Morland, George; The Soldier’s Return; Lady Lever Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/the-soldiers-return-102607

A lot of my short stories and novellas use the childhood sweethearts reunited plotline. It’s fun, for one thing. It lets me use more mature characters, for another. And, in shorter fiction, it gives credibility, since the romance can continue from where it left off once they are reunited, rather than needing to develop from first attraction to happy ending in just a few thousand words.

Here’s the opening of my next newsletter short story, due to be sent out in the next few days. If you have a reunion scene, please feel free to share it in the comments.

At first, Magda thought it a prank. There Luke was, stretched out prone across the vegetable garden between the onions and the cabbages, crushing the spring carrots. At any moment, he would leap up laughing, as he had once before, long ago, when they were children.

Perhaps not a prank, then, but a humorous reminder of the years of their friendship, long ago, before the earl’s younger son was sent away to join the army a month from his eighteenth birthday. He’d been gone for fifteen years, until she spied him in the tavern this afternoon, drinking with their old friends from the village, Will from the tavern and Ned from the forge.

After Luke left, Will and Ned had not been able to stand out against their parents and maintain—at least in public—their friendship with the witch’s by-blow granddaughter against the steadfast enmity of the wives of both the squire and the earl.

They were sisters, Luke’s mother Lady Compton, now the Dowager Countess, and Lady Frederick Barlow, widow of the squire who had preferred to ignore Magda’s existence and mother of the squire who, even today, made her life as difficult as he could.

Despite their parents and the two ladies, Will and Ned watched over her from a distance, keeping the squire’s sons from any but the more the subtle forms of persecution. Several times they had risked their own necks, or at least the displeasure of the two most prominent families in the district, to protect her from unpleasant advances and outright assault by nasty friends visiting the young gentlemen of those families.

Old friendship, too, must have been the reason why Will employed her as a cook, once he took over his father’s tavern. A job meant wages so she could look after Gran, and save a nest egg to escape from this place.

Luke was still lying on her carrots. Perhaps he did not realise she was there. “Luke?” Though she supposed, now that she was no longer fifteen nor he eighteen, she should call him Lord Lucas. Or Major De Grenville, perhaps. “Major De Grenville?”

He did not move. Did not spring to his feet, his sea-blue eyes dancing, asking her to share the joke. Now that she was closer, she saw the bruise on his cheek, and a trickle of blood, dried now, that had meandered down his neck from the hair at the back of his head.

She leaned closer; skimmed her fingers over the matted evidence of an assault or fall. Though if a fall, he must have descended from a height head first, for the lump was high up in his hair and had split with the force of the blow.

Magda felt for the pulse in Luke’s neck, and released a breath she had not been aware of holding when it throbbed, strong and even, under her fingers. She pressed his left shoulder with her hand and spoke to him again. “Major De Grenville?”