. And in the nineteenth century, it was a fashionable way to die.

The most common form of tuberculosis attacks the lungs. Sufferers experience chest pain, fatigue, night sweats, loss of appetite leading to a general wasting away, and a persistent coughing up of phlegm and later blood (and bits of lung tissue). Eventually the patient’s lungs are so invaded by the disease that they suffocate and die. Sounds sexy, right?

No. Not that bit. What our Regency and Victorian poets and artists admired was those features of the disease that fit their ideas about the causes of illness and their concept of beauty.

First, not knowing about germs, they thought that the causes of the illness varied by social class. When the poor died in their filthy overcrowded rooms, they had the Graveyard Cough, the White Plague, the King’s Evil (so called, because the touch of a king was thought to be a cure for the version of the disease we now call scrofula, a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands). These were diseases of poverty, immorality, and criminality, which were all clearly linked, since poverty was obviously the fault of the poor. (Come to think of it, some modern commentators haven’t moved on from that belief.)

When the wealthy died, it was clearly a different disease, since they were rich, moral, and altogether less smelly. It was consumption, so called because the person grew thinner and thinner. It was, so medical theory had it, an excess of emotion and genius typical of the artistic mind that slowly consumed the patient. They were killed by fiery passion.

And look how lovely they were while they died! Was it fashionable to be slender (rather than hearty and robust like the working classes)? Not being able to eat made you thin. Was it fashionable to be pale (rather than tanned like those horrid workers who must toil in the sun)? Loss of blood will make you positively pasty.

Since one in four deaths in the nineteenth century was caused by the disease, many fashionable poets, musicians, painters and authors died of consumption, which confirmed, in the minds of the fashionable, that their creativity had killed them. Add to that the predilection of said creative types to glorify death by consumption in their poems, operas, and novels, and hey presto. A horrible slow wasting death becomes desirable.

Kirana, Jules’s mistress, is slowly dying of consumption in my current work-in-progress, Unkept Promises. Her death will be written some time in the next few days, poor soul. 

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Tea with Sophia Belvoir

“So tell me, my dears,” Eleanor said, as she poured tea for the two Belvoir girls, “what do you know of this duel? I understand you were present at the time of the challenge!”

Felicity’s eyes shone with excitement. “Mr Winderfield was given no choice, Aunt Eleanor,” she insisted. “Mr Andrew Winderfield, I mean.”

“You probably know more than we do,” Sophia ventured. “After all, Aldridge was second to Weasel; that is, Mr Wesley Winderfield.”

The duchess shook her head. “Aldridge would not discuss dueling with his own mother, Sophia. Especially since he knows I disapprove of the way His Grace encourages Mr Winderfield — Weasel, I should say, for clarity — to behave towards his cousins. I have heard he shot before the end of the count!”

“The scoundrel,” Felicity said. “He has had to leave town, of course, and Lord Aldridge says he will never be his second again, so he had better not go around any more insulting people’s mothers.”

“And quite right,” Eleanor agreed. “The Winderfield brothers are among your admirers, are they not?” She was looking at her tea cup, so could have been referring to either sister.

Sophia, who was still smarting from her brother’s lecture about not encouraging the possibly base-born sons of the Earl of Sutton to dangle after Felicity, said, “We see them from time to time at Society affairs. But we leave for Bath this week, Aunt Eleanor, so I imagine we will not come across them until next Season, by which time this controversy about their birth should be resolved.”

The duchess, whose spy network in Society must be the envy of governments everywhere, did not comment on what she must know: that ‘from time to time’ meant nearly every event she and Felicity had attended all Season, since she first met Lord Elfingham, the older brother, in a small village in Oxfordshire. He had snatched a child from the path of two runaway carriages and ridden away with her heart. If he was courting either of the sisters, it would be Felicity, of course: the younger, prettier, more vivacious one. Sophia had no intention of discussing any of that.

