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.

Technical Topics -- Talking Heads II

In My Lord and Spymaster, I had a dozen nuggets of backstory to pass along to the reader. So I wrote a Talking Heads scene. Adrian and Sebastian search Jess' bedroom.

How do you make a Talking Heads scene slightly less horrible than it might otherwise be?


-- Best choice is you turn the action of the scene into plot action. (i.e. You make it 'not' a Talking Heads scene. )

So, instead of folks sitting around the kitchen table, talking,
which does not change the outcome of the story and is not story action or even plot action,
you change it into folks sitting around the kitchen table building a bomb or performing an emergency lobotomy or cutting letters out of the newspaper for the ransom note
all of which are at least plot action.

-- Failing important plot action, you do the next best thing.
You liven things up with 'stage business'.

Stage business doesn't advance the plot, but it's interesting. Folks bend spoons with their psyches or learn to play the fiddle or get hiccups.

What else do we do to take the edge off a Talking Heads scene?

-- You layer on sensation, of course, as you would in any scene. Give visuals. Blow whistles. Waft forth the smell of brownies in the oven.

-- You make sure there's real info to share. That is, they don't already both know what's being said. ("As you know, Bob ...")

-- Your characters interact with each other. You enrich, expose and develop the characters. You might even sneak some story in this way.

-- And, most especially, your characters react to the information that's being conveyed. They wouldn't be talking about it if it weren't important to them.

OK. Coming to one of my specific instances of Talking Heads.

In the search-Jess's-bedroom scene I want to convey the backstory factoid that Jess had an old boyfriend.
Sebastian and Adrian do not sit at a table and swap info.

You got yer stage business
and yer visuals
and yer interaction between Sebastian and Adrian
and you got yer character reaction to what's being said.

Here's the scenelette:

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here." He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?"

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying. "The Honorable Edward Harrington. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her."

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy." He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. "He had the face of a young Apollo."

Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. "What happened?"

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."************

What do I do to make the Talking Heads marginally palatable?

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

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. That's stage business and visuals. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."
There's human interaction. Sebastian is annoyed at Adrian. That's what interests the reader right now, not so much what was in the letters ... though that's supposed to be intriguing too.

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here."
Which is Adrian's reaction right back.
The Talking Heads don't just talk. They snipe.

Information comes to the reader under cover of these two guys being annoyed at each other. The reader doesn't have to care about the info. She can care about the two characters on stage.


He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. Stage action. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

See the character interaction?
Adrian lures Sebastian to ask questions. Adrian , for reasons of his own, obviously wants to convey information.

The way the info is released becomes important. The characters have a reason to talk about the info. They have an attitude toward the info.

One of the dangers with Talking Heads is we can set them to chattering about stuff they don't really need to discuss.
So in a Talking Heads scene you always ask yourself -- why this info? Why between these two people? Why now?

... Here, it's because Adrian has something he wants to say.
That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?" 

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying.

Adrian doesn't just lay the information out for Sebastian like he was dealing cards. There's an ebb and flow to it. Adrian teases Sebastian with what he knows. Sebastian pulls info out of Adrian.

"The Honorable Edward Harrington. Ned. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her." 

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy."

This is Adrian's emotional truth. The factoids are just slathered all over with meaning.

The way Adrian says this shows Adrian's awareness of who he's speaking to. Adrian wouldn't say this, this way, to anyone else.
Info filters to us through its source. If story facts are not modified in the guts of the man who holds them, we don't have real characters. Likewise, info is shaped towards its recipient.

We don't just 'tell a fact'. We tell the fact we see and understand. We tell it to our audience.

Our characters have to do this too.

OK. OK. This is true in any dialog.But it's especially important to keep the basic dialog rules in mind when we do Talking Heads. T.H. tempt us to forget everything we've ever learned about dialog.

He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. Visuals. Stage business, too, I guess. "He had the face of a young Apollo."
Adrian's emotional reaction to the factoids.

We transfer the emotional punch of these old factoids into the present. The T.H. do not merely tell the old story; they experience that story now.

This is not an exchange of info. It's a replaying of old events and old truths with the character's current reactions.

Current reactions hold the reader's interest. Sometimes, they're story.



Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. That's the internal from Sebastian. "What happened?" 

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."
That stuff above ... here's a minor technical.I'm doing the big long run of straight backstory here. I get it out of the way, all in one lump. What I've done ... I've laid big dollops of emotion before and after, and I'm hoping like mad that the reader doesn't get bored while I real quick-like slip all these little facts past her.

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

And we got us some internals.
Internals go with Talking Heads like Burns with Allen.
Sebastian thinks about what he's just been told. He reacts. He feels.
This is the necessary ingredient. This is what mitigates Talking Heads and all this factoid dropping. The human reaction pulls the reader through the scene.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."

At this point, Adrian grabs us and jumps onto the next bit of stage business. We leap from past to present, from interior to exterior.
We go on to do an interval of solid, visual stage business. That's our respite before the final set of factoids lands like wet dough onto the floury board of the scene.

