Unkept promises

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Arrivals on WIP Wednesday

This week, I’ve picked arrivals for my theme. Your choice. An arrival at a ball or dinner. The end of a long journey. Any kind of arrival, and from anyone’s point of view. Mine is Mia, the captain’s wife from Unkept Promises, meeting her husband again after seven years, when she comes to South Africa to look after his dying mistress. Ever since her own arrival, Mia has been expecting Jules back from his patrol in the seas off southern Africa.

Dear Heavens. The man was gorgeous. In the seven years since Mia had last seen him, she had managed to convince herself her memories had played her false. She had been alone and frightened, trapped by smugglers and locked up in a cave. And then a golden god had wriggled through from the cell next door. He had kept her company in the darkness, comforted her when her father died, fought the smugglers to win her safety, and then married her to save her reputation and give her a home.

Of course she adored him. She very likely would have developed a major crush even if she’d met him socially — she had been fourteen, had grown up largely isolated by her father’s social position as a poverty-stricken scholar of good family.  It was no surprise she fancied herself in love with the first young man she had ever properly talked to.

Handsome is as handsome does, she warned herself as she made her way down to the kitchen. But even in a taking about something, as he clearly was, he was unbelievably handsome. Mia thought she was immune to handsome men. Her brothers-in-law were all good-looking, and Mia had been propositioned at one time or another by most of London’s rakes, who clearly believed that a wife who hadn’t seen her husband in seven years must be in need of their attentions. None of them made her breath catch, her heart beat faster, and her insides melt.

Jules did, destroying all her preconceptions. Mia had assumed that, in the renegotiation of their marriage, she and Jules would be equally dispassionate. So much for that. Even grumpy; even with most of his attention on another woman, even with all that she’d heard about him to his discredit, she wanted him.

In the kitchen another handsome man, this one only twelve, took pride of place in Cook’s own seat, being waited on by his two adoring sisters. Marshanda was shuttling between the table and the chair, refilling the plate from which Adiratna was feeding her brother, who was sampling scones topped with different flavours of jam with the judicious air of a connossieur.

Marshanda saw her first. “Ibu Mia,” she announced, then ducked her head. She was not fond of being noticed, whereas her little sister wanted to be the star of every occasion.

Adiratna patted her brother on the cheek as a means to get his attention. “Ibu Mia is Mami’s sister, and our elder mother, Mami says.”

Perdana narrowed the beautiful eyes all three children had inherited from their mother, examining Mia thoughtfully.  Then he lifted Adiranta from his knee and stood to bow. “You are the Captain’s wife,” he announced. “Has the Captain arrived, Ibu Mia?”

Mia nodded. “He is with your mother, children,” she told them. “Give him a few minutes, my dears, and I am sure he will be down to find you.”

Adiratna was already on her way to the door, but she stopped obediently when Mia said her name. She turned and stamped her foot. “But I want my Papa now,” she whined. “He has been gone for ever so long. I want to show him the doll that you brought me from London, Ibu Mia.”

“And so you shall, darling,” Mia reassured her. “But we cannot properly greet Papa without just a little noise, can we? And noise makes Mami so tired.”

“Yes, Ada,” Marshanda said, her bossy streak overcoming her reticence. “You know you will squeal when Papa gives us presents. You always do.”

Adarinta’s eyes widened and sparkled. “Presents!” In moments, she was back across the room, tugging on Perdana’s hand. “What has Papa brought me, Dan. You know, I know you do.”

“Lumps of coal, like the Black Peter we saw on St Nicolas Day,” Perdana answered, promptly, “And a switch to beat you with, for you have undoubtedly been a great trouble for Mami and Ibu Mia.”

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Out-takes on WIP Wednesday

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.

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Before the book on WIP Wednesday

I’ve fallen into a process of writing until I find the start of a book. Real life, of course, isn’t tidy. Stories don’t have a beginning (except, perhaps, conception) or an end (except, perhaps, death). Before the beginning and after the end of life, the story belongs to other people, I suppose.

Novels are much tidier. We authors decide where the story starts and where it ends. And I always have trouble deciding.

Is the start the first meeting between my couple? Possibly, but what brought them to where they are? Maybe they’ve known one another for ever, but a crisis brings them together. Do we start with the crisis? Maybe they are already married, as in my latest novella for the Bluestocking Belles, but have drifted apart. Where does that one start?

I’m thinking about this because I’m beginning the next Redepenning novel, Unkept Promises. My hero and heroine have been married for seven years, and haven’t met or even been in the same country since the day of their wedding. Do I start with the circumstances that brought them together when she was fifteen and imprisoned by smugglers? Or with Mia arriving in Cape Town seven years later to take over from her husband’s mistress as lady of his house? Or with Jules turning up at his house to find things had changed?

Post me your start, or a pre-start unused scene, here in the comments?

Wherever I start, I need to know what happened before, so I’m thinking about writing the scenes in the smugglers den, even if they are only posted here or in my newsletter. It’ll go something like this.

At first, Jules thought the blow on the head had robbed him of his sight. But as he surfaced from the weight of the enormous headache that pinned him to the stone floor where they’d left him, he decided darkness was a more likely explanation. He moved cautiously, with protests from the bruises and aches from various kicks and blows the scurvy smugglers had landed. It didn’t take long to feel his way around the small uneven rock cave — with a sturdy wooden door — in which they’d placed him. It was empty, and he was alone.

Time crawled by as he waited for something to happen; time enough for hunger and thirst to gnaw away at his usual blithe disregard for his own mortality. He was sitting with his back against the wall, contemplating the mistakes that had brought him here, when he heard voices, so close they were almost in the room with him.

First, a groan. Then a girl’s voice, light and high. “Are you awake, Papa?”

The light came as a surprise, shining like a beacon from the other side of a barred opening set high up in one wall. Standing, Jules managed to reach the bars and pull himself up, to look through into another cell very like his own. A man, curled on a mess of rags and clothing, shifting restlessly. His eyes were shut, and he had not responded to the girl who crouched beside him. She was a skinny child, still boyish in shape, but he did not suppose that would save her from the smugglers. Jules made an instant vow to save her, whatever the cost.

The girl held the candle she had lit away in one hand to cast its light without dripping its wax, and brushed back the hair that fell over the man’s forehead.”Oh, Papa,” she said, her voice trembling.