Character Pieces: Starling

Now that I am in town for a few weeks I have been working hard at my non-fiction project. I find, however, that I feel stunted if I'm not working on my novels. And when it gets down to bare basics, I'm a child at heart and I can't help but write children's stories. That's why The Baby (Thrice Removed) is getting more space and time than the other projects I had going on. In an attempt to get to know the characters of The Baby, I looked up some character-building writing exercises which I always enjoy but seldom actually do. I am planning on doing various Character Pieces to help familiarize you (and myself) with the cast of The Baby. I found a couple of really great ones that I hope to do later on, but the one I went with was:

In the First Person perspective, write a scene of the first hour of your character's day.

The character I chose for this exercise is one you've not met yet. One neat bit of trivia about this novel is that at least three or four of the characters are built off of two particular dreams I had that were peculiarly vivid and that made me think at the time, "Gosh, they need a story." Today you get to meet Starling. Her dream was one of the strangest dreams I've had yet. All I know is that I was going down through a peculiar castle that was all twisty and odd and I ended up in a cobbled kitchen with bookshelves that looked terribly unsteady and leaned out from the walls. There was a queer mess of dirty dishes, pots and pans, stacks of teacups, and books on the shelves, and sitting in a pile of rags with an absorbed determined look on her face was a girl of about fourteen. She had very little time to spare for me because she wouldn't leave off running her finger up and down the pages of a book, trying to teach herself how to read. She didn't know how in the world to begin and she was frustrated almost to tears, but the creature was determined. Somehow she was having to cram lessons in to odd cracks because she wasn't supposed to be learning how to read. I don't recall what my purpose was in the dream and it had no conclusive end. All I know is that is how Starling was born.

source // The Baby pinterest board

In looks, Starling is stunted. Think Young Cosette advanced six or eight years. Her costume in the dream was very very similar, and she was "all over with smuts". As I learned, she's an under under undermaid and is a terribly obscure but eventually important piece of the Castle of Crissendumm. Anyway. I just started writing with that exercise, and I've posted the bit here so you can all get to know Starling:

I dreamed I was not a under-under-under maid any longer, but a princess. I had a nose that turned up in a delicate point and a dress that crinkled when I walked, and long golden hair.

I was enjoying that dream.

“Thump.” Something hit me crack in the belly and the dream disappeared. I wasn’t a princess no longer. I was just me--Starling--and my stomach hurt. I screwed open one eye and saw Cook across the room. On my belly was Charlemagne, the cat. He’s fat and I’m puny--it hurt when Cook lobbed him at me like that.

“Get your lazy buns out of that bed, girl!”

I screwed both eyes shut, wishing the dream hadn’t gone away. I bet princesses didn’t get a cat in the belly every morning. Charlemagne was tired of just sitting there and decided to help Cook wake  me up by pushing on my cheeks with his claws out.

“Owgeroff!” His fur muffled my protest and I scrambled up in bed, shoving him off the edge with my blanket and put a hand to my cheek. It came away with little streaks of blood.

“Ain’t there a law ‘gainst Child Aboose?” I asked.

“Child Abuse?” Cook’s  face twisted in her ‘You Stupid Oaf” look. “Of course there’s a law ‘gainst it.”

“Then I ought to tell someone you beat me,” I said, trying to remember if I was in trouble with any of the constables and if so, who I’d tell instead.

Cook’s face was very red and I bet she had been drinking all the cream off my milk again. “I don’t beat you.”

“You throw cats at me,” I said.

“That’s hardly what you might call beating.”

I rolled off the cot and pulled my flimsy petticoat off its hook, snagging the fabric and widening the tear. I looked at Cook through the hole. “So it ain’t beating. But it hurts all the same.”

“An’ well it should if you’re such a lazy clot.” She flopped onto my nail-keg and it disappeared under her. Her fat little legs stuck out on either side and she swung them till she looked very much like one of the black beetles I turn on their backside while sweepin’ the hearth.

