Love's Treasure by Shirley Martin

Hi everyone,

 

I recently started a fantasy romance, and this is the first scene from the second chapter. I'm using this scene because it has more dialog than the first scene of the first chapter.

                                                               

 

 

 

 

                                                  LOVE'S TREASURE

 

                                                   by Shirley Martin

    

"You'll have to hurry, son. I'll explain the situation as you get ready. I've already ordered the stable boy to prepare a  horse for you."

    Inside his bedchamber within the palace of Airen Tir, Garth pulled on his trousers, all the while focusing his attention on his father. He wondered what the 'situation' was.

    "As you know," his father explained, "we have a few spies planted inside the palace of Volanar. They act as servants of the palace, but they serve us. Now let me backtrack a bit. Have you heard about a cache of gold hidden inside a cave of Misty Mountain?"

    "Misty Mountain?" Garth paused while pulling his linen tunic over his head. "I've always thought that tale was a myth. You think there's some truth to the story?" 

    King Treherne nodded. "I have reason to believe so. The story has persisted throughout the years, and my grandfather spoke of it in his last days, regretting that he'd never sent anyone to find the treasure. There surely must be truth to the tale."  He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "Yesterday, one of our spies was in the archives room of the Volanar palace--"

    Garth fastened his belt. "The archives room? What was he doing there?"

    "He followed Princess Olwen, clandestinely, of course, and checked the room after she left. First lighting a candle, he saw an open book that revealed a map of where the gold is hidden far to the north of Elucera in Misty Mountain."

    "Wait a minute," Garth said, dropping several coins in a purse attached to his belt, where his sword already resided in its scabbard. "How do you know this?"

    "A carrier pigeon brought the news early this morning on a slip of paper. A small map was included."  He drew the paper from a pocket and handed it to Garth. "Study this map later, when you have time.. Another spy saw a young man he couldn't identify ride off in the middle of the night."

    Folding the paper inside his tunic pocket, Garth sat to pull on his boots. "That still doesn't prove that the man was headed for Misty Mountain."

    Treherne smiled slyly. "Remember I once told you about a hole drilled in the wall of the king's study, behind a painting? One of our spies heard the princess talking to her father about the hidden gold." Briskly, he stood. "Enough talk. I want you to ride as if your life depended on it." His eyes narrowed. "You need to redeem yourself, son. There is still your unexplained absence from the kingdom earlier this year."

    "And if I arrive at the cache of gold the same time as this unidentified young man?"

    "Why, you kill him, of course."  

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Find all of Shirley's books at Books We Love  

http://bookswelove.net/martin.php 

 

Winter Fire -- The Story of the Story

Leslie Nielsen as "The Swamp Fox"

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by early American history. In fact, when I was ten, I wrote my first novel; it was very loosely based on the “Swamp Fox” TV series (a Disney production 1959-1960), starring Leslie Nielsen as the Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since then.

At around this time until I was fourteen or fifteen, our family vacations involved visits to old forts, battlefields and living history sites from Montreal to St. Augustine in Florida. My father was a Civil War buff who owned an extensive collection of books on the subject, but he was eclectic enough to include sites from earlier periods in our itineraries. Strolling  through formal gardens and marveling at sumptuous bed chambers and ballrooms of Tryon Palace in North Carolina or expressing wonder over the three tiny rooms of an 18th century farmer’s house in Connecticut, I was deeply moved by the vibrations set off by the clothes, furniture and personal effects on display. Subsequent trips to Williamsburg, Virginia, and Old Sturbridge in Massachusetts, among others, provided far more insight than any high school history text could on how people in the past lived, worked and died, and with detail that struck all of my sensory nerves.

It was only natural that, when I took up writing seriously, I chose to set my fiction in the period I had come to love—the time encompassing the colonial and Revolutionary War eras in the U.S.

While searching for inspiration back in the days before the Internet, I became intrigued by “captive narratives.” In their time, and for a populace starved for the type of fabulous accounts that scream from today’s tabloids, this was an extremely popular genre depicting stories of white settlers taken in raids by Native Americans. Although all of these tales provided entertaining and informative reads (many supposedly in the teller’s own words), none was more gripping than the tale of Mary Jemison, a teenage girl who was captured by a French and Indian war party and adopted into the Seneca tribe in the area around what is now Syracuse, New York. Even as she mourned her family, Mary lived the rest of her life among the Haudenosaunee, marrying twice and giving birth to a number of children. By the time she was an old woman, Dehgewanus (as she was then called) had all but forgotten her native language and was venerated by her tribe. An equally engrossing tale is told in a more recent book. The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos (Vintage, 1995), chronicles the efforts of a Massachusetts family in the early 1700’s to regain their daughter following a raid on Deerfield. After years of searching and countless disappointments, the father was horrified to learn that Eunice had married a Mohawk warrior and chose to remain with her captors.

