Out-take from Spymaster's Lady

A bit of old draft attrib photostever

Doing other stuff today and writing on the WIP, I came across a bit of Spymaster's Lady that didn't make it into the manuscript. 
So I figgered --  I'm never going to use this.  Let's post it on the blog and maybe somebody can get something out of it.

This piece would have fit in the part of the story where Annique and Grey are first entering London.  Instead of passing through Covent Garden and heading off to Meeks Street, they stop for a while.   In this early draft version, Annique was going to write something important at this point.  That disappeared in a later draft.


The fictional locale -- this tavern -- continues to exist in the Spymaster's fictive world.  It just hasn't made its way into a book yet.

****

Covent Garden

ETA this first paragraph.

She had slept, on and off, through the night and the early morning while Robert, and the horse Harding, brought her all the way to London.  She awakened suddenly in the dawn to the sound of wagons on cobblestones and women in white kerchiefs selling ladles of milk from the huge cans on the back of their carts.  The sky was still pink when he brought her into the Covent Garden, which was not a garden at all but instead a market of incredible size, full of flowers and vegetables and chickens in cages, complaining.

In a street to the side of the market was the tavern called the Crocodile, which from the look of it was an accustomed meeting place of smugglers and other clandestine types.  They knew Robert well, but did not once say his name or look at him directly or ask for payment.  It was only 'Yes, Sir,' and they brought him ale to drink and a meal of beef which was a loathsome habit in the morning and thoroughly English.

For her, by some miracle, they conjured up black coffee in a tin pot and fresh rolls, so she was ready to forgive them as much as they wished.  She allowed Robert to gift her with that coffee and another meal later in the morning.  She did not have the strength to argue with him any longer, being disheartened and frightened by what she was about to do. 

He was an even more important smuggler captain than she had realized.  He sprawled at the end of the bench, his feet propped up, his back to the wall, his coat lapped about him, and dozed all the long morning.  Men of all types and degrees, and a few women, came and went from the tavern.  Not one glanced in his direction.  Only important men can be so anonymous. 

He made her safe there, from the denizens of that place and from those far worse who lurked in the streets outside.  In safety, she could perform the next step in the great task she had set herself.  She chose her spot, near the window where the light was good, and wrote and wrote and wrote in the small black book she had bought.

She held it now.  To buy a blank-papered exercise book and ink and quills and blotting paper had consumed three and tuppence.  But that was not in any way the cost of the book she turned over and over in her hands.

"I did not know I would be this afraid," she said.  "Or that I would be ashamed."

Robert stood beside her with his arms crossed.  It was as if he were on watch while some smuggled cargo was landed – alert and focused and awaiting events.  The horse Harding would have been more inquisitive.

********

ETA:  This out-take above slid into another, also not used.  So I will add that.  Two out-takes for the price of one.  Hey.  Such a deal.

Anneka, in this draft, is carrying a coded book to England.  She has promised Adrian to drop it off at Meeks Street.  As part of her own plans, she is doing that.

In the later draft I simplified the story and eliminated the whole six- or seven- thousand word subplot.  Aren't you glad? 

*****

She held it now.  To buy a blank-papered book and ink and quills and blotting paper had consumed two pounds, ten, and tuppence.  But that was not in any way the cost of the book she turned over and over in her hands.

"I did not know I would be this afraid," she said.  "Or that I would be ashamed."

Robert stood beside her with his arms crossed.  He was a brew of complex emotions, most of them hidden from her.

 Number Seven was made of gray stone.  Thin, white curtains hung in the windows, so one could see out of but not in.  She did not know if anyone were watching her at this moment.  "I must reveal myself to these men," she said.  "I have the greatest wariness of them.  Fouché's organization is the best on the earth, of course – those are the men in France I worked for when I was a spy, you understand – but these British are nearly as good.  I have been their enemy all my life.  Now I stand in their country not twenty feet from their stronghold.  It is a sobering thought.  I must leave London immediately when I have passed over this book to them."

"Yes," Robert said.

"You are being silent to me again."  The book was getting damp in her hands because they were sweating so.  "You have not even asked what it is I do here."

"You're going to bring that book to that house."

"Truly one would think you were a fish, the amount of curiosity in you.  What I do here is risk my neck, all so I may become a traitor to my people.  It will keep me awake at night for the rest of my life."

