I often cut scenes when I edit. Sometimes, I know even as I write them that they’re not going to be needed, but I still need to write them to get where I’m going. Sometimes, I love them dearly, but find out there’s a better way to achieve the same result. And sometimes I cut them reluctantly because I like them a lot, but they add nothing to plot or character.

This week, I’m busily writing a prequel to Unkept Promises that will never go in the book. It’s set seven years before the novel, and I posted the start of it a couple of weeks ago. Mia meets Jules when they are imprisoned together in a smugglers’ cave.

It is coming along, and I intend the whole sequence to be my next newsletter short story, from when Jules realises someone is in the next cell to where Jules kisses his new bride chastely on the forehead and rides off to Portsmouth and his ship.

Do you have a favourite deleted scene you’d like to share? Post it in the comments! Here’s the next bit of mine.

“Miss,” Jules hissed. The girl startled back from her father. Her face, already white, turned whiter as she faced the door, putting her body between herself and the unconscious man.

“I’m a prisoner,” Jules reassured her. “In the next cell.”

The girl held the candle high as she stood, peering towards the sound of his voice. He kept talking to guide her. “Lieutenant Julius Redepenning of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, Miss. I am going to get out of here, and I’m going to take you and your father with me.”

The face turned up to him was just leaving childhood behind, but the eyes shone with intelligence and her response indicated more maturity than he expected. “I hope you can, Lieutenant. But if your cell is as sturdy as mine, I beg leave to reserve judgement.” She sighed. “I am sorry for your predicament, but I will not deny I am glad to have company.”

“May I borrow the candle?” Jules asked. Her eyes widened in alarm and he rushed to add, “just for long enough to check my cell. They left me without light.” Without food or drink, either, but he would not tell her that. Perhaps the smugglers intended to supply him, and if they didn’t, he would not take the supply she needed for herself and her father.

She passed the candle up, her worry palpable, and he hoisted himself higher with one hand so that he could stretch the other through the bars. “I will be careful, Miss, I promise.”

“Mia,” she said. “Euronyme Stirling, but formality seems out of place, here.”

He returned her smile. She was a brave little girl; he had to find a way out for her. “Call me Jules,” he offered, “as my friends do.”

He rested the candle — a stubby bit of wax with a rope wick — on the sill between the bars and dropped, shaking the ache out of the shoulder that had taken most of his weight. When he reached the candle down, Mia let out an involuntary whimper at the loss of light.

“I have it safe,” he said. “You shall have it back in a minute.”

“I do without it most of the time,” she replied. “It’s just — I have always known I could light it again.”

Most of the time? “How long have you been here?” Jules asked, keeping his voice light and casual against the lump in his throat at her gallantry.

She answered a question with one of her own. “What is today? Tuesday? Or later.”

“Tuesday, probably. It was late Monday evening when I came across the smugglers. They knocked me out, but surely not for long.”

“The tenth of June? It was the fourth when Papa and I…” she trailed off, a small gulp the only sign of her distress.

Six days. Perhaps seven. “How long has your Papa…” Surely she had not been nursing a sick man all this time?

“They hit him when they attacked us, but I think — I wonder if he has had an apoplexy, Jules.” She took a deep shuddering breath and spoke again, her voice once more under her control. “He has not woken since that day. I have managed to get some water into him, but…”

“No food,” he guessed.

“They have given us nothing to eat.”

Bastards. They’d left her mostly in the dark, with no food, little water, and a dying father. He had been exploring his cell while they talked, and found no comfort in it. The door was firmly set, its hinges on the outside where he couldn’t reach them, though he ran his knife through the gap between the wood of the door and the stone of the walls, and guessed the hinges were iron by the sound they made. The door had a small hole, just big enough for someone outside to peer in, or for food or a small drug to be passed through. He pushed the shutter that blocked the hold from the other side, but it didn’t shift.

The only other gap in the stone was the high barred window between his cell and Mia’s. He put the candle up on the sill, and then added the bun, still wrapped in his handkerchief. That meant pulling himself up by the bars at the other end of the window, and the one closest to the edge shifted slightly as he put his weight on it.