Some random questions on the stories

A kindly reader has asked a few questions.  I paraphrase the questions and answer them below, in case anyone is interested.

Lucille seems tragic, but with a touch of inhumanity. 

The long and short of it is, Lucille is not a nice person. 

Taking a toddler to France in dangerous political times is iffy at best, so we start with that. Then Lucille's loss of her husband and her imprisonment, rape, and torture made her very hard. Cold. Fanatical almost.
Annique paid the price.

Annique's eidetic memory was recognized as soon as she could talk. It's the key to why she was in France at all. If she hadn't been uniquely useful, her mother would have sent her back to England when Annique's father died.

Frankly, Lucille exploited Annique and spared her very little. Just as Lucille spared herself nothing.

Was Lucille a villain who manipulated and used her daughter and later Justine in a despicable way

or a heroine who stepped up when England's existence was at stake?

Was she a woman who sacrificed everything she cared about for England's sake?

Or a selfish ideologue?

Or, like, all of the above?
 

I don't explain and we never go into her head. I try to show her as a woman with regrets. I'm hoping the reader will find her believable as a person and wonder about her and feel sorry for her. 

She had just a touch of inhumanity

On the exculpatory side:

Lucille, as a high-level officer of the Secret Police, curbed some of the evil things going on. Justine's rescue from the child brothel and sending Justine to help the last of the Caches are two examples of Lucille's work.

Did she really keep a brothel?

 Well ... yes.

I have trouble writing about historical whoredom. It needs somebody wiser than me.

Women had few career choices in this era. Some women, for one reason or another, became whores. A rich, well-run brothel like the one Lucille ran was an island of safety in a city visited by war, revolution, riot, and the occasional bout of starvation. The woman working there were grateful to be in the place. They had different expectations than run in the world of 1867 or 2018.

So I'm trying to deal with difficult historical realities in the context in which contemporaries would have judged them. Also trying not to be too realistic.

She raised Annique to be a spy, naively committed to France, while using her for the opposite cause. She set Annique up for the heartbreak and disillusionment in TSL,

Lucille wouldn't have felt it was morally dreadful to be a French patriot. Lucille spent her whole life among French patriots and, I think, loved some of them. Arguably, France was on the right philosophical side in that war.

Lucille chose loyalty to the British. She left Annique free to choose which side she'd be on. 

Annique feels betrayed when she sees all her letters and reports have found their way to the British. A tough day to be Annique.

What happens to Grey and Annique?

I don't say what happens to Grey and Annique after the end of TSL, since I want to be free to return to the timeline and write a story there if I ever decide to which I probably won't though.

I'm sure they had a true HEA, which means they both found uses for all their talents. Maybe out in India. Or maybe they went under deep cover in the south of France and ran a safehouse. I know they did exciting things.

Why does Shandor have a Hungarian name? At least, the spelling isn't Hungarian but the sound of it is.

It's a Kaldarashi name. A Rom name.

At the end of Rogue Spy, what was Galba's final reaction to Pax's insubordination?

All along, Doyle and Grey kept Galba in the loop about what was going forward. Galba, in the manner of senior management since the dawn of time, turned a blind eye to what he couldn't prevent . . . and what was ultimately serving his purposes.

Galba would have preferred that Pax not be the one to kill his own father, (Who among us wishes to promote patricide?) but he approves of the overall outcome.

After the close of the book Galba gives Pax a legendary and wide-ranging chewing out. Then Grey, Doyle, and Galba take turns interfering with wedding preparations to brief Pax on what they expect from him when he heads back to Italy.

Who replaced Grey when he retired?

Some "guy I didn't need to name or worry about what happened to him" took over. Then another guy, likewise. Then Adrian.

When Adrian stepped into Galba's shoes as Head of Service, the position of Head of the British Section was taken by -- you guessed it --  another "guy I don't need to name or worry about."

All else being equal I'd rather not name or describe characters who aren't necessary to the action because I always have more than enough characters anyhow.

How did Justine learn about Lucille's death and how was she affected by it? I expected to see this come up in The Black Hawk when the story moved parallel of the events in Spymaster's Lady and Vauban's death was mentioned.