By now, my story had begun to take shape, but I was still in need of a time and setting. Further research led to a campaign of 1779 during the American Revolution, which had as its target Six Nations warriors under Mohawk war chief Joseph Brandt and his Loyalist allies. (An exceptional account of this bloody chapter in American history is told in Allan Eckert’s Wilderness War.) Following a number of murderous attacks on frontier settlements and equally brutal reprisals,

George Washington dispatched Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton and their armies into Iroquois lands essentially to minimize the effectiveness of Brandt’s forces by burning their villages and crops. The resulting devastation on both sides led only to more retaliation. An unexpected by-product of this campaign was the recovery of a number of white captives and their return to “civilization.” Some went happily with the army, while others had to be forcibly removed from the burning remains of their adoptive homes.

This inspired me to ask myself, "What if...?" What if a white woman in like circumstances had been forced against her will to return to what was left of her family? 

I had read of incidents in which this had been the case, and in which these reunions, more often than not, were unpleasant (to put it mildly) for both the former captives and their relations. Many of the redeemed were scorned, shunned, and regarded with suspicion for their strange ways. After years of living among the “savages,” attempts to reintegrate into a society that was now foreign and strange ended in failure for these unfortunate people, who often ran away at first opportunity to rejoin their Indian families. Not all of these tales had a happy ending.

And so, with these accounts as its foundation, Zara Grey’s story took root in my imagination. Caught in a war pitting neighbor against neighbor, son against father, white man against “red man,” a young heiress of Dutch descent becomes both a pawn and a pariah, with murder in the bargain.

Ethan Caine, the male protagonist in this historical romance, has as his backstory a 1763 incident in eastern Pennsylvania during Pontiac’s Rebellion that polarized the region. A group of self-appointed vigilantes, the “Paxton Boys,” fed up by a lack of support by colonial forces, attacked and killed residents of a nearby village of peaceful Susquehannock. While the actual incident was unprovoked, the fictionalized account in my book involves a patchwork of accounts gleaned in my research. Young Ethan is deeply traumatized by these events and the ensuing senseless slaughter. Fifteen years later he is forced to confront his own prejudice and regrets when he rescues a young white woman dressed in clothes of Iroquoian design attempting to cross a half-frozen stream enroute to Iroquois lands.

The resulting novel,Winter Fire, a 1998 Golden Heart finalist, has as its core the inter-cultural conflicts of its time, colored by the perceptions and fears of people in the midst of war.

Click here for more information.

WRITER ROOTS

What makes a writer? There are said to be a lot of ways to get into this particular form of insanity, but I can only speak for myself. Personally, I believe writers are born, not made.

I’ve just returned from a small visit to an old friend. We reconnected through our 50^th HS reunion, which is a little odd, as I didn’t graduate from that school, but from a grammar school in Barbados. My friend and I hadn’t spoken or written since the 9^th grade. That summer, my mother fled an abusive marriage and went to see old friends in the UK. She thought she and Dad were taking a break; he knew that the marriage was over, although he didn't say so . When I left home that summer, I expected to return to the US by Christmas. My father, however, already had a woman waiting in the wings. Instead an eventual reunion, there was an ugly long distance divorce.  My school friends soon stopped answering my sad letters. In the '50's, a divorce sent you into social exile.

Over time, I’d set the past aside. "Lost and gone forever" and "stiff upper lip" were the lessons. Imagine my surprise upon receiving an out-of-the-blue note last summer from this long-lost BFF! Apparently, one of our old classmates was with the FBI. For the fiftieth reunion, he’d pulled out all the stops, and located everybody even remotely associated with his graduating class.

So what made this old friend so special?   Well, Gemma was a co-conspirator in the great game of acting out the stories that filled my head. Her Mom sent her to ballet class and they had a wonderful costume box, too, something that every well-equipped home possessed in those days. I wanted to retell the stories I'd read, and sometimes to rewrite them—what is now called “fan fic” -- but mostly, in those days, we shared a desire to act them out.

As we approached our teens, Gemma was among the few who would still engage in the make-believe which remained the center of my world. I was the story-teller, the director. Gemma intuitively understood the world of theater. She created dances and she had a fantastic sense of design, so she did costuming and make-up. Her house was large; her parents indulgent. We could stay up late, until our projects were complete.  Favorites came from history and Greek myths--the gorier, the better. Cleopatra and the asp, Iphigenia on the altar, the Princes in the Tower, Aida and Radames buried alive! We always had musical accompaniment, too, so there was Beethoven, Schumann and Smetana’s The Moldau and all of Tchaikovsky's ballets. We had Grand Opera, too. Puccini and Verdi wrote music full of high drama, and their librettos reliably ended with someone tragically expiring.

In our late sixties now, we reminisce, discussing marriages and schools, children and grandchildren, parents and trips abroad. Gemma became a college professor. I became (finally) a writer. Her job was a wiser choice, but I still can’t quit those old habits of falling in love with passionate characters, the kind whose stories I've just got to tell.
       

~~ Juliet Waldron~~

Historical Novels 

Mozart's Wife

Roan Rose

Genesee

and many more

http://www.julietwaldron.com

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