Lady Graves, Day 12 - NaNoWriMo 2018 - freewritemadness
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Lady Graves is my NaNoWriMo novel in progress.
Day 12
Bwa ha ha ha!
I don't believe in astrology.
That said, I was born "in the cusp" so I'm a bipolar or multiple-personality-disorder Sun sign. Either forecast fits most days, and both fit Today's horoscope:
Good advice, but....
That said, here is my pathetic word count from over the weekend.
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“Come here, you.” He held out his arms and she walked right into them.
10-Nov-2018
No one had ever wrapped her in his arms like this, flesh against flesh, not a gap to be found between them until he drew her head from his shoulder and traced her jawline with his fingertips, his deep green eyes darting, a tiny smile of satisfaction tugging at his lips. “Your bruises and swelling are almost entirely gone. I can stop hiding the looking glass now lest you die of the horror of seeing your own face.”
“What?” Her hands flew to her face, checking its contours. The tenderness had subsided. “I hate you!”
“Fräulein, there is but a very thin line between hate and love.” The flames reflected in his eyes seemed to be coming from within, and the teasing lilt in his voice turned into something soft and urgent.
In the space of a heartbeat, his body was flush against hers, hip to hip, his lips mere inches from hers. An invisible force built like a raindrop swelling on the window pane until the tension gave way to the silent glide down the glass. The letting go seemed so natural now, so inevitable.
Their lips made contact. A spark traveled down to her knees and robbed her of the power to stand. She might have collapsed he had not scooped her up and carried her to the bed. She melted into it. He started to pull away butshe lifted her hands to hold him in place, pleading without words for him to stay.
“Lady Evelyn, it would take the strength of a thousand soldiers for me to hold back when you look at me this way--when you make no effort to defend your boundaries and even seem to invite me to trespass. Don’t look at me! Du bringst mich um. You are killing me.”
“No. I am putting my life in your hands. Your dog may have found me but only you could have saved me. But for you, I would be rotting in a grave, never having known true love’s first kiss, never having--”
Her breath caught in a sob that she managed to stifle.
“Ach, du. I am a physician. Many a young lady has become enamored of the man who watches over her during a prolonged illness or injury. You will start spending more time around the young Lanzas of the world and soon forget Herr Doktor. And that is as it should be.”
“I feel much too old and battle-scarred for any man so young and light-hearted as Herr Lanza.” She caught his arm as he moved to go. “When I awoke to find you gone-- the shock of it is with me still!-- I awoke in other ways. Bitte, stay. Please. Don’t crawl up to that loft again. Sleep with me, if you can sleep at all. Just sleep. I ask no more.”
“To ask no more of me is to ask more than a man can endure.” He held her in his most stern and authoritative stare until that teasing smile of his got in its way. “As your doctor, however, I will do what I must rather than risk you losing your much-needed beauty sleep.”
“You are an impudent and heartless cad!”
“You are an intractable English patient in sore need of her beauty sleep.”
With no bedside manner whatsoever, he settled in beside her.
Tucked under the covers, facing the fire with a fortress of male flesh warming her backside, she watched the dance of shadows on the wall turn slower and ever slower as the flames died down. Her thoughts kept dancing down dark pathways. Sleeping Beauty, an innocent cursed to death by a jealous godmother, hidden in the forest for sixteen years. Snow White, sent into the forest to die, but the hunter took pity on her and brought back the heart of a slain deer instead as proof of her demise. Siegried, posing as Gunther’s vassal, helping him cheat in order to win a test of strength a thousand suitors before him failed in a quest to win the indomitable Queen Brunhild of Iceland. They were only myths, but they held a truth she had never been forced to face: men and women would steal and kill for their own personal gain.
Emil twitched and yipped in his sleep, and even the doctor succumbed to the spell of slumber, while Lady Graves wandered the corridors of a castle in her mind with a flickering candle that couldn’t dispel the darkness.
11-Nov-2018
Chapter Ten
The aroma of coffee and that marvelous bread Stangler made, the roar of the fire, and the boing-boing of Emil at the cottage door heralded the dawn of a new day. On the table, a sprig of purple violets with lily of the valley stood in a glass tumbler. A familiar hand rustled the pages of a book, then penciled something into a journal, a sound she had come to cherish, along with the way those dark eyelashes would lift and a pair of eyes would shift to focus on her.
