Amalie's Story - Before 'Delighting In Your Company'

As writers we have to know far more about our characters than ever appears in the book. There has to be a “backstory” in our minds as we write about them if they are to breathe life. No character springs to life full blown on page one. What happened before the story began? What experiences in his/her past have caused this character to act in this particular way in this particular situation?

Amalie in Delighting In Your Company is a character who intrigued me. I started out thinking she would be a proper young eighteenth century lady, very different from her twenty-first century descendant, also named Amalie, who travels back in time to meet her.

But try as I might, my eighteenth century Amalie would simply not behave herself. I suppose it had something to do with growing up in a motherless home. Her Mother was off In London where her brother was in school. Her father loved her, but he was too busy running a large plantation on the Caribbean Island of St. Clements to notice how his daughter was growing up.

It must be admitted here that Amalie used no small amount of guile to keep her father in ignorance. She appeared at dinner every evening properly dressed and coiffed. Smiling her dimpled smile at him, she always had a ready and thoroughly proper answer to his “How was your day?”

 “I started a new book.” Or “I finished another row in my embroidery.” These were not lies; they were simply a very small part of the truth.

And so Amalie grew up unfettered by the conventions and restrictions of her age. She wandered about the plantation freely. She particularly liked the stables. Not for her were the delicate side-saddled trotting horses. Donning her absent brother’s clothing she rode astride and raced like the wind along the beach on her large mare, Molly.

She regularly swam in the sea, in the nude, leaving the loose pants and shirt she habitually wore for her explorations hanging on a bush.

She knew more about mating and the reproductive process than any young girl of her age in the eighteen hundreds ever did.  She had grown up observing the mating of the many animals on the plantation, and even of her mare, Molly. And knew the consequence of mating, having assisted at the birth of Molly’s foal.

As it happened, she was wearing a dress, albeit without petticoats, the day she first saw Jonathan.  Her skirts were hiked up above her knees as she raced Molly along the sandy beach in the edge of the sea.

She hadn’t expected to see anyone there. There was never anyone there. But this morning there was.

She pulled her mare to an abrupt halt and looked down at the man who was striding along the beach toward her.

He stopped and stared up at her. Their eyes locked.

His eyes passed over her, taking in her unruly wind-blown curls and rosy cheeks, her gently rounded breasts, her bottom firmly planted in the saddle, her exposed legs and bare feet.

And then he laughed, a deep booming laugh. “Good morning, Mistress Ansett.”
Amalie blushed, furious at being caught-out.

“Never fear. Your secret is safe with me.” He laughed again and taking off his planter’s hat, he bowed low to her.

Amalie turned Molly abruptly and raced back in the direction from which she’d come. At the plantation house she turned Molly over to the grooms and rushed inside and up to her room.

Jemma, the slave who had looked after Amalie since she was an infant, was there cleaning her room and making her bed. Amalie threw her arms around the elderly black woman and danced her in a circle.

“What’s come over you, chile? And where you been here before breakfast? You looks disgraceful. Your hair not even combed. Best not let your Pappy see you like dis.”
“Oh, Jemma! I’ve met him! I’ve met the man I’m going to marry!”

When this scene, not in the book, happens, Amalie is just fourteen. Jonathan decides she is the one he wants for his wife, based on this one encounter:

He smiled, remembering. “You were still a child.”
“I was fourteen. Some women are married at fourteen.”
“You were delicious. I’ll never forget my first sight of you. You were racing your mare along the beach. Your skirts were flying and your legs were exposed to above your knees. And your hair was all loose and uncombed and windblown. And my heart stopped. I believe I have loved you from that moment. I told myself it was absurd. There was a six year difference in our ages. You were still a child. But it did no good. I wanted you.”
“You never said anything. We met at dinners and at parties, and on the beach, and you never said anything.”
“I was waiting for you to grow up. It was my firm plan to ask your father for your hand on the day you were eighteen.”
“I moved that along, didn’t I? Two years later, the day after my sixteenth birthday.” Amalie gave a low seductive laugh. “I waited quite deliberately for you that day down on the beach.”
“How could I forget? You were standing there, so close I could smell the scent of your hair, feel the warmth of your skin. It was driving me to distraction. Not touching you was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Then you said, ‘race you’ and started pulling off your clothes. I just stood there, in shock, immobile.”
“Not for long. I seem to recall you divested yourself of clothing pretty rapidly.”
“We enjoyed our first kiss, out there in the sea. And I fully meant it to stop there.”
Amalie laughed. “I didn’t. I came to the beach that day determined to seduce you, to break though that steely reserve once and for all. I wanted you, Jonathan. I wanted you when I first saw you. I still want you.” 