"I doubt it."  He was a man of many certainties, Robert the smuggler.

"Hah.  I will show you."  She opened the book and let the pages flow under her fingers.  "Look.  This is code.  Not one I know, and I have no skill in dissecting them.  But I do not need to take the code to pieces to know what is in here.  When I saw it first in France I saw at once what it must be, written in so many hands, with the numbers in it, and organized just so.  This is a report on the ships that Napoleon builds to invade England.  When and where and how.  It is the work of many cunning men, this book."

"I see."

"You do not see.  For you there would be no problem.  You are not political  You would toss it overboard, or light a fire with it, or give it to those men ..."  She glanced once more at Number Seven, Meeks Street.  "... in there.  It would be all the same for you.  For me, matters are less simple.  A mile from here is a man named Soulier.  A Frenchman.  By all the duty of my life, I should take this book to him." 

"Why don't you?"  Robert crossed his arms.

"Oh ... it is complicated."  She scuffed her feet upon the pavement.  "I made a promise, for reasons that seemed good at the time.  That is some of it.  But, in truth ...  "

Truth stuck in her throat, as it did, occasionally.  She would say it, though.  She would admit to herself what she was doing.  "I am come here to put a weapon into the hands of the English."

"A weapon?"

"Of a kind.  Not a weapon of soldiers.  One of politics.  Battles do not hinge upon seven ships here and twenty there, most of which the British have been told many times.  And they do not know of the false hulls, which will never be completed, and the many ships hidden in the south and ...   well, many matters that make this book not so correct as the men who wrote it would like to believe.  But I will not tell you these things.  They are not good for you to know."  She sighed.  "The dangerous secrets ... matters of battle plans and troops and supplies.  I assure you, they are not in this little book."  They were firmly in her brain.  But of that she refused to think at all. 

"Useless is it?"  Robert looked at her without any change of expression.  For all he was a smuggler captain and most intelligent, she could be speaking Romany to him.

"Useless to soldiers.   This is another sort of weapon.  Words can be most powerful, my Robert.  Your English diplomats will lay this tally of ships upon the conference table and give the lie to Buonaparte when he claims that he wishes peace and demands concessions."  She scowled at what she held, since it tormented her with several hard choices.  "This book will be the cat in the pigeons of many dovecotes.  The French, themselves, do not know of these ships.  The ordinary people.  They do not want more war."

"Nobody wants that."

"Perhaps not.  But those nobodys do not become traitors this fine morning."  She wiped first one hand, and then the other, upon her skirt.  "So I will tell the French what Citizen Buonaparte keeps up his sleeve.  And it may be the men of Paris and Lyon and Rouen will see that those hundred ships never sail at all.  I have planned this for a week, my betrayal of my country.  Now I must do it.  When I have finished, I shall be so disgusted with myself I shall not even care if Duval finds me."

"Don't be silly, Anneka." 

"You are right.  I shall still care and for that I despise myself also."  She shrugged.  "But this is to make a drama.  I have been well trained not to make the dramas.  Stay here, mon ami, when I go across and do this thing.  These are not people you should involve yourself with."

"I go with you."  He said it in a voice not susceptible to argument, being like paving blocks, set closely.  So she let him come because she was frightened and wanted him next to her, even if it were dangerous for him, a little.  With a man such as Robert beside her she could face even this. 

Dull and respectable was written on all the stones at Number Seven Meeks Street which showed that even stones could tell lies.  The wide door was placid, as if it were a mouth that had swallowed a thousand secrets and grown fat on them.  It was a solidly built house with bars on the windows.

"Go ahead, Anneka," Robert said.  "Let's get it over with."

So she rapped loudly, using the knocker which was in the form of a curled rose.  In a minute, a boy opened the door, taller than she was, but probably three years younger.  Anneka dropped the book quickly into his hands.  "A man asked me to bring this to you."

But the boy wasn't looking at her.  He was looking past her.  At Robert.

Robert took her shoulders, which startled her for it was the very first time he had willingly put his hands upon her.  The boy stepped back and Robert pushed her carefully and rapidly across the threshold, into the house, into a room which was a dull, tasteless parlor, stiff with disuse. 