“Good morning, young lady,” he murmured, going straight back to his reading.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor.” She poured her own coffee before taking a chair across from his to see what he was reading. Lewis and Clark’s journals were among the pile, with some old newspapers and letters.
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Stop!
The chapter just fell deeper into hell from there. Don't even bother to read the rest.
It will be junked.
Skip ahead if you have any interest in the history
that is killing my NaNoWriMo word count.
“We missed the boat
on colonizing the Americas,” he said in a tone most unfamiliar from him, brusque and irritated. “The German Empire could take notes from you Englishmen. We are just a collection of small states more or less constantly fighting each other. It was my lot to be born in a land run by old-line, overly conservative junkers like Frederick the Not-so-Great.”
“Junkers?”
“Landed aristocrats stuck in a medieval mindset, oblivious to the need for a royal fleet because we have no coastline. We have universities and books now!”
“Indeed.” Evelyn, as she had increasingly come to think of herself, glanced toward the window but saw no cats were there. She could hear Emil barking at the squirrel in the old oak tree.
“Prince Maximilian was born the eighth of eleven children in the city of Neuwied. He and I share the same grandfather, much as you and your maid Vee have a grandmother in common, and what matter is it if she was a princess, or my father a prince, if they were not firstborn, or the only surviving heirs to the throne?”
“I didn’t know you aspired to a throne. You’ve had nothing but bad things to say about society and court life. If it is any consolation to you, I regard you as a prince.”
He almost smiled.
What had happened in the night, when he came in reeking of dirt and decay, and she had poured his bath, and a curtain between them had come down?
Had she dreamed all of it?
“Have you never given any thought to visiting the American colonies, the new United States?” he asked.
“Getting here from London was trial enough,” she said. “A longer journey by ship and then carriage does not intrigue me, though you seem positively obsessed with the idea.”
“I have more reason to start over in a new world than you do, or did. See, this is the thing.”
He had eyes for her now. She caught her breath, meeting that intense gaze of his.
“You could go back to your family in London,” he said. “They would ask why you were not in Lindenstein with Prince Hal. And what would you say? The other Evelyn will surely write letters home. If not, word of her safe arrival and marriage will reach your family one way or another, and once your father and brothers learn of her villainy, they might launch an attack on Lindenstein. For you, however, sending you back to London would be far safer than letting you travel to Lindenstein to see for yourself what is going on.”
“Nobody will launch a single ship on my account,” she said, “even if my maid stole my husband out from under me. Do you not recall hearing me say what a rebel and trouble maker I’m known to be? I cannot go back home. Nobody would believe my version of what happened. More likely, they’d say I convinced Vee to take my place so that I could escape to the forest and go live in a stone cottage with a fugitive from the law. And as I recall, you would never accompany me to London, because you are an escaped prisoner. Yes, I know. You may tell me I was dreaming.”
He laughed --finally!
“Only one destination is safe for me,” he said. “Only the United States is far enough away that these trumped-up charges of mutiny and revolution would invite sympathy.”
He had given her bits and pieces of his story while they walked in the woods and gathered herbs, and she thought she understood the bare-bones version of it. In his idealistic young-man days, he had picked up new ideas at the university. The Enlightenment threatened to bring free speech, property rights, civil liberties, and other unthinkable advantages to the uneducated masses, the peasants and serfs and working poor.
And the very people he had sought to help joined in the outcry for his head. He was captured and imprisoned, but he escaped.
Somewhere in that narrative was a wife who was killed during an uprising that led to his arrest. It was a subject he dodged and she’d learned to tiptoe around.
But he was not some old, widowed, derelict man. He was thirty-four to her twenty-one. Her betrothed, Prince Hal, was almost forty. And he had a reputation for carousing with women, drinking too much, and taking a front-row seat at public beheadings for dissidents.
“I would have left for America long ago,” Stangler was saying, “but life became too easy here in my hideaway in the wilderness.”
“Until I came along,” she said.
“You could do the logical thing, and leave your maid to marry your dreadful prince, and join me in a new life in America. Or…”
“You could accompany me to Lindenstein.”
History is Killing Me!
Remind me not to attempt historical fiction again.
I consult history texts only to keep seeing things like this:
Alexander Von Humboldt was born on September 14, 1769, in Berlin, Germany.
