Tidbits: Piper's Fantasy

Deleted Scene from My Father's Son by Penny Freeman

Cassandra offered a smile of encouragement. “Well, perhaps he must be taken to task for it. Perhaps it would do him some good.”

“If anyone could help him, Miss Sterling . . .” He dared speak no more and the lady turned her face away to wrestle with her own warring sensibilities. As she gazed out the window, the setting sun silhouetting her face and igniting the fire in her hair, Durant fell into the fantasy which she opened up to him. It fit hand-in-glove with his daydream of retreating to Trinity and a smithy to carve his own life from the forests and rolling prairies of east Texas.

He thought of a work-weary stonemason making his way home in the twilight. His clothes were plain and common, but they were kept clean and well-mended. His knapsack of tools professed a master’s skill. He would make himself a master mason and stonecutter, avail himself of every opportunity for betterment. He would have only the best for his wife, and so gave the best of himself to accomplish it.

As he walked, his oldest lad and his dog would run up to meet him from where they kept watch and waited. The lad would simply walk silently beside him, or they would consult man-to-man as he reported his day, his own chores done, his morning in school and his afternoon on the moors, his assurance to his father of his use to his mother.

Well-commended, the boy’s bright face would sing in the stonemason’s heart. He would ruffle the thatch atop the lad’s head and assure him of his approval. Very soon indeed, he would take him on as an apprentice and in no time the lad’s work would excel his own. It was a precious bit of time they spent together walking and conferring, and the stonemason savored every moment. He knew that too soon his son would have sons of his own.

Tidbits: Introductions by Penny Freeman

Deleted Scene from My Father's Son:

“Oh, Sandy!  Come see!  Come see!”

Sandy turned from where she buttoned Chloe’s frock, having completed her markings on the new silk gown.  She merely looked at Zoe, surprised to see her serene sister all aflutter, but she infected Chloe immediately.  ”Oh, hurry, Sandy.  I want to see.”

“See what?” Sandy wondered.

“Just come see,” Zoe insisted.  “Come to the stables.”

Dragged by both girls, Sandy hurried down the back stairs and outside, after having slipped on her clogs at the back door.  She laughed and teased the girls with pause and delay, but when they rounded the stables, she stopped short in earnest.  She saw before her Paris sliding off the back of the most marvelous hunter she had ever beheld, lively, high-bred and surely more expensive than her father could ever afford.  Yet, there he stood, with Paris patting his head and holding his bridle, his pleasure outstripped only by the sensibilities his father’s faith engendered.

Nothing more bespoke Mr. Sterling’s pride in his son than that horse.  She did not require sight of him standing hard by with a look of supreme satisfaction on his face to know it.

However, the third gentleman surprised her.  Sandy had never before seen the man in the neighborhood, but at first sight, she felt an air of familiarity about him.  Perhaps the age of Merit— probably the age of Merit—he was taller and broader.  He wore his dark hair so long and unruly it taunted her, and she fought back the urge to go comb it.  Even so, he had an intensity of manner which radiated from him, even as he leisurely stood back, away, fairly in the shadows of the stable, as if he wished to absent himself from the family scene.  And yet, his look of satisfaction exceeded her father’s own, and Paris could not help glancing to him now and again to assure himself the gentleman yet remained. 

Standing there in her garden clogs, in an old frock professing it had seen better days, her work apron so stuck with pins she appeared a porcupine, and her hair hanging long and loose, only drawn back from her face and held with a ribbon, she colored at the very thought of being seen in such a state, especially by that elevated gentleman, and stepped back.

The 150,000-Word Question

Recently, my good friends over on the iWriteNetwork Facebook group were tallying up how many words they had finished of their current work in progress.  Some proudly proclaimed thirty- or forty-thousand words, halfway to the acceptable number for the average novel, which is 80,000 words.  Woohoo!  They were on their way.

I got to thinking, hmmm.  I wonder how far I am.  Now, (until I transfer it all over to yWriter5) each chapter of mine is a separate WordPerfect file (the one true word processor and victim of the great apostasy), so I painstakingly cut and past all 25 chapters into one big long document and then hit the word count button.  [drum roll please!]  I about fainted when it topped out at 149,000 words.