"Robert ..."  She tried to turn, confused.  His hands tightened.  "I don't want to be here, Stop it, Robert."  The boy locked the door behind them and went to unlock another door on the far side of the parlor.

Outtake from Forbidden Rose

You may or may not know this;
I spent a lot of time agonizing over the beginning of Forbidden Rose.

I rewrote the beginning a dozen times.
I'm still not sure I made the right choice. *g*


Here's  a beginning I wrote and discarded and put in and took out and put in and took out.
It was almost Chapter One.
Instead, it went in the waste basket.  Such is the life of a writing snippet.

******* beginning of outtake *****

France was a black line cut between the starred sky and the sea.  They were killing each other in Paris and at convenient spots in the countryside, all in the name of Revolution.  Doing it in imaginative ways.  The gates of hell were open and all the devils were loose.

If there'd been a general increase in liberty, equality, and fraternity, he hadn't seen it.

William Doyle took a wood cask from a smuggler, rested it on the gunnels to shift his grip, and lowered it over the side, down to outstretched hands.  The next cask was ready when he turned back.

Everyone worked in practiced, heavy-breathing silence, in the dark.  The rhythm to it came half came from these Devon smugglers, who knew about heaving bales and boxes from one boat to another, half was the sea itself.  The sea lifted the French fishing boat towards him and drew it back, then lifted again.  He and a barely-seen Frenchman timed the waves and passed cargo when the ships knocked sides, clapping against the bags of sand that kept the hulls silent.

This cargo was Assam tea leaves, pressed into hard blocks and packed tight in waterproof kegs.  It'd be poured into teacups in the Faubourg St. Germaine by the end of the week.  He didn't expect to get to Paris half that quick himself. 

If he ever got to Paris.  That was looking damned problematic.

His own personal cargo was the two crates over there, bobbing in the French boat. Counterfeit notes.  Troublesome stuff.  Then there was the boy, also troublesome.  He was starboard, puking his guts over the side as he'd been doing with some regularity, every ten minutes, since they left Dover.

Almost made him feel sorry for the murderous little animal.  Almost, not quite.
   
This was just a duckfooted mess of a job.

Doyle hefted the last keg, grunted, and handed it down.  Soft-footed on the deck, whispering, the French smugglers scuttled about, tying and securing and covering illegal cargo with canvas and fish.

The transfer was complete. Time to get a move on. The boy crouched with his back to the forecastle, pale gray in the flicker of the dark lantern, sullen as a dirty rag. 

He strolled over and nudged all that suffering with his boot.

"You."  He spoke French.  The boy understood just fine. "Get the bags." 

No response.   

"Or stay on the boat.  They'll drop you off somewhere.  Mid-Channel, probably."

The boy, Hawker, got to his feet and staggered off to get their luggage.

***** end of outtake *****


I kinda regretted not using this.

Now, just in the interests of full disclosure and maybe somebody is interested in how this all works, down below the cut I've put up what this little segment actually looked like when I set it aside.
Which is to say, with all the notes I make for myself still in. 

An Outtake from MLAS

Martha, in the comment trail, asked about scenes that don't make it into the final book.

As a generality, there are Good Reasons why scenes quietly disappear from the ms before the Editor ever sees them.
The scene is boring.
Or it twiddles off down a line of minor plotting, instead of telling the love story.
Or it is talking heads conveying information.
Or all three.

Here below is a scene that got written
and then a draft or two later got grubbed up by the roots and tossed out.

The scene is not dreadful in and of itself. It explains why Jess, (our heroine in MLAS,) is knee deep in kimchee with the British Government.
But we do not write scenes to 'explain things'.

The stage action I kept, because I need the little jigsaw piece of scene to transition from one place to another. The action shows up, much modified, in MLAS as pages 152 to 158. But the version that hit the book is all about the love story instead of suspense plot and intrigue.

Below, you're looking at Second Draft work, not Final Draft work.
There's lots of awkwardness and bad phrasing.
And I've left in my 'notes to myself'.

*************** See the out-take here ******************
It begins ....


Adrian was propped against the wall in the stuffy closet they used as a listening post, reading from a black, bound notebook. He crooked a finger in invitation and kept reading. "Close the door."