 

Reviews for 'Delighting In Your Company'

 

Review from The Romance Reviews:  4 out of 5 stars
DELIGHTING IN YOUR COMPANY is a unique paranormal romance that brings together island folklore, history, and mystery with an unlikely romance between the past and present that had me going through a torrent of emotions and made it impossible to put down. .....More

 

 ReadingReality.net - Escape Rating 'A'
Usually it's either the ghost story or the time travel story.  This time it's both, and it SO works.  .....More 

Purchase Blair's books today by clicking on the covers below.  You can then select the vendor of your choice.

                                                                                                                

Find Blair:

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Reviews for 'The Memory of Roses'

 4 out of 5 stars - Review from 'Poison Rose' on PickedbyPoison.com

"An excellent true romance with a touch of mythology to make it genuine. I loved seeing Brit grow and Andreas change together to adapt to each others way of life. When they are together they work in unison, two halves make the whole. Highly recommend for those who like a touch of history and growth in their stories. A strong 4 of 5 for Memory of Roses." ....read more

 5 out of 5 stars - Review from 'Melissa Haggerty' on Readingitall.blogspot.com

"I just love a good romance. I am so happy that I was given the chance to review The Memory of Roses. It would fall into that category of a great romance. The story line was so wonderful, the setting was gorgeous, and the characters were so amazing. 

Brit was wonderful to read about. She has lost faith in love and trust, and watching her find it again was something I loved most about this book. I love when a character grows during a story, and Brit truly did. Blair McDowell did such a perfect job of telling Brit's story."

....read more

The Story Behind the Story: Samuel - Delighting In Your Company

Win a copy of Delighting In Your Company! 

Answer the following question: 
What is the name of the tune that Jonathan always whistles?  
Hint:  see the web page

As writers we all know that our stories do not start on page one of our books. If our characters are to breathe life we have to know their history. We may never use that history, but without knowing it we cannot create believable characters. The character of Samuel in Delighting In Your Company is one I found particularly interesting to research and write.

The year is 1798. We are in Equatorial Africa. Samu awoke early that morning. He could hear the parrots chattering in the trees, heralding the dawn. This was an important day. Today he would accompany the men of the village as they went into the surrounding jungle to hunt for food for the tribe. It would be his first time as a hunter. It meant he was no longer a child. He had lived through twelve rainy seasons and was now old enough to be recognized as a man. To be given adult status in the Koromantyn tribe.

As Samu stretched and rose from his rush mat, he heard a sudden scream and then shouts from outside.  Rushing to the door of his family hut, he saw a raiding party from a distant village rounding up the men of his village.  His father had already been captured.

Samu moved to run to his father, but his mother grasped him from behind. “No, Samu. Not you too.”

“I must go. I must help him.” Struggling he broke loose and ran to his father.

********

The trek to the Gold Coast was long and arduous. Their captors had little care for the prisoners beyond giving them enough food and water to keep them alive. They were slaves now, and their black masters were not benevolent.

A week later they were sold to the captain of a slaving ship bound for the West Indies. He paid twenty-five dollars a head for them. Long gone were the days when Africans were satisfied with payment in glass beads.  At their destination, those of them who survived the voyage would fetch one hundred and twenty-five dollars each.

With the others, Samu was placed in the hold of the ship, chained to a narrow plank bed.  The men were so close together they could not easily turn over and the deck above them was so low they could not stand erect.

Once a day, buckets were lowered with food, usually a thin broth. Water was scarce. Within three days the stench was unbearable. Samu was suffocating for air, starving, and thirsty, but his father told him to be brave.

Then the sickness began among them. There was dysentery and small pox. Each morning the bodies of the dead were taken out and thrown unceremoniously into the sea. One morning, Samu’s father was among the dead.

The boy no longer spoke. He withdrew to a safe place inside his head and simply survived. Finally they reached land. They were led down a gangplank to a holding pen. The air was soft and scented with spices. It was possible to breathe again.