The Great Archive of The Spymaster Fictive Universe

I got an e-mail asking about the notes I keep on what's happening year by year in the fictive world.

These are the notes. I went back and pulled out stuff that would be spoilers. I think I got everything.
Anyhow, it's in the form of a bunch of pages, one by one. I couldn't find a better way to do this.

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."

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

Adrian and Jess met ...

Emlyn said ...

And this may be off-topic, but could you clarify a little more (without spoilers, of course) when and how Adrian & Jess were acquainted? He's in Russia with her & her dad acting as their butler, Hurst (love this! adrian as butler! lol!) after he rescues her from Lazarus, right? Does she know him before this? How did he come to be involved in her rescue?

Leesee ... In Spymaster's Lady, Adrian gets picked up by Josiah's smuggler boat and rescued.

He returns the favor by intervening in Josiah's struggle with Lazarus over who's going to get to keep Jess.

Adrian and Doyle spirit Jess away. She's had a bad fall and she's still drugged into unconsciousness. She doesn't wake up till she's on the ship and away from England. She never saw Adrian.

All that's in the two books, someplace or other.

What's not in the books ....

Adrian is assigned as Head of Section for Russia, based in St. Petersburg. Josiah also sets up one of his offices there. He and Adrian re-establish contact and Josiah lets Adrian use his house as British Service Headquarters.

That's when Adrian and Jess finally 'meet'.

Dates

I wanted to set the dates here and the ages. I hope I have all these right.

Leesee ...


Doyle and Maggie's Story takes place in July, 1794

The Spymaster's Lady -- 1802

My Lord and Spymaster -- 1811

Her Ladyship's Companion -- 1818


Birthdates. Doyle in 1764. Maggie in 1770. Grey in 1775. Sebastian in 1784 Adrian and Anneka in 1782, Jess in 1790.

Adrian's Story

Claire Emerson writes --

Since you brought up Adrian -

What are your latest thoughts on writing him a book of his own? I'm following your deliberations on this with great interest. He's a marvelous creation and I'd love to read more of him, but, like you, I have some difficulty imagining his heroine or HEA.

And, if Adrian's story isn't next (after Doyle/Maggie)... do you know yet what is?


I'm up to my gills in MAGGIE right now. Adrian -- for me -- is twelve. He's dirty and skinny and one of his knees got dislocated a while back. I haven't decided whether it's his left knee or his right. Do you have a preference?

He's not just a bundle of joy to those around him.

Since I'm holding Adrian so firmly in front of me as an angry, dangerous pre-teen, it's difficult to see him as the more complex and thoughtful, (still dangerous,) man he becomes.

When I get to the end of the MAGGIE story, I'll know whether I can visualize Adrian's HEA.
I hope I'm working on it in the back of my head all that time.

I don't know right now if ADRIAN will be the story directly after MAGGIE. There might be one intervening story. But I think the one after that would have to be ADRIAN.

The books

Somebody asked ...


Book #4, (if I ever write it,) will be Doyle and Maggie's story. Set in France and England in 1792. Adrian will have a strong secondary role. I might give some walk-on parts to my old friends. (TBA)

The Spymaster's Lady is the story of Annique and Grey. Set in France and England in 1802. Adrian and Doyle have secondary parts. Giles Tarsin has a walk-on. (release January 2008. Berkley)

My Lord and Spymaster is the story of Jessamyn and Sebastian. Set in London in 1811. Adrian plays a secondary part. Doyle has a walk-on. (release July 2008. Berkley)

Her Ladyship's Companion is the story of Giles Tarsin and (jo tries to remember here) Melissa ... It's been a long time. Set in Cornwall in 1816 or 1818 ...? Adrian plays a secondary part. (release 1983. Avon)

St Odran's in Spymaster's Lady

As to the St. Odran of Spymaster's Lady.

(cough)

This Saint Odran might be the one here , who, I should think, would be the patron saint of taxi drivers and those who are killed while being mistaken for someone more interesting.


But, on the whole, I think it is the Saint Odran (or Odhron or Otteran) of Iona, here or here.


What it is ...

The site where St. Columba wanted to build a chapel was infested with demons. Awkward, that. These could only be exorcised by burying a holy man alive. St Odran volunteered.

After three days Columba decided to dig him up to ask for news about Heaven.

St. Odran said -- "There is no wonder in death. Heaven is not as it is said to be. Hell is not what it is said to be. The saved are not forever happy. The damned are not forever lost."

... so St Columba had him buried again. Or at least, that's how one story goes. A lesson for us all.


I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

The date of Spymaster's Lady

Spymaster's Lady takes place in August and September 1802, during the Peace of Amiens.

I'll just mention that, historically, Napoleon fired Fouche as Chief of the Secret Police on September 12. Nobody knows quite why ...

Maybe it was because these Albion plans went missing.

(g)