There wasn't room for three in the cubbyhole. He slid in behind the table, the rack of pistols on the wall poking into his back. Trevor, the spy in training, sat at the table, his ear pressed to a brass ear trumpet that emerged from the wall and wrote, scribbling fast. The only light in the room came from the dark lantern at his elbow. Three sides of that were closed, the fourth open. In the bright oblong it cast, his pencil made a manic, dancing shadow across the page. Three books, like the one Adrian held, lay to his left. Another dozen were stacked and ready.

This was where the British Service watched and listened to what went on in the library. Jess was right -- the walls were full of rats.

... and it ends ....



"You and Josiah are playing games. Jess isn't."

"Then it's time she did." Adrian was still a moment. "Josiah knows what I am. Eventually, Jess will. Do you know, there are times I do not find being Head of Section at all amusing. Shut up, now. When I open this they can hear us."
****************

An out-take from MLAS

Here's an outtake from My Lord and Spymaster.
I refer to it in a later post. Here it is, in full, for anyone who wants to see it.

In a much modified form, this scene made it into the book.

***************

Adrian was propped against the wall in the stuffy closet they used as a listening post, reading from a black, bound notebook. He crooked a finger in invitation and kept reading. "Close the door."

There wasn't room for three in the cubbyhole. He slid in behind the table, the rack of pistols on the wall poking into his back. Trevor, the spy in training, sat at the table, his ear pressed to a brass ear trumpet that emerged from the wall and wrote, scribbling fast. The only light in the room came from the dark lantern at his elbow. Three sides of that were closed, the fourth open. In the bright oblong it cast, his pencil made a manic, dancing shadow across the page. Three books, like the one Adrian held, lay to his left. Another dozen were stacked and ready.

This was where the British Service watched and listened to what went on in the library. Jess was right -- the walls were full of rats.

He waited till Adrian looked up. "Don't question her again."

"Ah." Adrian gave him the same meditative consideration he'd been using on the book. "You're feeling protective."

"I can't deal with her when she's so scared she can barely think. You're making it worse."

"Naturally. We are, in our own small way, His Majesty's government.[which caps?] " Adrian shrugged. "We didn't haul out the bastinado, [date, sp] you know. Fletch chatted with her once, politely. Pax coaxed at her as if she were a kitten hiding under the sofa. Galba attempted reason. Reason is always a mistake, I feel."

"You've put this in my hands. Leave her to me. No more badgering."

"Our attempts to badger were, if I may say so, water off a duck's back. Do you want to see her badgered? Let's take a look at that interesting reunion next door." An angry rumble vibrated the walls, coming from the study. It had been going on for some time. "That's Josiah, disapproving of her recent exploits."

"Or he's annoyed she didn't follow his orders well enough."

"I don't think you're a fool. Do try not to disappoint me." Adrian flipped back to the beginning of the book he held. "Here are today's notes. Eight o'clock -- breakfast with Galba, discussing the market for fake antiquities." He thumbed forward. "Macleish, at ten, much incensed over problems in inventory and complaining about Pitney. He is followed by Pitney, at noon, complaining about Macleish. Pitney then enlivens everyone's day by peaching on Jess, who has been a very naughty girl. You must curb her tendency to climb four-storey buildings. [check hyphen]"

"I intend to. Let me see that." He helped himself to the book. To give him credit, Trevor wrote a clear hand and filled in later what he missed the first time through. "Damnation. Pitney knew what she was up to and didn't stop her. She took a bloody ferret with her. Can no one control that woman?"

"Good men have tried." Adrian reached across and turned forward a dozen pages. "This is what you want to see. At three o'clock, matters become interesting. Sergei Orkoff visits. What do you know about Sergei?"

"Attaché with the Russian Embassy. [check legation? Check possible titles] Smooth. Amusing. I see him at Claudia's soirees, hanging on the fringes of the Foreign Office and War Ministry crowd, listening. Very friendly to men who talk more than they should. My guess is he's in your line of work."

"Discerning of you. He is also an old friend of Josiah's.

"Orkoff is everybody's old friend."

"Too true." Adrian watched him read. "You will see they greet one another with glad cries, in French. That is to keep us on our toes. Some discussion of where to get decent pastry in London. The rain. Orkoff reminiscences of bordellos in Heidleburg."

And there was page after page of it. "Why did you let him in?"