The next morning the auction began.

Samu peered through the cracks of the holding pen.  The men from his village and many others were being sold to planters who needed them to perform the backbreaking work of harvesting and processing cane. The naked men on the auction block were large and powerful. They brought high prices, the bidding coming fast and furious. 

Suddenly someone grabbed Samu, took him from the pen and pushed him roughly up onto the platform. He tried not to show fear, but he was terrified, trembling. 

The auctioneer looked at him.  

 “I’ll admit he ain’t much, but he might be some use as kitchen help. Don’t know how he got into this batch. Was supposed to be all field workers. What am I bid? Come on gentlemen, got to move along. Don’t nobody want this scrawny piece o’ nigger flesh?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then from the back of the crowd,

“I’ll take him. Ten guineas.” The speaker was a boy no older than the one on the block.

“Ten guineas?” the auctioneer sneered. “Might as well give ’im away. What am I bid, gentlemen?”

The crowd was silent. The boy reached into his pocket and counted out a handful of change. “Ten guineas and twelve bob.”

Someone in the crowd called out. “Jonathan Evans. Your pappy know how you’re squanderin’ his money?”

The crowd broke into raucous laughter.

“Never you mind.” The auctioneer took control. “The boy’s money’s as good as anybody else’s. You got yourself a slave, boy. Come and git him.”

 Jonathan had bought a friend. Taking the boy by the hand Jonathan led him back to Evans Plantation.

There he confronted his father with what he had done.  Ernest Evans was a first startled, but realized that a companion might be just what the lonely, motherless boy needed. And so Jonathan Evans had a slave. 

The naked boy was bathed and clothed and fed while Jonathan watched. Only then did Jonathan try to speak to him. The boy clearly spoke no English. 

“Jonathan” the blue eyed white boy said, pointing to himself.

The black child at first looked puzzled. 

“Jonathan,” tapping his chest. He looked at the black boy and touched him.

The boy’s eyes lit with understanding. “Jonathan” he said pointing to his new master. Then he tapped his own chest. “Samu” he said.

“Samu? No. Samuel.” Jonathan replied.

Over the next years, the young slave, newly named Samuel, sat beside his master as Jonathan took lessons with his Jesuit tutor. Samuel quickly learned English.

 Jonathan studied Greek, Latin, History and Mathematics. Jonathan was a desultory student, but Samuel absorbed everything.

When freed from their lessons the two boys swam and hiked and fished and explored the island together. They were inseparable.  They grew up side by side, the tall, laughing, blue-eyed, devil-may-care Jonathan, and the small, dark, intellectual, intense Samuel.

Sometimes Samuel thought back to the time when he had been Samu and lived in the jungle with his mother and father and younger brothers and sisters. But on the whole, he was content with his new life and he was devoted to Jonathan.

Jonathan’s father died when he was just twenty-one. Jonathan’s first act upon taking control of the plantation was to give Samuel his freedom. Then he immediately hired him back as Plantation Manager. 

This was a job at which Samuel excelled. It was Samuel who ensured that Evans Plantation didn’t fall into the quagmire that overtook the cane-sugar industry in the early 1800’s, when the European market discovered that sugar could be made more cheaply from beets.

When Delighting In Your Company begins, Samuel is a man of twenty-one. He is still slight of figure. He wears wire framed glasses and always looks a bit puzzled by the world in which he finds himself. He’s black, but he’s not a slave. He’s educated and well read.  He knows much about the culture of the white western world, but he understands and empathizes with the world of the slaves. The world of Jumbies, the walking dead, and of Obeah, the black magic brought to the West Indies from Africa. It is this latter understanding that saves the day when the lives of Jonathan and Amalie, Jonathan’s fiancé, are in peril.

As a writer I found depicting the life-long friendship between these two men both interesting and challenging.  The template for their relationship was established centuries ago, by the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament. 

And in the end, Jonathan gave Samuel the greatest gift he could have given. The gift of family.

Purchase Blair's books today by clicking on the covers below.  You can then select the vendor of your choice.

                                                                                                                     

Contact Blair:

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Blog:  http://blairmcdowellauthor.blogspot.ca/
Email:  info@blairmcdowell.com