The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(23)
‘Thank you, Thomas. That would be most helpful.’
‘Mistress Paterson.’ He touched his smiling lips against her hand, and then he straightened, and with mild dismay Sophia realized Kirsty had been right, for there was more than friendly interest in his eyes. ‘I trust,’ he said, ‘that, in my absence, you’ll endeavor to have no more misadventures. Though I’ll warrant you may find that rather difficult, before too long.’
She murmured a polite reply, not wanting to detain him. It was not till some time afterwards, when she could no more see the Royal William’s sails upon the wide horizon, that she wished she’d asked him to explain the meaning of those final words. Because, to her ears now, they sounded rather like a warning.
CHAPTER 5
JANE, MY AGENT, SET the final page aside and curled her legs up underneath her in the armchair, in the front room of my cottage. ‘And you’ve written all of this in just two days? It must be thirty pages.’
‘Thirty-one,’ I told her, as I dragged a wooden chair across to the front door so I could stand on it to feed more coins into the black electric meter.
‘I don’t remember you writing this quickly, before.’
‘That’s because I haven’t. It feels great, it really does. It’s like I’m channeling. The words just come in through the top of my head and run right out my fingers, the voice is so easy. I’m glad you suggested a woman.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said drily, ‘I do have my uses.’ She ruffled the pages again, as though, like me, she hardly believed they could be there. ‘At this rate, you’ll have the book done in a month.’
‘Oh, I doubt it.’ I wobbled a little on top of the chair, and caught at the door jamb to steady myself. ‘I’m bound to slow down when I get to the middle. I usually do. And besides, this new angle is taking me straight into plot lines that I haven’t researched. I’ve spent most of my time reading up on the French side of things, and Nathaniel Hooke’s viewpoint, and what he got up to in Paris. I know some of what was going on in Edinburgh, of course, among the Jacobites, but apart from what Hooke wrote I don’t know that much about Slains, and the things that went on there. I’ll have to do some digging.’
‘I do like your Captain Gordon,’ Jane decided. ‘He’s a good complicating character. Is he real?’
‘Yes. I was lucky to remember him.’ The coins dropped one by one into the meter, and the slender needle, which had started drifting to the ‘empty’ mark, rebounded with reluctance. ‘It’s funny, the stray things that stick in your mind. Captain Gordon gets mentioned a couple of times in Nathaniel Hooke’s papers. Not in detail, and Hooke never says his first name, but I guess he made an impression, because I remembered him.’
She was looking at me, curious. ‘Why did you name him Thomas, then? I thought you had opinions on the naming of historical characters, and how they shouldn’t be guessed at.’
I did. Ordinarily, I would have left the first name blank until I’d had a chance to look it up. This time, ‘He wanted to be Thomas,’ was the only way I could explain it, ‘so I let him. I can always change it later, when I find out what his first name really was.’
His ship’s name, too, the Royal William—I had made that up as well, but I knew that would be a simple thing to fix. The British navy kept good records, it would all be written down somewhere.
Jane said, ‘You’ll have to change the name of his “young colleague” while you’re at it. Captain Hamilton. You’ve got a Duke of Hamilton already, you can’t have another Hamilton. Your readers will be too confused.’
‘Oh. I didn’t even notice that.’ It was a bad habit of mine, playing favorites with names. In one of my first books I’d nearly had two men named Jack running round, mixing everyone up. Jane had caught that one, too, at the very last moment. ‘Thanks,’ I told her now, and started looking for my workbook, to remind myself.
My workbook was the only way that I could keep things organized. Before, I’d carried pocketfuls of notes and scribbled scraps of paper. Now, I wrote down all my thoughts on characters and plotting in the pages of a weathered three-ring binder, where I also kept the photocopied pages from the books I’d used for research, and the maps and timelines that I would refer to as my story took its shape. I’d got the inspiration for my workbook from my father’s family history binders, neatly kept and sectioned in a way that satisfied his sense of order. He had worked his whole life as an engineer, in charge of building things, and second only to his love of making every surface level, was his need to battle chaos with pure logic.
I did try. I flipped my workbook to the section labeled ‘To Be Checked’ and jotted down the names of Captain Gordon and his ship and Captain Hamilton.
‘So you think it’s all right?’ I asked.
‘I love it. It’s fantastic. But you don’t need me to tell you that,’ Jane said, and smiled at me, a parent indulging a child. ‘You writers and your insecurities. Honestly. You said yourself you felt you were creating something wonderful.’
‘I said the feeling of writing it was wonderful. That doesn’t mean the story’s any good.’
‘Come on. You know it is.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I think that it’s fantastic, too. But it’s still nice to hear it from somebody else.’