Electra

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Scandal and risk on WIP Wednesday

Scandal is part of the stock in trade of a historical romance writer, and particularly the writer of Regency and Victorian novels, whose stories are set against a rigid, if hypocritical, standard of publicly moral behaviour. If my characters didn’t ignore it, or be accused of ignoring it, my stories would be a lot shorter! Here are the hero and heroine of One Hour in Freedom, ignoring social norms. Or are they?

After she was ready for bed, Ellie sat in a chair by the fire, waiting. He had stopped in the hall as Mrs Blythe showed them to their rooms. From the look in his eyes, he had thought about kissing her, but had changed his mind. Why? Were they still estranged? Was she a fool to hope they could be together again? Surely he had the same questions.

After half an hour, she decided that Matthias was not coming. Does he not realise that they needed to talk? They had both been given rooms in the guest wing, and were the only occupants. Furthermore, when they had come up together after the meeting with Max, she had seen which room he had entered.

Well then. She let herself out into the dim hall and counted doors until she reached the one Matthias had been given. Light still shone under the door. Good. That made things easier. She knocked and listened for a response from inside the room.

The door swung open, and Matthias stood in the opening, his neutral expression dropping for a moment to reveal surprise, then delight and lust, before he reimposed control over his features.

He stood to one side. “Ellie. Please come in.” The huskiness of his voice sent her body humming, as did his state of dress—or undress. He had wrapped a towel around his waist to open the door, but—apart from that scrap of fabric—he was naked.

She swallowed against a suddenly dry throat and walked past him into the room.

“Give me a moment,” he demanded. He went behind a dressing screen. He is quite correct. We need to talk. Ellie took a deep breath and attempted to distract herself by cataloguing the contents of the room. A bed. A couple of chairs by the fire, one of which had a half full glass on the little table beside it. She sat in the other chair, and continued her examination.

A clothes press. A side table under the window. Another by the door. Very similar to her own room, so probably a washstand and some pegs for clothes behind the dressing screen.

Where Matthias was presumably armouring himself against her lustful eyes by hiding his glorious chest and strong legs under clothing. But the sight was graven on her eyeballs, and her efforts to think of something else were not working.

He emerged in a pair of trousers, with a shirt worn loose over the top. “Still undress,” he said, “but not quite as scandalous.”

“Not scandalous at all, under the circumstances,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but the household doesn’t know that, do they?” he argued. “Do you want a whisky, Ellie? Lion brings it down from Northumberland. They brew it in the hills there.”

“I have never tried whisky,” Ellie admitted. “Perhaps just a little. As to the scandal of my presence here, or not… that is one of the things I wanted to talk about.”

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Enemies to lovers on WIP Wednesday

 

Actually, in One Hour of Freedom, from the Lion’s Zoo series, they were lovers before they were enemies.

She stopped by the window and turned to face him, the brighter lights in the bedchamber illuminating her face.  He traced the changes time had left. In London, when they first met, she had been more child than girl. In Spain, several years later, she was a girl hovering on the edge of womanhood. She was now fully a woman, and more beautiful than ever.

“I need to talk to you, Matthias.”

He sneered. “And you could not visit me in London? No, of course not, for undoubtedly you are involved in something illegal, and you know that in London I have the authority to arrest you.” A slightest exaggeration. His authority was limited to the river and the docks. But she wasn’t to know that.

She had learned to control her temper somewhere in the past four years. She did not react to his needling, but answered calmly, “I am being watched in London. I could not see a tail, but I may have been followed here, to Coventry. I cannot be seen to be talking to you.” She waved an expressive hand. “Hence the precautions.”

Despite himself, he was intrigued. No. He would not let her inveigle him again. “I have a way you can avoid that. Don’t talk to me. Go away, Electra.”

She sat in one of the two chairs by the hearth. “The Kingpin has ordered me to kill you,” she said, bluntly. “You are interfering with his trade, I am told.”

His hand had not left the gun in his pocket, but it had relaxed. No more. He hooked his finger back to the trigger, though every nerve in him jangled at the thought of sending a bullet into the flesh he had once loved so deeply.

The Kingpin was a shadowy figure that had, in the past couple of years, taken over some of the most lucrative illegal businesses in London. One of those was stealing cargoes from the ships in the Pool of London and the London docks, which put him in direct conflict with the Thames River Police. 