"The Russian Embassy asks us to. And I was curious. Next -- you'll come to it -- Josiah discusses bordellos in Munich. In German. Sergei relates a filthy but inventive story involving animals and a Prussian Grand Duke [check title margravane]. Trevor finds this all very interesting. One seeks to educate the young."

"Fascinating." He turned the page. "They've switched to ... what? Russian."

Trevor stopped pretending to take notes. "That's because Orkoff's Russian. Or ... koff. Russian."

Adrian said, "Russian isn't one of your languages, is it? I'll have Trevor do a translation tonight."

The stripling looked mutinous.

"Tonight, Trev." Adrian's voice was gentle.

"He's not going to read it." Trevor [some action]. "The Captain's made up his mind. He's not here about Whitby. All he's doing is bullying Jess into bed with him."

"Then Jess will slice him stem to stern and laugh girlishly while he writhes in his own blood. Nonetheless, you will deliver the full translation to his house tonight." Adrian let that settle in. "A careful translation."

The mutter might have been, "The hell I will." Or it might not. Fortunatly, Trevor was Adrian's problem. [look for echo in earlier scene]

"Just tell me."

"Always the practical man. Let's see." Adrian took the book and turned it into the light. "We continue in the same vein. Customs officials in Athens. Cheeses. An anecdote concerning the Swedish legate [check] in Vienna."
Adrian laid the notebook on the table, held flat under his spread fingers. "And here, in passing, Orkoff mentions the transfer of a tourmaline from Josiah to a certain Levgenny Gregoritch Petroff Romanovski,[check Russian names]. For safekeeping."

He felt a dry prickle across the back of his neck. A warning of danger. "A Romanoff?"

"A minor, but perfectly genuine, Romanoff. He has vast estates overlooking the Black Sea." [check political geography] Adrian waited.

"Whitby doesn't deal in jewels." It took a minute. "The tourmaline is Jess."

"Regrettably, yes."

Trevor's hands, on the table, clenched into fists. "She won't do it. I won't let her."

"How nice for you both. Let us see what Sebastian has to say about this, shall we?" Adrian smoothed his way along Cryllic [caps?] letters with his fingertips [check frequency of fingertips]. "Reading between the lines ... the Russian Embassy [ambassador, legate, legation] offers to intervene on Josiah's behalf with his His [cap?] Majesty's Government. Josiah leaves the country. His holdings in England are forfeit to the [devolve? confiscated] crown [caps?] -- that's the sweetener for the Foreign Office [what office deals with treason?] -- and Jess marries a minor Romanoff. That's the payment to the Russians."

Jess, God help her, would marry a syphilitic dwarf if Josiah told her to. But it wasn't going to happen. Even in the first blank instant of rage, he knew that much. "Damn the Czar anyway."

"Amen."

"Whitby wouldn't live six months."

"He would meet some elegantly Byzantine end. The Russians are so good at that sort of thing."

"Whitby dead. Jess inherits half the shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean. Quite a coup for the Romanoffs."

But Jess wasn't destined for some Russian lordling. That wasn't what Adrian was warning him about. He did a quick mental tour of the labyrinth of Russian Imperial politics and didn't like what he found. "It's not ships the Russians want."

"Not ships. Not the indecent pots of money. Not warehouses. It's the [arabic word or turkish word for 'contacts'] prestige. The influence. Whitby knows everyone. He has a network of spies and commercial agents from the Crimea to Khartoum."

"It's the Whitby name they want."

"I can almost hear the Russians slavering."

That was the East. He'd sailed those waters for a decade. Every trade, every encounter, was an intrigue of boxes nested within boxes, wheels within wheels, layer after layer of subtlety. England played intricate, rough games in the ports and palaces. So did the French and the Austrians and the Russians. "It changes the balance of power. The Foreign Office can't allow it."

"They'd see the company, and both the Whitbys, destroyed first."

"Both Whitby's. They'd have to destroy both of them." Jess did collect enemies, didn't she?

He rubbed his chin, feeling the beard. He'd been up all last night searching the Whitby warehouse and he hadn't shaved. He looked like a pirate and Jess still didn't even have the sense to be scared of him. "No wonder she doesn't trust the government. Did the Foreign Office frame Whitby?"