Germany did not exist until 1871.
My Herr Doktor Stangler is incorrectly identified as a German in my early-1800s novel-in-progress.
Move on, right? Fix it later!
He has such a long history to consider, so many reasons to resent the social order, the legal system, the lack of justice in his Europe. The Englightenment woke up some good men who got exiled or beheaded for daring to challenge the ways of the world.
Not the least of which is the hair and fashion!
The stupid powdered wigs had a practical origin:
A syphilis epidemic in the late 1500s in Europe left people with patchy hair loss. Other symptoms of the disease includes unsightly rashes and a bad odor. Powdered wigs scented with orange and lavender were worn to cover not only the sores and baldness, but the smell as well.
Brian May hair, back in the day!
Her cheating husband had a mistress and illegitimate children. Everyone knew it. But when she was caught in an affair, her lover was murdered, and she was imprisoned for life, AND her children are not allowed to visit her.
[source: me! On a "feminist" rant, my middle child would say]
Women in History - it sets my teeth on edge!
"Twenty years after the divorce, George Ludwig inherited the British throne as King George I and moved to England... His daughter, the younger Sophia Dorothea, married Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1706 and eventually became queen. As for Sophia Dorothea herself, she lived under lock and key until her death on November 13, 1726, 32 years after the end of her marriage."
source: The Extraordinary Case of George I’s Wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle
This sordid history repeated itself!
The story of Caroline Matilda, Princess of Great Britain, echoes in many ways that of her great grandmother, the tragic Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Caroline Matilda, the ninth and youngest child of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was born ... in 1751.
A marriage was arranged for Caroline Matilda with her first cousin, King Christian VII of Denmark...
Caroline Matilda aroused attention when she took walks in Copenhagen, which was considered scandalous at the time, as royal and noble Danish women normally only travelled by carriage in town.
The king was known for discussing literature, philosophy and art-- and going out drinking and whoring.
She was neglected and cheated on, but when she took a lover, he was
Beheaded, drawn and quartered
in front of a crowd of 30,000.
- Caroline was separated from her children and sent to live in exile. She was never to see her children again.
- At age 23, Caroline Matilda died of scarlet fever at Celle in 1775.
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Women
did not have any social or legal protections to speak of, never mind those delusions of Knights in Shining Armor defending a lady's honor.
Even in the USA,
many women suffered for suffrage (arrested, tortured in prison, shunned)-- not until August 18, 1920, did the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.
Marriage, a social and economic institution,
and lineage, a mere coincidence of birth, determined one's station in life.
Morganatic marriage, sometimes called a left-handed marriage, is a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which in the context of royalty prevents the passage of the husband's titles and privileges to the wife and any children born of the marriage.
... princesses of the blood royal are the legitimate daughters and the legitimate male line granddaughters of a British Sovereign. They are dynasts, that is potential successors to the throne.
You already know cities were smelly and filthy:
"Waste-water from the houses collected in the gutters running alongside the curbs and emitted a truly fearsome smell. There were no public toilets in the streets or squares. Visitors, especially women, often became desperate when nature called. In the public buildings the sanitary facilities were unbelievably primitive....As a metropolis, Berlin did not emerge from a state of barbarism into civilization until after 1870."
No Justice
in addition to no sanitary sewer system.
Imagine working for two years UNPAID on a project as monumental as the Lewis and Clark journals:
After Lewis’ death, Clark wanted Jefferson to undertake the editing and publishing of the journals, but Jefferson did not want to. Clark instead found Nicholas Biddle, a child progeny who had graduated from Princeton at the age of 15, to do the editing.
***He worked for two years on the project without pay. **
At long last, in 1814, 1417 copies of the account were printed. They sold slowly, and
Lewis and Clark got no credit for most of their discoveries. source
Jane Austen’s world charms us
because it appears to follow stricter rules than our own, setting limits on behaviour. There are precise forms of introduction and address, conventions for ‘coming out’ into society (meaning a young girl’s official entry into society and therefore her marriageability), for paying and returning social visits, even for mixing with different social ranks.
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You call that charm? Count me in on the boat to the New World.
The crass, rude American, unmannered, but not uneducated, redefined civilization.
No matter how bad things may be economically and socially for women in the work force today,
You've come a long way, baby.