[SPOILER]

What we're looking at here is the section of Black Hawk that begins with Hawker coming to Justine's window carrying a letter and ends when Justine shoots Hawker.

[END SPOILER]

In this time frame Vauban had been dead about a week. Lucille, who has been in Italy for months, has been dead a few weeks. 

The action of TSL begins after the action of this section ends.

Before this Black Hawk section opens .... Lucille dies. Annique leaves immediately for Paris. Soulier's resident spy sends word of Lucille's death to Soulier in London. LeBlanc's assassin, having killed Lucille, spends a lot of time attempting to find Annique and finish the job. He then wastes more time trying to track her north. Eventually the assassin rides for Paris and reports to LeBlanc.

During the TBH section, only LeBlanc, Soulier, a couple messengers, folks in Italy, and Annique know about Lucille's death. Justine meets none of these people except LeBlanc and he's not about to reveal he knows Lucille is dead because he has no legitimate way to have this news.

After the BH section, Paris Secret Police get the info.

So Justine doesn't learn about Lucille's death "on stage," as it were, and we don't see her reaction.

Timeline confusions (SPOILERS)

WARNING:  HERE BE SPOILERS


I've had a couple people come away from the timeline of the books a little confused.  In fact, the sound of heads banging on desks is about deafening.

So let me provide a general comment on the timeline as a Guide for the Perplexed.  And then I'll probably do it again in a week or so, but with more specificity than I can scrape together right now. And I'll only do that if I'm not buried in work of some kind or another.


We have three confusing time periods. Like ... sometimes I have two books happening at once.

1794 -- And we are in Forbidden Rose. Hawker, Pax and Justine are all young. Hawker is 12 or 13. Justine, 13. Pax, about 16.

Galba is Head of the Service. Grey has not yet joined the Service. Annique is living with the gypsies at this point. Doyle is a senior Independent Agent. Hawker is merely a raw possible recruit, on probation.

In 1794, Hawker walks onto the stage in Forbidden Rose leading a pair of tough little donkeys. About a third of the way into Forbidden Rose Hawker will meet Pax when they change duty at the watching post on Maggie's house. A bit later Justine and Hawker meet for the first time on the street outside Doyle's prison.

Black Hawk also visits 1794. This is in the first fallback section from the frame story.  We open that segment with Justine and Hawk getting together in Paris in front of the now-inactive guillotine.  This is the day after Doyle is freed from prison in Forbidden Rose.  In this segment of Black Hawk, Pax, Hawker, and Justine go to the Coach House and rescue the last Caches-in-training. 

Forbidden Rose and the 1794 section of Black Hawk then come together and end with the same scene. That's the one where Justine gives Severine into Maggie's keeping.

1802 -- This is where things gets complicated, because now we got three books involved.

In 1802 Justine and Hawker are 19 or 20. Pax is 24 or so.

Galba is Head of Service. Grey is Head of the British Section. Hawker is a young Independent Agent.

We have an 1802 segment of Black Hawk full of our three young spies saving Napoleon from an assassin. At the end of that 1802 section of Black Hawk, we see Justine shoot Hawker. This is on page 228.


The action of Spymaster's Lady opens five or six days after that shooting scene. Offstage, Grey and Hawker got picked up when Hawker was getting himself out of the Louvre. There is Hawker in prison, dying from Justine's bullet.  Annique gets thrown into the cell and they're off!!  Hawker, Grey, Annique and Doyle run headlong across France.

Rogue Spy starts when we're in the middle of the Spymaster's Lady timeline.  The two stories go forward in parallel. Action of one story happens while stuff is going on in the other.

While Pax in that tavern working up the courage to go

to Meeks Street, Grey and Annique are walking across Devon to London.

When Hawker visits Daisy's house in Rogue Spy it's been maybe three weeks since he was shot. He's only now come to terms with his final breakup with Justine. Meanwhile, across town, in Spymaster's Lady, Grey is dealing with Annique as a prisoner at Meeks Street.

Rogue Spy wraps up with the death of the Merchant but Spymaster's Lady continues. So later events like  Meeks Street headquarters getting shot up and Annique escaping to Soulier's house take place after Cami and Pax have already been married and sailed for France.