"I think not. Probably not." Adrian closed the book. "They are not, strictly speaking, that clever. And Whitby's has heretofore presented no problem."

"They'll find out Orkoff was here."

"Certainly. They will eventually figure out why. Some bureaucratic popinjay will then panic." Adrian met his eyes. "He will fix upon one of the two obvious solutions. That is why Jess will return to your house every night, mon ami. Your footmen will stick to her like so many nautical mustard plasters [date] every day, and my own men will lurk in the shadows lending just that soupçon [check]of official support. This is the last time she gives us the slip. She must not fall into the hands of the Foreign Office."

Behind the wall, in the study, the grumble of a man's voice continued, words muffled to unintelligibility. Jess was getting yelled at.

Outside, the real storm was gathering. He could protect her against Cinq. Could he protect her from his own government? "The Foreign Office doesn't want her dead. They want her married to an Englishman."

"To their chosen Englishman. I doubt Jess' consent is considered strictly necessary. Sit down, Trevor." That was directed at the boy. "There is insufficient space for strenuous heroics."

Trevor subsided, muttering.

The boy was right about one thing. "They can't make her do it. Not Jess."

"I will back Jess against triple her fighting weight in Foreign Office lackeys. And Josiah's been diddling the diplomatic service for years. I suggest we listen intelligently to what he has to say to Jess." Adrian set his hand on the small, square panel in the wall behind him.

This wasn't what he'd come for. "I don't –"

"... You don't listen at keyholes. Have I ever told you how much I admire gentlemanly scruples? You read the transcripts. You pass a quiet hour pawing through her bedroom. But you won't eavesdrop. These distinctions escape me. Douse the lights, Trev."

Without a word, the boy closed the door of the lantern and threw them into total dark.

"Sebastian, they know I'm watching. They expect it. Think of it as a sort of game." The sound of tapping fell into the darkness. That would be Adrian's fingers, restless on the table or the edge of the chair. "I specialize in betrayals. I assure you, this hardly qualifies."

"You and Josiah are playing games. Jess isn't."

"Then it's time she did." Adrian was still a moment. "Josiah knows what I am. Eventually, Jess will. Do you know, there are times I do not find being Head of Section at all amusing. Shut up, now. When I open this they can hear us."
***************

If you want to go back to the post where I was talking about this, it's here.

Out-take from Spymaster's Lady

'Moth' asked if there were any other out-takes from My Lord and Spymaster.

I couldn't think of anything from MLAS, but I do have a scene from Spymaster's Lady.

It's a scene I rather like. I regretted pulling it out of the manuscript.

Where it lived ... about three-quarters through Spymaster's Lady, there's a dream sequence with Annique's mother. I put it in that spot, in part, because I wanted to explain Lucille a little bit.

In the end, pacing demanded a very short dream scene, so I abandoned this writing.
With, y'know, regret.

It's a rough draft. And I never got it slimmed down and turned into a dream. So this reads like a realtime event mostly.


***********

She hunched under the blankets, holding onto to them. There was only darkness. That was all there would ever be. Darkness.

"You will get up now and eat. You have eaten nothing."

"It doesn't matter."

"You must begin training. There is work to be done and you lie abed."

"There is nothing I can do. I have become nothing. Go away" ... and leave me to die.

"Nothing. You have decided then, to be nothing." Maman dragged her from the bed, pulled her by the arm, by the hair. "I will not argue."

Maman pushed her across the room, out into the hallway. In her nightshift, she stumbled through darkness that was halls. Then to the stairs, and up and up.

"I do not want to practice walking." She dragged her feet, sullen as a child. "Or eating or fighting. Or anything. Leave me alone."

They walked up stairs, endless flights, up and up. She went along, not bothering to struggle. Limply resisting. It would infuriate Maman.

Then it was cold and hard under her feet. They were outside on the roof. Somewhere. She had not tried to find her way around the chateau. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

"Here." Maman shoved and poked at her back. Rough stone railing brushed by. "Take another step. Good. This will do." And she let go.

Anneka felt wind on her face. "What is this?" She stretched her hand out and there was nothing. Nothing in any direction. She did not know where she was.

"Maman?" Darkness. She turned and didn't know which way was back. Which way was forward. Everything was empty around her.

"Maman. Where are you?"

Silence. She heard her heart beating and, far below, tiny voices.