“I do not recommend that you try,” he growled.

She hooked a single eyebrow. “I have no intention of trying. But when I told the Kingpin that, he took someone very important to me. He tells me I have a choice. Kill you, or see the person I love die. I choose the third option. I have come to ask for your help.”

The sheer audacity of it silenced him for a moment, and then he swore, a long string of invective dredged up from the streets that birthed him. “You think I would lift a finger to help you save your lover?” he added. “Go to hell!”

“I undoubtedly will, for my sins,” Ellie agreed. “But first I must take down the Kingpin before he finds my daughter and carries out his threats against her, and I hope you will help me, for she is your daughter, too.”

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Flaws and idiosyncrasies in WIP Wednesday

 

Characters can’t be perfect, or there isn’t any story, but the flaws and idiosyncrasies that make them human need to be believable, and possibly endearing. This week, I’m sharing a piece from one of my current works in progress, called either Catch the Wind or One Hour in Freedom, in which my hero and heroine are trying to enter a building without being seen. If you have a passage to share that shows a character’s flaws, please include it in the comments.

Matt’s eye caught movement on a rooftop overlooking the street they were on. “Stop!” he commanded, drawing her under the awning of a shop. She followed his gaze, then turned worried eyes to him.

“The building opposite is the one that belongs to my cousin.”

“Then we had better find out who those people are and what they are looking for,” Matt replied. “First, though, is there a back way into the warehouse?”

He knew she would know. Ellie would never have left her daughter in a place she had not thoroughly scouted. Undoubtedly, she knew every path in and out of all the buildings for streets around.

Her mischievous smile confirmed his assessment, though it didn’t touch the worry in her eyes. “Not exactly. Are you still uneasy about heights?”

She tugged on his hand, and he followed her back the way they had come, but only until they could no longer see the observers on the roof.

Across the road and down a little alley between buildings, so narrow that the top levels cut out the daylight. When someone came towards them, Matt had to drop back so they could pass single file, and even then, both they and the other person had to press themselves against the buildings.

Ellie stopped a few yards further on and watched the passerby. He was outlined against the light at the mouth of the alley and then gone. He hadn’t looked back.

As soon as he was out of sight, Ellie opened a door onto a narrow stairwell. Matt followed her inside with a sinking feeling. They were several buildings from Ellie’s cousin’s warehouse, and there were at least two alleys between them and their destination.

Sure enough, they came out on the roof, several floors higher than the observers across the road.

“I am not afraid of heights,” Matt declared. Heights scared him witless.

Ellie had pulled out a plank half buried in rubbish just behind the parapet. Oh, God.

“Help me with this?” she asked.

He took one end of the plank, then helped her push it out until it sat across the alley to the next building.

He thought he was maintaining a stolid expression, but perhaps not, for Ellie took a good look at him and said, “If you want to meet me in the street in thirty minutes, I can do this.”

“I’m coming with you,” Matt insisted, as his gut urged him to let her go on her own.

She didn’t argue, but leapt up on the parapet and ran lightly across the plank to the next roof.

Matt climbed up a little more slowly. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. It’s only two or three paces. You can do this.

Five steps, to be precise, though none of them were long enough to be called a pace. His feet felt like lead and his hips and knees didn’t want to bend. He reached the other roof and jumped from the parapet, his legs nearly buckling as they suddenly loosened. Sweat rolled from his brow and he was shaking all over. He braced himself. There was at least one more alley to cross.

“Next?” He asked, with a fair assumption of calm.

“Two more crosses,” Ellie told him. “The next building is lower, so we need to go down several floors.” She led the way into another stairwell, and then along a hall and through a huge echoing storage place that was currently empty. On the far side of the room, she stopped at a window that was just a rectangular hole in the wall, the glass and frame long gone.

“The alley is much narrower, so it is just a step from one window to another,” she said, and she took that step and dropped before his eyes. He darted forward in a futile effort to catch her, but she halted before he reached the hole.

There she was, perched on a narrow ledge, busy pushing up a sash window. She was right. Once the window was up, all he had to do was step across. It wasn’t even a long step, but every particle of his body was conscious of the drop below.

He took a deep breath and let it out, then took the step.

Two alleys crossed, and he had not shamed himself in front of Ellie. She knew, of course, that he had some difficulty. He hoped she had no idea how much. He hoped he could nerve himself to make the last cross.