1818:  1818 is the frame story of Black Hawk. It's 16 years since Justine shot Hawker. Sixteen years since Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique married.

Hawker is Head of Service. Galba has retired. We haven't visited their timelines, but we can assume Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique have had many adventures in the intervening years, done important work, and have settled into a happy life. Maybe they have kids even.
And in 1818, Hawker and Justine marry.

So that's the way all these events spread out.
And that's just as clear as mud, isn't it?

Go ahead. Ask me something. I'll try to clarify.

Win a FREE COPY of the Forbidden Rose audiobook

Dear All --

This is a wonderful opportunity to get a Free Copy of the most excellent Forbidden Rose audiobook.

The contest is over on Goodreads and will be open till tomorrow.  Pop over here and give it a go.  
Hurry.

Two ... no, three things to mention.  No, four.  Well, several things.

This is US only, and I am very sorry if the audiobook is not available where you live.  I feel just terrible about this.  All I can suggest is, check Book Depository for one possibility.  Ask at a local bookstore that may be able to order it.  Ask a US friend to buy it and mail it to you.
Geo restrictions frustrate me terribly.

The audiobook is about brand spanking new, so you are in the forefront of this reading delight.

Tantor is also going to put out Lord and Spymaster and Black Hawk over the next couple months.  I haven't heard these yet.  I am waiting impatiently.  Can I say I am on Tantor-hooks?

The Forbidden Rose audiobook and the others are narrated by the extraordinarily talented Kirsten Potter. (Who narrated Spymaster's Lady and did such a wonderful job.)  She is so good she should have groupies.

Teresa Medeiros has given me a cover quote on the audiobook.  Like, wow.

If you are at GoodReads anyway, wondering if you're going to enter this contest, remember you can check out the reviews of the book itself right at that site to decide whether it's worth the trouble. 

Jo (having done this huge gollop of prom, fans self in exhaustion.)

But, really.  I mean.  Free audiobook. How can you go wrong?

Class and the Spymaster Fictive Universe

I was writing to excellent reader Ann today, talking about the blog post I did on how we write about Regency-era slums and got to thinking about how I deal with 'class' in the books.

Do I consciously write about social class in these books?
Yep.  I figger we all reveal our attitudes and beliefs unconsciously as we write ... so I might as well be aware I'm doing this and use it.



Take Lazarus.
Lazarus is motivated by resentment of the class that ruined his servant-girl mother and drove her into prostitution.  This is the class to which his father belongs.  The class Lazarus would enjoy if he'd been legitimate. 

Lazarus runs an empire of violence and theft, in part, because he figures his minions are entitled to take what they want.  The rich do.  Why shouldn't the poor?  He's self-educated and brilliant.  He can't help but see the inequity in the laws of England.  He ends up with great sympathy for the French Republican cause.

In his private life, his special ire is reserved for women of the privileged class who commit crimes that would land a servant girl in jail or send her to the gallows.  Again, class motivates his actions.
 

Adrian's life journey is shaped by a desire to become 'a gentleman'.  He walks, like Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, on sharp knives every step of the way.  He finds himself, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, unable to go back to what he was and yet unable to be comfortable with what he becomes. 

He measures his own success by his ability to pass as a member of the upper class. And yet, Adrian only passes for a gentleman; he never becomes one.  He watches, judges, and shrewdly assesses the rich and powerful . . . as an outsider.  He can never buy into their narrower view of the world.  He uses privilege, but doesn't believe in it.

Adrian originally admired the French Revolution, liking the leveling effect.  Then ... an outtake from Forbidden Rose has him watching a tumbril take a family with teenage girls to the guillotine.  We don't see the scene onstage, unfortunately, but that was a turning point of his life.  It outraged him.  He would never again be tempted by revolutionary violence.  Years later, he rejects Napoleon as an ambitious opportunist.  By that time, by 1799, Adrian is wholly committed to the British Service. 