"Maman!"

The wind whistling up from below, under the skirts of her nightgown. She stepped back. Back. Her foot stumbled.
She grabbed at air. Screamed. She was falling ...

She threw herself forward, toward the point of balance, and slapped her arms wide. Momentum grabbed her and tried to spin her into the dark.

She was flat on her belly, hugging the stone. She lay her head down, cold with terror. Sobbing air in and out of her lungs. Safe.

How to fall. How to fall safely, exactly where and how you choose. She had learned to fall before she could read. It is the first law of fighting -- how to fall. Her body remembered.

Wind screeched around her, tugging at the cotton on her back. She reached out. She was on a narrow stone walkway, over the air. She could reach from side to side of it, cup it with both hands.

She was weak as wet cloth. "Maman." It was a croak. A pitiful whisper. And everywhere around was only dark. Maman had left her here.

Tears leaked across her face, biting cold paths. "Maman. Help me."

No answer. She was alone.

She breathed in and out for an endless time. Waiting for someone to rescue her.

She would stiffen soon, if she did not move. She would become clumsy. And she was shaking with the cold as well. She must move, or she would fall and die.

Sometimes life is simple.

Now that she listened, it was easy to know where the open air was, and which way must lead back to the roof.

The first letting go, the first shifting of her hands, was the hardest. After that it became possible to creep and creep like a worm over the stones. The parapet that edged the roof was blessedly solid. It was carved with flowers or leaves. She pulled herself up and over, clamped to those flowers and leaves like an inchworm.

It took her an hour, crawling back and forth, to find the door Maman had brought her through. It took that long again to work her way down the stairs, recognize the proper floor by the smell of beeswax and potpourri, and find her way to her bedroom.

Maman was waiting for her there. She could hear breathing, over the spit and crackle of the fire. She could smell perfume. Lavender and bergamot.

She shuffled across the room, bent like an old beggar woman, sweeping the air in front of her with outstretched fingers, heading for the heat of the fire. She hurt in a million tiny cuts and bruises. The stickiness on her hands was blood, where she had scraped herself, falling. She had left a red trail on the walls of this pretty chateau.

"I hate you, Maman."

"I know, cherie." Cloth swished on cloth. Maman came to her. "I know."

Maman took her against warm, scented silk

She had not realized she was crying until she could do it against Maman. Yes, she was snivelling. "I could have died."

"There is always that chance. You must wash now, or the cuts will become infected. Then we will practice fighting. I have thought of techniques a blind woman can use."

"I cannot even walk. It is stupid to try to fight when I cannot even walk. We should practice walking first. Besides, I am starving to death."

"We will eat first. Then we will fight."

Some MLAS Backstory

Anon said ...

I just started rereading MLAS, and ... I realized as I started though, that I don't know what happened to Jess's mom. Or why where Josiah went and why he didn't come back for her, when she was a kid--if I remember correctly, Jess' mom was still alive when she went to work for Lazarus.


I pulled a good bit of backstory out of My Lord and Spymaster.

It's always a hard choice. Do I go wandering down these side alleys of the distant past, or stick to the straight highway of what's happening right now.


Here's a bit of a scene about Jess' mom, pulled out of an early draft.

***********

Always liked to watch people, Sebastian did. Probably saw a lot.

He said, "What in Blue Blazes did you think you were doing?"

"It was one of those calculated risks."

"It was a calculated madness. Did you really stab him when you were eleven?"

"I tried to. He was expecting it." She frowned and began fingering along a strand of her hair. "I wanted to kill him, Sebastian. He got me locked up in Newgate when my mother was dying of fever. Bad fever, whatever it was. Both the women nursing her died of it in the end. When I got out -- "

"You were in ... For God's sake, you were in Newgate."

"I was safe enough. Nobody touches what belongs to Lazarus. But I about battered myself silly on the walls, wanting to get to my mother. I kept waiting for Lazarus to buy me free. It took me a couple of days to figure out he was the one who peached on me."

"And your mother died."

"When they let me loose, I went after him. Didn't do much more than scratch him. I think I was out of my mind for a while."

"You think you were ... Jess, is there ever a time you're properly sane?"

"I'm cautious, generally. You barging in and asking Lazarus for me -- now that was daft."