“I like this room,” she said after a bit. Her eyes were roving around and looking at everything and my fingers shook so I couldn’t do my buttons. She might see my Letters.

I cinched the rag of an apron around my waist. I could pull it tighter each day and I didn’t even have to wear a corset--when you’re fed off of crumbs and dribbles you’re never what they call Plump. “‘Course you like it,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?”

“OF COURSE you like it,” I said, and shoved the board I used for a shutter away from the tiny window. Early light seeped into the room and puddled on the floor, making a safe wall between me and Cook. “Know why you like it? ‘‘cause it’s mine and you don’t like me to have anything nice.”

Cook lumbered up from the nail-keg, for all the world like a great, heaving cow and the red in her face started to mix with bits of purple. “What are you sayin’?” She crossed the floor and came up evil-close to me.

I filled my lungs with breath and held it a moment, then it let it out, choosing my words with care. “I’m sayin’ you’re a mean, cross old woman and you’re jealous of an undermaid’s undermaid’s undermaid.” I folded my arms across my flat chest and glared at her. Later I’d pay for my words and then I might care, but for now I liked just looking at the old fool and watching her fish around for words like an overfed pigeon in a worm-garden.

“Starling-chit,” She grinned a grin like Charlemagne’s after catching a mouse, and fidgeted with the strings of her veskit. “This room is my room now. You’ll sleep in the dairy-house tonight.” With a sniff she whipped out of the room and left me half-dressed, starin’ after her.

I weren’t so very worried--I was joggled from place to place every couple of weeks because somehow Cook always liked where I slept best. The dairy was a new thing, but maybe after a few weeks she’d want to trade places again, and that heifer would finally be where she belonged. I stuffed my straw-colored hair into my cap and--after being sure no one looked on--took the Announcement from its hiding place and puzzled over the symbols that I prayed would someday make words for me.

And the fanfare of trumpets: TUM TA TA!

After over-much hemming and hawing and not-really-knowing what I'm doing and how to do it, I have settled onto two writing projects. One is Top Secret, and the other is entitled, The Baby (Thrice Removed). On this blog I may refer to it alternately as "The Baby" and as "Thrice Removed". Either one is correct. This story is best defined as "whimsy". It's not quite fantasy, besides occurring in another world, because so far I haven't come across anything that couldn't occur here. If it is fantasy, it's of the Alice in Wonderland  variety. But the thing remains, the book starts in London when The Baby goes missing, and involves a tumble down a puddle, and a surge out of a pool of water, and suddenly you're in Crissendumm trying to convince the Royal Family that The Royal Baby is actually your Baby and you'd very much like to take it home now. It's rather a mess, and I love Jamsie and Richmond and The Baby already, and here is a gobble of Chapter Three for you to forage through and judge.

From The Baby (Thrice Removed) by Rachel Heffington, Chapter Three

Richmond had finished retching up the horrid puddle-water, and pulled his wits together enough to sit up and realize—with a profound sense of relief—that Jamsie was beside him. “You still alive?” he whispered through the dark.

“Barely,” Jamsie said. Her voice had in it the offended dignity of a cat that has fallen off a garden wall.

“What was that?”

“A puddle, stupid.”

“It wasn’t a puddle.”

“Was too.”

“Jamsie! A puddle is a shallow bit of water.”

“Says who?”

Richmond hugged himself, feeling the cold now that he was mostly alive. “Do you realize what bosh it is to sit here arguing about what that thing was?”

“Do you realize you began it?”

Richmond sat in the dark and shivered alone. It would have been much more comfortable to scoot over a bit and shiver with Jamsie, but knowing women, she’d take it to mean he was apologizing—which he most distinctly was not. A dark wind whished along the banks of the whatever-it-was they’d come through, and it seemed to Richmond that it was what most books liked to call an “ominous” breeze. He wished he someone had thought to put a streetlamp somewhere about. Had they fallen straight out of London-town proper into the country surrounding? They certainly had to have come a long way for that to happen—the nearest farm was a thirty minute drive in a cab. What a shoddy business—one moment a fellow is walking along in the park looking for The Baby, the next he’s down a puddle-hole, the next he’s throwing up the water (and lunch besides) and for toppers, the night’s as black as…shoe polish. “Jamsie?” A trickle of terror—or could it be water?—crawled down Richmond’s back. “It’s dark.”