Perhaps Aunt Eleanor understood, for she changed the subject. “I hope you will be back in London for the meeting of our philanthropic committee in September, my dears. I think you will like what I have in mind.”

***

Sophia will be part of the organising committee for Aunt Eleanor’s house party, which was featured in Holly and Hopeful Hearts. Watch this year for To Win a Lady, the novel-length form of my novella from that collection, starring Lady Sophia Belvoir and James Lord Elfingham.

 

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Black moments on WIP Wednesday

Each story reaches a moment when things go wrong. In the most gripping stories, at some point, things go so wrong that the hero or the heroine or both can see no way out. Prue has been killed when the building exploded. Rede is in the hands of his enemies, bound and helpless. Even in a romantic comedy, the black moment (though it might be more of a grey moment) brings despair to the characters we’ve come to love. Cecilia and Marcel have a magical kiss, and then must part. They are from different worlds. It’s over.

It isn’t, of course, at least not in my stories. I choose for my protagonists to find love and for their love to be returned. The happy ever after is just within reach.

But, still, the barriers must seem, at least to them and preferably to the reader, impossible to overcome.

This week, I’m inviting you to give me a clip from your work-in-progress showing part of your protagonists’ black moment. Mine is from Unkept Promises. My hero is tied to a tree, bound and gagged. And my heroine is trying to rescue his son against overwhelming odds when this happens.

“Quick, Mrs Redepenning.” Luke was urging her down, his hands firm on her calves as he knelt. She leapt from his shoulders. “Quick,” he said again. He led the way slightly around the tower to put it between them and the carriage they could now hear approaching.

This side of the hill was less even, full of bumps and hollows. Mia followed Luke as quickly as she could. He had just entered the trees, and she was less than a dozen paces behind him, when she caught her foot and came down flat on the hillside.

For a moment she could only lie there, winded. Voices from the other side of the tower had her pulling her knees under her to get up, but she froze again as they grew closer.

“I’m telling you, Captain, we didn’t hear anything.”

She recognised Hackett’s voice. “And I tell you to find him. You!” His voice retreated. “Get the boy. I’m not waiting to be ambushed.”

“Hey!” The man closest to her shouted after Hackett. “Not so fast. We haven’t been paid.”

“I don’t have time for this. Follow me, and you’ll get your money.”

Now. While they were arguing. Mia crept towards the tree line, keeping low.

She might have made it, but for the riders who appeared at that moment, coming up the hill through the trees on a path that approach the tower from the side. One of them turned his horse and in a few quick strides was in front of her. The moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun he had pointed at her.

“Stand up very slowly,” said a cultured English voice; a woman’s voice, and one she had heard before, though she could not, for the moment, place it. The other riders had joined the first.

Hackett and his men came down the hill towards them. Any thought that the two parties were aligned faded in the light of the weaponry each pointed at the other. Perhaps Mia could use this to her advantage.

“Madam,” she said, “please, I beg you, help me. Those men have kidnapped my son.”

The woman nudged tell course closer and bent to look into Mia’s face. It was Lady Carrington! What was that wicked woman doing here? She had fled England long ago; indeed, most of the Redepenning family thought she must be dead. The lady raised both eyebrows.

“Euronyme Redepenning. How interesting. Fancy running into you, here of all places.” She looked up the hill at the approaching ruffians. “Do come closer,” she invited. “I may have captured someone of interest to you, and I am willing to trade.”

 

 

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What could possibly go wrong? on WIP Wednesday

This, my friends, is a jack knife — a useful sailor’s tool.

 

My favourite question when writing is ‘what could possibly go wrong’? And then I make it happen. This week, I’m talking about those defining points where the story takes a twist to make things worse. Share me yours in the comments. Mine comes from a scene I wrote this morning in Unkept Promises. Lady Carrington, who you may remember as the villainess if you’ve read Farewell to Kindness, has a position with the French spy agencies. She has persuaded Murat, her spymaster, to let her return to England to fetch the fortune she was forced to abandon when her husband decided to get rid of her at the end of Farewell to Kindness. To help her get to her hiding place safely, she takes Jules Redepenning, my hero, who is a prisoner of war after being pushed off his ship by someone in the pay of the man who wants to abduct his son. (It makes sense in the book, I promise. And, after all, what could possibly go wrong? Right?

