Goddess Fish Party: Amalie's Story - Delighting In Your Company by Blair McDowell

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.”

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

                                                                                                                     

Find Blair:

Website:  http://www.blairmcdowell.com

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/BlairMcDowellWriter

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Blog:  http://blairmcdowellauthor.blogspot.ca/  

Email:  info@blairmcdowell.com

Win a Copy of my new Paranormal Romance!

ENTER TO WIN A COPY OF

Delighting In Your Company!

Just answer the following question: 

What would Jonathan like to do if he were 'in the flesh'?

Hint here:

Alas my love you do me wrong,
To leave me so discourteously,
While I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.  

These words from a fifteenth century song, Greensleeves, were a part of the inspiration for my paranormal novel with time travel, Delighting In Your Company.

  
My heroine, Amalie Ansett, finds herself in the unenviable position of falling in love with a ghost.   Jonathan Evans was a plantation owner on the small Caribbean island of St. Clement’s in the early 1800’s.   He died suddenly and violently and has walked the island ever since as a ghost, or, as the people there call the dead who walk, a 'jumbie'.  

Amalie can see and hear and touch him as no one else has in two hundred years.   It is up to her to help him find out what happened all those years ago.   Why he is alive but not alive, dead but not dead.  

The island in my book is based on a real one, St. Eustatius.   I’ve had a home there for many years.   Details in my book about jumbies and Obeah, the ancient religious practice brought by the slaves from Africa, are based on stories I’ve heard many times from local friends.   There is a White Wall Road.   And there is, according to local lore, a ghost who walks White Wall.   The “real” ghost, however, is a woman.   In my book I’ve chosen to change her into a man.  

There are other differences, as well.   My book is fiction after all.   While St. Eustatius is Dutch today, I’ve chosen to make my fictional island, St. Clement’s, English.   I did this because in 1807 the British Parliament enacted a law prohibiting the transportation of slaves into and out of all ports in England and all British possessions.   At that time St. Eustatius was a British Island.  This had a profound effect on the economies and social structures of the British Caribbean Islands, and it is a key factor in my plot.  

While I’ve been steeped in Caribbean culture for many years, I learned much in the course of researching the Caribbean of the eighteen hundreds.   I have a large collection of books on the history of the Caribbean, some of them very old, and these were invaluable.  

Museum on St. Eustatius

Delighting In Your Company is a fantasy.   A figment of my imagination.   But the scenes of a slave auction and of an Obeah Ceremony are taken from the works of nineteenth and early twentieth century writers, and the hand written records of slave sales that my heroine finds are, with minor changes, the ledgers I have seen in the Museum of the St. Eustatius Historical Society.  

This book almost wrote itself.   Once I became immersed in the tale, all that I love about the Caribbean Islands and their culture and peoples simply took over.  

I hope you will enjoy reading Delighting In Your Company as much as I enjoyed writing it. 

In the following scene, my heroine, Amalie, is transported in time and is observing a slave auction.   

In the basement room, Amalie contemplated the papers strewn around the wide pine table.   There was a large, leather-bound ledger sitting on top of them.   She hadn’t noticed that yesterday.   Where had it come from? She opened it and started to read the faded ink entries. 

To her shock she discovered it was a ledger of slave sales, with descriptions and prices. 

• 1 male and 2 females, household slaves to Jeremiah Johnston ….   425 guineas.  
• 2 field workers to Emerson Gainsborough….   250 guineas
• 6 field workers to John Taylor….   1250 guineas

The room spun around her.   She grasped the edge of the table to keep from falling as consciousness faded.

She was in a harbor full of wooden ships.   A crowd of men, from the look of their clothing, planters, shopkeepers and businessmen, milled about the dock, shouting to one another, pushing and shoving, vying for position.   The cacophony was ear splitting.   A large vessel was pulled up to the pier.   Naked male slaves, their ankles chained together, were shuffling down the gangplank and being herded into a holding pen.   The smell of their fear and hopelessness hovered in the air.  

Amalie heard a voice raised above the clamor and turned to see an auction block.  

“And here we have a fine specimen from the Gold Coast.   You all know there ain’t no stronger or better field workers than these.   Turn around, boy.   Let’em see you.   So what am I bid? Come on gentleman.”

Bids started coming, fast and furious.   

Horrified, Amalie watched as the young man was led away by the successful bidder.   

When she turned back to the auction block she saw that it was occupied by an emaciated boy barely into his teens.   Even in the hot tropical sun he stood shivering as the crowd jeered and the auctioneer turned him around for prospective buyers to examine.
 

“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, near where Amalie stood invisibly, “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.  ”

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

                                                                                                                

Find Blair:

Website:  http://www.blairmcdowell.com

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/BlairMcDowellWriter

Google+:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/111235595606875813906/posts

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

Wanna get away to a tropical paradise?

So would I. In fact, it's been about 9 years since I've been down in the Caribbean, reveling in the sun, meandering through the waves and enjoying the fantastic sights and sounds down there.

Sometimes, when I'm missing places where I've been, I write a story featuring that setting. This is what I've done with my upcoming release CARIBBEAN HEAT. This book with release on May 17th with Cobblestone Press.

Today, I'm sharing the blurb and cover with you.

Blurb for Caribbean Heat (coming soon from Cobblestone Press) www.cobblestone-press.com

He needs control. She needs to lose it.

It’s Carnival season on Tobago and everyone is playing out their fantasies.

Felicity Hartsford lives a sheltered life on Tobago, a tiny British protectorate in the Caribbean. The daughter of a sugarcane plantation owner, she feels stifled under the threefold bonds of running the estate, her father’s illness, and her less-than-ideal engagement to a man she hardly knows.

Nathaniel Donovan’s estate is a well-oiled machine compared to others on the island. Haunted by the death of his wife and child, the last thing he wants is to be caught up in the parties of the Carnival season, let alone a new relationship.

But the magic of Carnival can’t be denied. Passions ignite and blaze into an inferno of need sparked by the warm, sultry nights of the Caribbean. Before they can stop it, Felicity and Nathaniel are swept away on a tide of desire and love. Can their budding love burn brighter than religious tensions and humanity’s angst in order to survive the storm?

As a special treat, since the release date is so far away, I'm offering a unique prize to a random commenter on this post. I'm giving away book swag plus a pashmina scarf. I thought it would be a wonderful giveaway and match up real nice with the Indian vibe in the story.