“I know that.”

“It wasn’t dark a minute ago when we fell.”

Richmond listened to Jamsie catch her breath, hold it, and let it out. “We were falling for a long time. It could have got dark,” she finally said.

Richmond shook his head. “Not that long—we’d have drowned. We tested last summer at the Pools, if you recall, and neither of us could hold our breath longer than forty-five seconds. Jamsie—where are we?” He needed to know. His head was upside down and backward without geography in its proper place. He even felt an odd, urgent desire to panic. Nonsense. A Balder—especially a male one—never panicked. It was against the Code.

Richmond was still making up his mind whether to panic or not when a form stepped away from the blackness of the night around them and became a blackness of its own. Richmond stood at the same time Jamsie did, and they stumbled into each other. Jamsie’s hand clamped around his own, and Richmond felt a centimeter taller and a smidgen braver. The black form was still and midnight-silent.

It neither moved nor spoke, and yet Richmond was certain it wasn’t a…what was that word? Ah yes—a figment of the imagination. A figment of the imagination wouldn’t make Richmond’s stomach wrench like it was doing presently.

The wind muttered again, and tattered pieces of black flung out on either side of the Thing’s body. A cloak, Richmond thought. He must be an assassin. He was more curious than frightened at that thought. An assassin was at least human—not a banshee. He’d rather die at knife-point than be…digested by a creature.

Jamsie’s hand tightened over his and Richmond cleared his throat.

He took a step forward. “Excuse me.” Richmond didn’t want the Thing to think him impolite, but he wasn’t certain if it was a “sir” or a “madam” so he thought it better to leave that part off. “Excuse me, who are you and are you up to any mischief?”

“Mischief?” The form’s voice was black as crows. “What is mischief but a dashed good joke tried on the bally wrong person?”

Richmond eased his weight from one foot to the other and licked his lips. Jamsie’s face was twisted into a sailor’s knot of confusion. This wasn’t how Assassins acted--really, now. “Excuse me, but who are you, and would you mind stepping into the light so we can get a good look at you?”

The Thing moved a step closer and Richmond and Jamsie stumbled back. “There is no light, which is how I like it.”

Jamsie elbowed Richmond and he realized what a blunder he’d just made. The Thing--whatever it was--now knew that they couldn’t see well in the dark and it apparently could. That put them on all sorts of wrong footings. “But what are you?”

“I am Admiral of The Fleet,” it said.

“You mean like ships?” Jamsie had popped up on the other side of Richmond now, and he could see her face, still quizzical.

“No,” The Thing said. “Like birds.”

“Oh, I see,” Richmond said--only he didn’t, quite. “Er, listen.”

The Thing stepped forward with a rustling like taffeta, and before he could help himself, Richmond put his hand out and grabbed hold of a cold, slick arm; he shivered. The Thing glanced down at Richmond’s hand which was just a pale, white-looking blob outside of his jumper-sleeve, and then back at Richmond’s face.

“Don’t touch me,” it seethed, and seemed to grow larger.

“Sorry.” Richmond patted the arm. It felt like--why, it felt like feathers! “What sort of an Admiral did you say you were again?”

“Admiral of the Fleet.”

“But you can’t have a fleet unless you’re speaking of ships.”

The Thing raised one side of its cloak. “Can’t you?”

“I can’t,” Richmond said in a voice that hung just barely above a whisper.

The Thing raised the other side of its cloak, and Jamsie’s fingers tightened around Richmond’s shoulder.

“Then again, maybe you  can have a fleet made up of something else. If you want it,” Richmond hastened to add, stepping backward at the same time.