This is a problem.  This is a really, really big problem because I'm only halfway finished with this first installment of my series.  Did I mention that the plot of My Father's Son is so complex wrangling it into submission is like making a dozen two-year-olds dance a waltz?  (Sidebar:  it includes all the plot that has absolutely nothing to do with P&P and easily transferred over from The Famous Mrs. Darcy.)

Tidbits: Fleet Street

Deleted scene from My Father's Son

by Penny Freeman

Holborn, January, 1809

     Accustomed to their drafty garrets and scanty meals, too little coal for their fires, too few hours in their days, the overworked, underpaid, unappreciated solicitor apprentices of ‘the pit’ gallery at Schoonover, Pensinger, Conroe & DuPre knew that despite the terms of their articles being fulfilled, they may spend years more as a ‘fledgling’, as pompous Pensinger delighted in calling them, and thus never questioned their fate.
      Rather, they endured it for, after all, theirs were the oldest, most respected chambers in The Temple.  To represent Schoonover even as a lackey afforded a man a certain measure of respect.  The chamber’s portfolio of patrons was second to none and in such a situation, an alert, attentive apprentice could find his fortunes made.
      Thus, they guarded their places of honor and subjugation, ‘the nest’, as Schoonover dubbed it long before the birth of any there.  Flanked by the long row of windows which lit the room and guarded by an iron rail as solid as the firm, the nest sat situated atop the closet for the chamber’s most closely held documents.  It overlooked the pit, a warehouse of clerks and attorneys perched atop their high stools, row upon row, scratching their lives into oblivion.
      Their own desks too narrow and confined for the books and folios which overburdened them, each allowed far too little space in which to work, the fledgling solicitors performed their own tasks conscientiously.  They toiled ever with an eye for appeasing Stickler, their master, for they knew him impossible to impress.  A brittle old man of failing eyesight and short temper, with ears to compensate for one and exacerbate the other, he possessed not an humane bone in his body.  Taut, sharp, and austere, they knew the ancient yet breathed for he was far too near to brook the expense of dying.

Tidbits: A Knight's Tale (MFS)

Excerpt from Book 1 Chapter 8: A Knight's Tale

by Penny Freeman

(In the wake of his father's untimely death, Durant slips into Sandy's sickroom in the dead of night where she battles life-threatening pneumonia.)

     As Piper watched Sandy, contemplating exactly what he should do, she tugged at the collar of her nightgown and fretted at the bedclothes despite her drug-induced torpidity.  He thought to cool her fevered brow, but, before he ventured to her bedside, he moved the lamp to the far side of the room and lowered its flame until it almost guttered.  With only the light of the low fire at his back, his face would be completely veiled in shadow, as dark as the far side of the moon.

    “Hush, precious” he breathed as he replaced the cool compress upon her head. “Rest now. Be still.”

     To his dismay, Sandy struggled against the physic and managed to pry open first one eye and then the other, although her lids were heavy indeed. “Dragon?” she peeped. She reached up to touch his face, and he could not bring himself to deny her. “My dragon, is it you?”

     Piper forced his voice as deep into his chest as he could manage. “No darling. This is only a dream.” She fell into a fit of coughing, then curled into a ball in an attempt to relieve the pain. Tears seeped from her closed eyes. “It hurts,” was the extent of her complaint.

Tidbits: A Shadow's Honor

Pierpont Durant clinging to the last vestiges of his faith and hope in the future.

So there he huddled, desperate for the cool fresh air which poured through the cracks and crevices, smelling sweet and unadulterated, free of the filth and dank of the cell.  Piper permeated his lungs with the lilac of spring and the spice of fall and some exotic scent of summer he could never quite place.  He bathed himself in the light that warmed and cleansed him and fought back the creeping blackness.   

He told himself to be a man and accept his just sentence, admit his weakness and set aside his dependency, but it was an insidious, seeping, creeping thing which leant strength to his soul and corroded the shadow’s defenses.  Despite the excruciating pain of that exquisite half-life, he despaired that he would ever conquer the addiction.