Though the sky was clear and the moon full, still, everything was grey on grey, and in the shadows, it was black as Lady Carrington’s heart.

“We will need transport,” Jules pointed out.

Lydia smirked. A moment later, a man leading a horse turned a corner further along the lane and began walking towards them. Four more horses followed behind, all strung together.

“Tha be the ’uns for these ’ere ’orses?” he asked, his eyes a suspicious squint as he looked from one man to another, ignoring Lydia, until she stepped towards him and held out a pouch.

“Your next payment,” she told him. “As promised, the third will be ready for you tomorrow night, when we return the horses. We will leave on the high tide, whether you are here or not.”

The man touched his cap; a response to her cultured tones. “I be here,” he said, his sourness not abated by the purse he weighed thoughtfully in one hand. “See that tha be.”

He disappeared back into the gloom, and Lydia ordered the disposition of the horses. Jules was ordered to take position between the two French officers, his horse on leading reins. Lydia led the fifth horse, which had been supplied with a pack saddle and paniers.

“If you lead us into a trap, Julius,” the Baroness said, “Pierre will shoot you without blinking.”

“You have my word,” Jules told her indignantly. After all, she was not privy to his inner justifications for abandoning her. “However, I cannot lead you tell you tell me where we are going.”

“Iron Acton will do for a start,” Lydia said. Iron Acton was five miles from Chipping Niddwick. Further confirmation that Lydia’s stash was hidden at the Carrington Castle, or nearby.

“I take it you want to avoid villages and farm dwellings. Very well. If we head south on this lane,” he pointed the direction he meant, “we will come to a turn inland in about seventy-five yards.”

Lydia nodded at his two escorts, and they wheeled their horses to follow his directions. There had never been any doubt about who was in charge.

He kept them to lanes that avoided the villages and towns. Little used except for stock movements and farm carts, they were mostly in poor repair, and recent rain had frozen in every rut and hollow, so that their way was marked by the crackle of breaking ice. Going was slow. From Iron Acton, the Baroness directed them toward Highwayman’s Hollow, a place just off the Yate to Chipping Niddwick road where, or so local legend had it, highwaymen used to lurk, waiting for a rich prize.

“We shall take a rest,” the Baroness announced, dismounting. Jules and the two silent Frenchmen followed her example. She beckoned the three of them. “Come closer so we can talk without me shouting.”

Sound did carry in the night air. Still, Jules thought she was being too cautious. Unless things had changed since he was last here, there wasn’t a dwelling anywhere within ten minutes’ walk.

Nevertheless, he joined the group, ready to hear their next destination. He wasn’t ready to be seized by Pierre and Victor, one on each side. He struggled, but he was soon bound to a tree and gagged for good measure.

“I know the way from here,” the Baroness told him. She caressed his cheek, a parody of affection. “I cannot trust you near people who might help you. We will be back, Julius, and you shall see us to the coast as you promised, and then I shall release you as I promised.”

Unable to comment, Jules merely glared. The Baroness laughed, and leaned towards him her lips puckered. He twisted his face, so that the kiss fell on his ear rather than his lips. She laughed again, and groped at his fall. “He is hardly a man at all,” she told her French lovers. “Such a disappointment. One expected better of a Redepenning.”

Jules raised a sardonic eyebrow. Lydia tipped her nose in the air and walked away to remount her horse. Pierre followed, and then Victor but only after a vicious punch to Jules’s stomach. “That is for disrespecting madame,” he hissed.

Jules had no choice but to keep his response to himself. He gave the Baroness precisely the respect she deserved. Probably as well he couldn’t speak. Another couple of blows like that, and he’d be in real trouble.