He tripped. Over what--a root, or Jamsie’s foot--there was little certainty. But what was certain was that in an instant Richmond was on his backside, having landed hard on something tubular and metal. “Ow!” Then he ripped the thing out from under him with a frisson of excitement wriggling up his backbone. “Jamsie--my torch! I’d forgot!”

One flick of the thumb later, and The Thing’s precious darkness was spoiled. In fact, the gleeful beam of Richmond’s battery-powered torch showed that mysterious, inky form to be the most curious conglomeration of things he’d ever seen: There were a dozen crows--wings outstretched--clinging to the shoulders of a frail, peeved-looking old man as if trying to cover him. There was a long top-hat of the Abraham Lincoln variety, and a blanket of the Wild-Indian Variety which looked a deal smudged with soot as if the old man had been busy attempting to dye it black.

“You’re a...a...”

“A what?” The man’s croak was so sudden, his crows flapped off and away, leaving him even frailer-looking than before.

“Well, you’re a person!” Jamsie finished off.

Richmond went up and touched the man’s arm again. It was still cold and slick, but Richmond now saw it was because his shirt was made of crow’s feathers like some people were accustomed to wearing chainmail. He shone his torch in the man’s eyes to see if he would squint--he did.

“Ey, whaddyer doin’ that for?” the man complained, stumbling back a step. “If you want to talk, come where it’s dark.”

“We like the light,” Richmond retorted. “We’ll stay here, thank you.”

“Have it your way, you bally kid.” The man eased himself to the ground and stretched two spindly legs before him. He wore bright green garters and striped stockings which lessened his generally dismal appearance.

Richmond tossed Jamsie his torch and settled on the banks of the pool in a pile of last year’s dandelions. A pinch of fluff went sailing away into the darkness on  a sudden wind. “Can we start by saying our names?”

“Have it your way,” he repeated, only this time the man sniffed at the end with a great deal of Suffering.

“I’m Richmond Balder and this--this is Jamsie.”

The man held up his palm against the brilliant stream of light Jamsie directed at his face. “I like jam. With toast especially. I don’t get much toast these days.”

Richmond chuckled. “Her name isn’t Jam. It’s Jamsie, which is just what we call her. Her real name is--”

“Richmond, you wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh come on, Jamsie. It’s not awful.”

“It is.”

She sniffed and adjusted the torch so it shone in his eyes.

He threw his arms across his face. “Ow--get off it, would you?” She was being such a girl.

“Only if you stop trying to tell people my real name.”

“Fair enough, your Highness.”

The Admiral of the Fleet shifted and cocked one eye at the pair of them. Richmond felt as if he’d said something he shouldn’t have, and it bothered him to not know what he’d said that was so interesting.

“Is she--” the man stuttered, “I mean, are you...”

“Yes?”

“Are you part of Them?”

“Of whom?” Jamsie asked in a very confused voice.

“Of the Highnesses?” He hissed the last part and looked around in visible apprehension. “Please don’t tell me you’re truly a Highness.”

“What the blazes do you mean?”

“I think he’s cracked, Richmond.”

“Do you, now?” Richmond rolled his eyes and yanked the torch from Jamsie’s hand, flicking it off. Darkness enveloped them again, and he could almost feel the Admiral relax till he was just a form in the darkness again.

“Ay, that’s better by heaps,” the Admiral croaked.

Richmond assembled all his thoughts in martial order before speaking next: “Am I right in thinking we aren’t in England?”

The Admiral twitched his shoulders in clear dismissal of the idea. “You, my young friend, are most certainly not in England. England is out t’other end of the Puddle.”

Richmond rose and stretched, keeping his back to the puddle so he wouldn’t have to see the cold, reptilian glint of the moon-sliver on its surface. “Then would you mind very much telling me where we are?”

I hope you enjoyed this bit of Thrice Removed, and please stay tuned for an exclusive Inkpen Authoress interview with British author Penelope Wilcock! It is a really neat one, so please come back and check in tomorrow to hear about how Ms. Wilcock's real life experiences have prepared her to write about a medieval monastery! :)