But he never rejects France's social reforms.  Philosophically, Adrian is all for dismantling aristocratic privilege.  He doesn't act on this because social equality is never offered to him as a viable choice in the 1789 to 1818 timeframe. 
One reason Adrian gets along with Justine is they have no basic philosophical disagreement.


Doyle is more sympathetic to the idea of an aristocracy.

He plays at being a coachman or a laborer without assuming the interior life of one.  He's an aristocrat inside.  Born one.  Schooled and trained as one.

More than that, Doyle's a practical man rather than an idealist.  He believes a hierarchical society is inevitable, so he aims for a humane and workable system -- a fair, stable, well-run government with gradual change toward equality and social mobility.


The discussion Adrian and Doyle have at the beginning of Forbidden Rose is meant to show their different points of view.  (This is prior to Hawker's disillusionment with the bloody side of revolution in France.)

[Doyle and Adrian approach the orangerie at the chateau. It's savagely destroyed.]
 
    Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel.  “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.” 
   “Did they?”
    “They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds up here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there,they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”
     “That’s fixed, then. No more flowers.”
     Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hawker stoop and pick up a rock, draw back and throw. Glass fell with a thin, silver discord. The heroic revolutionaries of Voisemont had missed one pane. Destruction was now complete.   

Justine is my most ideological character.  In 1818 she's going through a period of disillusion, as idealists will.  She's seen Napoleon fall.  She's seen Paris turn away from the Revolution and accept the Royalists back in power.  It'll be a few years before she gets her political fire back. 

Justine saw her degradation and loss not as a male/female issue -- not so much, 'men did this to me' --  as a class and power issue.  'The rich can get away with anything.' "In a just society these things would not happen.'  She responds to her hurt with a desire to right the wrongs of society.  She becomes a political person.

Justine's journey is one of rebuilding herself after absolute destruction.  Part of this is reclaiming her place as an aristocrat. Though she's despised aristocrats, ironically, it's a measure of her complete healing when she can say,

     “I will come to live with you in your great mansion and be a lady again. I will be a DeCabrillac, and face down the world if they make accusations. I will shake out your haughty mansion like an old rag and make it comfortable to live in.”

She becomes something she has fought against, because Adrian needs this from her.  It's her gift to him.


Justine, too, is someone who doesn't buy into the class paradigm.  She may claim her name and position, but I see her taking her aristocratic space cynically.  She's gotten subtle in the Police Secrète.   Give her a few more years and she'll be the Grande Dame of the Reform Movement, infiltrating the camp of the enemy, still fighting the good fight.

My Romance Trading Cards

My Romance Trading Cards -- here.  I'll be handing these out at the RT Convention and at RWA National.  I don't know which one is going to be more popular -- the realistic or the manga style.

ETA:  I wanted to do one for my Adrian, but I haven't really got my act together for this yet, so I won't be handing out an Adrian trading card at RT.  I tried out a manga version -- no dice on this so far.  I don't have enough dpis or something on my anime picture. 

I will give this some more thought in April.
 

Alpha Heroes

Christine Wells said, over on the Berkley-Jove board : here


And Jo, about talking your way out rather than hitting someone--do you think that characteristic precludes Doyle from being alpha? I never quite know what an alpha male is. To me, he's the one who will take the lead in a given situation, the one other men/women will instinctively turn to to solve their problems. A man of action, yes, but not necessarily violence.

What does an alpha hero mean to you?


So I replied ...

I've done the ponder-ponder-muse-muse bit on this.

This starts out being a little confusing to me because 'alpha' in Romance does NOT mean the same thing as 'alpha' in animal behaviour. I keep forgetting that.

In Romance, 'alpha' is all about the power balance in the male-female relationship.

Set aside whether the hero is rich or competent or dangerous or useful to the community as a whole. Set aside whether he gives orders to other folks.
The alpha- or beta- ness of the hero, in Romance terms, lies in who gives the orders in the H&H relationship.

Do they eat Chinese or Thai? Who makes the decision -- or voluntarily passes decision power to the other?

Some of the most interesting stories involve changes in the balance of power
or struggles between the protagonists to determine the BoP
or relationships where strongly assertive H&Hs approach intimacy while dancing around an undetermined and unsettled BoP.