He watched them ride away before testing his bonds. Good. They’d left enough play for him to work with, and the jack knife he’d stolen on the ship was still concealed in his sleeve. He sneered after them. No sailor would have made such a mistake.

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Honest work on WIP Wednesday

One of the things I need to consider when forming my plots is ‘how does the character’s everyday job affect their time and their location?’ In the Regency era, peers of the realm worked: they’re sort of like the ceo of a company, in charge of the direction, making the tricky decisions, approving the strategy and the budgets. They were also eligible to sit in the House of Lords, and many had vigorous political careers. Ladies might be expected to be decorative, but that could be work, too. Wives, sisters, and daughters managed households, which could be massive and have huge numbers of staff. They were also expected to be responsible for dispensing welfare to the less fortunate.

Younger sons of the very wealthy might be the equivalent of today’s idle rich, depending on someone else’s money for their affluent lifestyle, but everyone else needed to have some way to keep fed, housed and clothed.  I love putting snippets of this into my writing, and I’ve written whole books starring characters with what we’d recognise as a job. I have a maker of invalid chairs, a chef, a house flipper, a horse breeder and others.

I’m currently thinking and imagining a couple of books ahead, and discovering some main characters who are not peers or their families. One, Lucas Mog, appeared in Farewell to Kindness, has a part to play in the current Work in Progress, Unkept Promises, and will be the hero of the next Redepenning book, Flavour of Their Deeds. He is a gamekeeper — but who is he really? One makes a living in a morally objectional fashion. He was an assassin for the British during the Napoleonic Wars, and now kills for a price and to order. He’ll be the hero of an as yet unnamed book for the Common Elements Project. One was tutor and minder to a lonely English boy in far off Naples while the boy had surgery. Now the lad is grown up, an earl, and married, Peter needs a new job. (Yes, this hero has a part in The Beast Next Door, my novella in Valentine’s From Bath.)

This week, give me an excerpt of a character at work — or at least of one who works. Mine is from Unkept Promises. My hero is a naval captain who has been lost from his ship, thank to the machinations of my villain.

Bruised and battered, every muscle aching, sick to the stomach from the sea water he had unwillingly ingested, Jules wanted nothing more than to lie on the sand just above the reach of the waves. But he was wet to the skin and cold to the bone. He needed to move before he froze, and he also needed to find cover before sunrise, because this was almost certainly a beach in enemy France.

He forced himself to his feet. In the dark, all he could do was set his back to the waves and start walking, feeling for each step, his hands before him to fend off any obstacle before it connected with his face. The rain had started again, which at least let him suck in a few drops of fresh water to ease his thirst.

He found a low bank by stumbling over it, stepping up from the sand onto a stiff grass that crunched under his feet. A few yards further on, his hands met leaves. Bushes, and when he pushed between them, they seemed to extend for some distance. He found a hollow in the ground surrounded by the foliage, hoping it would be enough to hide him until he could see well enough to find better concealment and make a plan.

It was a miserable wait for dawn, but at last the landscape emerged from the darkness. He would stick to the coast, he decided, in the hopes of finding a sail boat he could steal. England wasn’t above thirty miles away, though hidden in the persistent drizzle. He would probably not need to sail all the way; the channel was constantly patrolled by British ships.

He kept to the cover of bushes as much as he could, running across any open areas while scanning for other people. In the rain, they could have been almost upon him before he saw them, but all the more reason he would himself stay unobserved.

He also kept an eye out for better shelter; with luck, somewhere he could find dry clothing, or even something to wrap himself in while his own clothing dried. This must be the most deserted, Godforsaken piece of coast in all of France.

Then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Out of the mist came a column of marching soldiers, and Jules was surrounded before he could convince his tired bones of the emergency.

Someone shouted at him: a command by the tone. If it was a question, it was peremptory. I should have paid attention in French lessons, Jules thought. “My regrets, sir,” he said. “I do not understand.”

A rifle butt descended, and he sank into blackness.