A widely held opinion about women’s legal rights was expressed by Dr. Samuel Johnson, renowned man of letters and much admired by Jane Austen as well; he said: “Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them little.”
English common law left a woman very little economic freedom, for it ruled that whatever property a woman owned before marriage or might receive thereafter automatically became her husband’s. Thus, daughters of wealthy fathers frequently became prey of fortune-seeking men, and daughters of fathers of limited fortunes often had difficulty finding husbands at all. The laws of inheritance further limited women’s economic freedom for they often excluded settlement of property on women. The entail of Mr. Bennet’s estate and the economic plight of the Dashwoods are instances in the Austen novels of the operation of these laws of inheritance.
“Woman’s Place” in Jane Austen’s England 1770-1820 by BARBARA W. SWORDS
The War of 1812
plays into this story too. And so does Napolean. Because Dr. Stangler was a medic on the battlefield. Later, his attempted social reforms (no more torture of unwed mothers) and Enlightenment ideals leads to his imprisonment on bogus charges of being a Bonapartist. When Lady Graves first meets him, he's a fugitive in a stone cottage in a forest somewhere in what is now known as Germany.
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Napolean,
yes, that one, Napoléon Bonaparte,
widely regarded as a military genius and one of the finest commanders in world history.
He fought 60 battles, losing only eight, mostly at the end.
The great French dominion collapsed rapidly after the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.
History is about killing everyone!
A follower of Napoleon was called a Bonapartist. Followers of King Louis XVIII were called Royalists. Dumas based his protagonist, Edmond Dantes, aka The Count of Monte Cristo, on *** a true story he heard about a shoemaker whose jealous friends falsely accused him of being a spy for England.***
Royalists vs. Bonaparts by susan kennedy on Prezi
#History, or Current Events - "The News" -
It all sets my teeth on edge.
So now you know why Dr. Stangler is hell-bent on leaving Europe and starting over in the New World.
He owns one of those 1471 copies of the Lewis and Clark journals (thanks to the 15-year-old Princeton lad who worked for two years on the project without pay).
And why Carol's NaNoWriMo word count is so low.
Thank you #NovMadFan s for having hung in there with me so far!
For more information visit the @freewritehouse
Don't bother that much about all sorts of details, go on with the story and you can fact-check later!
(I was hoping for more... interaction between those two. I guess I'll have to wait!)
Good advice, thanks - and as for more interaction - how do we strike the balance between keeping the reader on edge, wanting more, and delivering enough to keep them satisfied and still turning pages.... and do I silence those Hollywood screenwriter voices in my head telling me Stangler must die tragically... how sad to imagine her landing in America without him. NO. No! I shake my fist at such unjust fates! History is nothing but this sordid, tragic, gritty realism. I read to ESCAPE it.
I so disagree with you!!! Your word count is not low. The hell with history...you are writing fiction. Do not junk anything because it is NOT junk! Everything is beautifully written and fits in perfectly. You are way too hard on yourself Carol. Keep writing your beautiful story like you did before researching history and it will be a masterpiece! This resident cat is your #NovMadFan and is rooting for you 100%! : )
You are just what I needed - of course I keep hating what I wrote, but if you find it engaging I must be doing something right after all. THANK YOU!!!
Another comment here telling you to fact-check later! :)
Your writing is beautiful and draws me in, and makes me cringe at my very poor attempts at love and sweetness. Maybe I'll just stick to dark gritty humour!
(Have you ever read any of @unstitched's writing? Their words are just as mesmerising. There are storytellers and there are word-weavers. You and they both are word-weavers.)
Dark gritty humor is what I want to be writing!! Sadly, tropes of the romance genre come naturally to me, however hard I've been fighting it. Maybe we could be co-authors!
Word weavers? Now that's high tribute! You are one yourself, @kaelci! Your Aussie voice, humor, and wit flow so naturally. Don't change that!!
You have snarky wit and humor. Which I lack. I can supply pretty prose. But let's see what the end of November brings!
chiming in to say keep on writing and research later - just put notes all over your writing in a different color to remember what you wanted to research.
That said
this fear has been driving men to keep women down - and they are still doing it!!
Now, on with the Romance. We need more Romance in the world and yours is well written and interesting!!
Thank you!!
I'm beginning to feel the same way, after passing the half-century mark. Enough of bloodshed, betrayal, war, and horror. More happy endings. More romance. Thanks again!