So ... you thought I'd never get to the point, didn't you?
... when I look at my super-competent Doyle. My sneaky and covert Doyle. My hyper-self-aware Doyle ....
I see him as alpha in a relationship.

Anyone this self-contained does not have within him the capacity for trust of a beta hero. It's going to be hard enough making Doyle even moderately honest and open when he falls in love.

This being the case, I must make Maggie self-contained and independent and a little isolated as well.

I'm setting her to useful and forceful actions, or course. But I'll also give her some kind of overt bang-slap-pop thing to do near the end -- probably in the confrontation with the villain -- just so everyone KNOWS she's powerful.

What they look like . . .

For Grey -- remember, he is not particularly handsome. Maybe Javier Bardem. Photo here, here,

Or possibly Hugh Jackman here and here

For Doyle ... how about Bruce Willis? here

Writing spies

I was thinking about spies, today, and how we represent them in fiction.

My Maggie is fallen among English spies even as I speak.
The more I move into Doyle's head, the more I have to show him as the 'spy' he is.

But it's not as easy to portray spies as you'd think.

One swims uphill, (can one swim uphill ...? maybe I mean crawls ... ) against a general opinion that all spies are James Bond, (or Jane Bond) -- sexually insatiable, with black belts in thirty obscure forms of combat, able to rappel down buildings on a line of dental floss, armed to the back molars, killers without mercy, cold-blooded as a flock of sharks.


Which has nothing whatsoever to do with real spies, of course, in any era.

TV has much to answer for.


Doyle, walking into France in 1794, is on a mission he knows will probably end with him killing somebody.

Now, espionage, 1790 style, was virtually all observation and reporting. What we'd call Humint nowadays. Valuable spies were those who could seek out information, undetectably extract it, and bring it home. Intelligence gathering intelligence, if you will.

Doyle has to do more than oserve, this time out. He's staring at the likelihood he'll have to kill somebody. He doesn't take it lightly.

The problem is, the minute I say -- 'Doyle is a spy' -- some readers are going to lose any sense that murder of an unarmed civilian might be troublesome to Doyle's conscience.
Doyle's dilemma is not merely lost. It becomes a wallbanger.

For some readers it'll be ...
'Real spies act like James Bond. Doyle doesn't. Ergo, he's not a real spy. I watch TV and I know.'
Why folks would assume that nations, now or ever, trusted their spying exclusively to bloodthirsty and athletic sociopaths, I cannot imagine.

The first decision I present Doyle in the story, (Chapter Four,) is whether he will protect his mission or behave decently.

I know how he decides, of course. But when I show his thought processes, none of this is going to be the least JamesBond-like.

I dunnoh how to make folks accept a more intelligent and less sanguinary view of the spy game.
Zeesh.

The Call

This business of getting 'the call' ... it is rather legendary in the genre.

At least for me, the significance was ...

I was talking to her
and she asked me what I was working on.
This may have been so I would stop doing the heavy breathing bit in her ear.
So I said I had another novel in progress.
"What's it about?" says she.

I am standing there with my brains in rigor from having received 'the call' and I cannot tell her what JESSAMYN is about even though I have written tens of thousands of words of it already and have a complicated outline in a .doc file labeled 'Complicated Outline.doc'.
"Ummmm ..." says I.
and then,
"It's set in 1810," says I,
that being the only factoid I can dredge out of the won ton soup that used to be my cerebral cortex.

She offers a supportive silence and I have to say something or she will begin to think I am really really stupid and she will not want to represent a gibbering idiot. She may already be having doubts.

"I'm using two secondary characters from ANNEKA in it," says I, grabbing another factoid as it swims by.

"Which two?"

Oh, good. Another question I can answer. "Doyle and Adrian."

"Adrian! That's wonderful! I fell a little in love with Adrian."

And all of a sudden it's all right. Because I'm a little in love with Adrian myself and I worried I'd carved out too big a role for a secondary character in the ms and it might have deformed the plot but she doesn't think so and she's a professional and should know that sort of thing.

This is the only other person on earth who's read the whole manuscript besides me and she really likes Adrian. She likes him.

It's going to be ok.