*****************

And here's something about Josiah.

***************

Loyal to the bone."

That described Jess pretty well. She certainly picked godawful men to be loyal to. "Where the hell was this father of hers all that time?"

"In Egypt, in Napoleon's army, shooting at Englishmen." Adrian rolled the pencil back and forth on the table. "That is supposed to be a deep dark secret from us."

"In Egypt."

"Whitby got picked up in Boulogne for smuggling and spent six month in Prison, passing himself off as a Frenchman. Ended up swept into the Emperor's army. It took him years to get loose and back to England. Jess and her mother were on their own."

"And Jess sold herself to Lazarus."

"I imagine Lazarus arranged it that she didn't have any choice."

*****************

Out-take from The Spymaster's Lady

Someone asked how Grey reacted to Annique getting her sight back. The first time he saw he with her eyes working, was he startled?
Or what?

This is an out-take from the working document of The Spymaster's Lady.
(Annique is called Anneka in this draft.)
This bit of story, in Grey's POV, didn't make it into the final draft.


***

Doyle's smuggler contacts passed word that Anneka would be landed in Dover. She was easy enough to spot on the docks. But he was expecting a blind woman. She wasn't blind.

Grey stood in the shadow of a tavern doorway and studied her. Her eyes were definitely working. It was Anneka Villiers he was dealing with, so he had to ask himself if he could possibly, possibly have been wrong about her eyes.

But no one on earth can control the dilation of the pupils. She'd been blind.

More than that, today a kind of wonder clung to her that said the light of her eyes had been taken and returned to her. She looked from coiled ropes to the peeling, rocking boats to a herring gull perched on a bollard and collected the sights into herself like a farm girl putting eggs carefully into a basket.

In the middle of all that noisy, fish-filled squalor, she stood and grinned. Her face transformed itself to the cheeky, blazingly-alive Gypsy boy he'd seen juggling in the town square in Bruges. The light inside her was brighter than sunlight glinting off the sea. For the first time he realized how shadowed she'd been the whole time he'd known her by fear and exhaustion and blindness.

Was she carrying the plans? He didn't see how. He'd bet she wasn't carting a spare handkerchief under that hideous dress. Too bad. It would have been easier for both of them if she'd had the plans on her.

She pulled a shabby black scarf around her countrywoman dress and started into town. It was the first mistake he'd ever seen her make, that clothing. Nothing on earth could make her look a farm girl.

She walked like a dancer through the filthy streets. Like a fire flickering. None of the sailors lounging along the quays or on the doorsteps of brothels called after her. They'd buy a black-haired Irish whore tonight and dream about Anneka, but not one of them thought Anneka's quality was within his reach.

The next hour was busy. He wasn't the only man waiting for her at the dock. Somebody else had been alerted by the same smugglers. There were rats on her trail. He set his men to picking 'em off as soon as they showed themselves. But he had only three agents with him and God knew how many people were after Anneka Villiers this warm fall afternoon. She didn't spot them herself for a while, too busy enjoying life to be properly careful of it.

She was in the market, smiling at some oranges, when she noticed the cut-throat who'd been shadowing her for a block and a half. It was pure joy to watch her slide into the crowd, smooth as slicing water, and vanish.

He sent Fletcher to deal with yet another thug who was lurking among the chicken coops and he took off after Anneka.

He was in time. Barely.

She was cornered in an alley, squared off against five times her fighting weight. Duval and two of his bully boys. When he got there, she'd reduced one Frenchman to a whimpering welter of blood. She was having less luck poking a hole in Henri. She couldn't get close. The Frenchman had a reach like an ape.

So he took care of Henri for her. He didn't break his neck. Anneka kept leaving the bastard alive for some reason and it seemed polite to defer to her judgement. All he did was bounce him off a wall and, hoped, crack one of his shoulders. Then Anneka put a knife into Duval – his arm, not his throat. That was enough to send the pack scurrying.

She sagged against the wall, breathing hard, pale as parchment. If he'd come into that alleyway five minutes later ... the thought of her, bleeding her life out in this dim, ugly squalor, hit like a body blow. She was game enough, and a clever fighter, but she lacked edge. He clenched his hands into fists to stop them shaking.

If she were his agent, he wouldn't let her off the front steps without a backup.
*****