Getting the Groove Back - Writing Exercises

Exercise 3 - A Suitable Companion

"Consider a plot that interests you, and the characters that would inhabit the setting in the story situation. Write a two-page scene from the point of view character who has the most to gain or lose, the most at risk, the strongest external goal."

This is a small part of a longer story (unwritten, naturally) that I've had in my head for many years now.

I examined my work, then reached behind the glass and turned up the gas a little more. I stood at the end of my bed and examined the lock on my door for the dozenth time. Locked. Lizzie would not be able to surprise me. She was certainly asleep by now, anyway, as was I, or at least that's what my maid would think if she looked at the crack beneath my bedroom door.

What sickly moonlight that managed to escape the clutches of the London fog crept a little ways through my window and stopped just short of the edge of my nightstand. It was from there I had taken the lamp that now resided behind the glass in the closet.

I think I had it.

It was strange how the same effect that had made me "the perfect image of death", as I believe the Times had said, made this jumble of discarded costumes and mannequin parts, well, not the perfect image of life, but a definite semblance of it. The glass was imperfect and the gaslight shimmering behind it almost made him come alive. Gaps in the reflection neatly hid the worst of the tears in the waistcoat and Lord Byron-inspired white shirt. The violin was smashed on one side, the victim of a drunken argument in the orchestra pit during rehearsals for The Haunting of Lilith Abbey last summer, but I'd turned the broken side to the black cloth covering my dresses.

The face, hollow-eyed--I would really have to find some way of giving him a more handsome nose--shivered, the lips almost appearing to murmur.

Murmur what?

If ever you sleep late and fail to dismantle me before Lizzie comes with breakfast, the entire West End and every penny rag in England will know about it before teatime.

I knew that. Fortune that I had always been an early riser. Women like me went their whole lives never being able to afford sleeping late, no matter how much money we had.

If ever you seek a living man again, and I am discovered, you would be banished to Bedlam before the gentleman buttoned his trousers.

I knew that too. For the first, I had no worries, for I had no such plans. As for the second, madness, real or perceived, and I had spent the last decade existing a hair's breadth from each other. Half-a-hair's breadth closer hardly felt like it mattered.

I climbed into bed, keeping watch over my new companion, who kept watch over me, poised to begin a charming dance or a lilting lullaby on his instrument at any moment.

Shall I play you to sleep, Ms. Fox?

I would have to name him.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of golden light, mould, and a slender sleeping figure in a black bed.