Merriton

“How many days has it been?” Kit Kat looked up from her comfy chair and laptop out the window. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been outside. It had been days since she was willing to put on her coat and boots to get the mail at the end of the shared drive. In fact, the last time she even opened the front door was last week when Vesta brought her muffins.

She closed her laptop and set it down on the floor. She was still in her pajamas, even though it was nearly noon. Did she shower yesterday? She couldn’t remember. She walked to the master bedroom. A hint of BO wafted past her nose as she removed her clothes and she started the shower in the master bath.

As she soaped up her hair, another idea assaulted her. The Dowager Langthrope might have been at the mercy of her confirmed bachelor of a son, but she would have had other options available. Her jewels, if sold discreetly, could provide her with a lifetime of independence. How could she sell her jewels without revealing her destitute state? Should she travel to France? Should she retire to the countryside to preserve her dwindling funds? Kit Kat hurriedly rushed through her shower in order to get back to the computer lying next to her chair.

She wrapped her hair in a towel and wrapped another towel around her body as she returned to the living room. She opened her outline, which had been stalled. This happened every time she wrote a book. It was time to make the dowager suffer and Kit Kat was reluctant to put the honorable lady in such circumstances. The jewels were a glimmer of hope for her main character, but they couldn’t be allowed to be a deus ex machina. If it was too easy, no one would care about the woman. Kit Kat HAD to make her suffer in order for the reader to love her.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Perhaps the indolent son could have confiscated her jewels. Why? Why would he do something like that? Just to make his mother suffer? He didn’t hate her. He just wanted her to stop bothering him about getting married when it was so very clear and entirely inappropriate to mention that he preferred the company of men.

She was stuck again and looked out the window. Suddenly, she remembered the whole reason she had gotten into the shower in the first place. She needed to check her mailbox before the damn thing overflowed. She walked back to the master bedroom and put on a pair of jeans and a bulky sweater. She ran her hand along the rough, thickness of it, enjoying the texture.

She remembered buying the sweater in a little shop manned by an angry Asian woman. It didn’t have a price on it, so when Kit Kat brought it to the counter to pay for it, asking the price, the woman assumed that she was trying to negotiate a better price. Kit Kat had no idea how much the sweater cost originally, but she bought it for “fifteen dollars and I can’t go any lower than that, you rich bitch.”

Sometimes she missed New York. No one had called her a bitch since she moved there, not even Elvis when she was so rude to him last week. Instead of the response she would have gotten in New York, she received a lovely basket of blueberry muffins. She felt a pang of guilt at her undeserved reward.

What if Dowager Langthrope is exiled to the country home by her son? She can live comfortably there, but not independently. She can’t sell her jewels because there is no one in Derbyshire who could even afford them. She would have to journey to London on her own in order to sell them and have enough funds to travel to India like she desires. THAT could work.

Kit Kat pulled on her socks and rushed back to the laptop, adding the elements to the outline and fleshing out the individual chapters. Her suffering could come at the hand of traveling from the countryside back to London without a male escort. Kit Kat happily clicked away at the storyline, but was stymied by another thought. If her bachelor son was so intent on getting his mother out of his eye, why would he not let her travel instead of exiling her to the countryside? If all he wanted was her to go away, India was as good as Derbyshire.

The mail! She had forgotten her intent again. She put down her laptop and pulled on her winter boots. Bundled up in her coat, she headed down the shared drive to check her mailbox. She turned her face to the sun and was surprised at how good it felt to feel it. The air was crisp and made the hairs in her nose feel like they were tiny ice daggers, but the sun made her feel so alive and happy.

Despite all her problems with the story, Kit Kat was happy to be writing. It had been a long time since she had been so immersed in writing. When she was in New York with Dave, he would always snap her out of her imaginary world she had built up. She would spend all day torturing Vicar Marr or rebuilding the marriage of Lady Anne and her war damaged husband. It was so easy to start living in those shires that she had created and Dave would jar her back into present time. At times, that transport back to reality was helpful to Kit Kat, but most of the time, it was just disruptive. It was so much easier to continue writing when there was no one to drag her back to post-millennial United States.

The pile in her box wasn’t nearly as large as she expected after a week of neglect. She rolled it up and headed back to the house. A flash of reality hit her as she crunched through the snow. What was she going to do about the religious elements. She hadn’t conceived of a character who had fallen away from the faith, only to come back with renewed vigor. In fact, she hadn’t thought about any of the religious elements. What was she going to do?

Perhaps her wayward son could see his lifestyle as sin and return to the faith and women, but that idea made her sick to her stomach. She didn’t want the confirmed bachelor to pretend to be heterosexual. It seemed so wrong to her. She decided firmly that the son would stay a bachelor.

Maybe the worthy merchant could be the one to return to the faith. His romantic pursuit of the dowager could include his tales of the heathen India where the savages worship many gods instead of the one true God. Kit Kat couldn’t continue on that line of thought. She had no quarrel with Hinduism. The merchant would have to remain stoically unreligious.

Perhaps the rogue Duke could be unabashedly unreligious and return to the faith when he realizes that he was not a man worthy of the dowager’s attentions. Of course, that would ruin her twist at the end. The one that made the whole interaction between the dowager and her son so delicious. No, it couldn’t be the Duke.

It would have to be a servant.

Kit Kat cringed at the thought of adding an entire storyline to her perfect outline. A lady’s maid? A footman? She couldn’t get herself to care about a servant who was having a crisis of faith. Despite the harsh words from Lowanda, her editor at Antioch House, regarding her first few chapters she had submitted, she just couldn’t bear to delve into this any further. The story would have to live without a return to faith this time. It’s a good enough story on its own, especially the twist of the ending. Once they read it through, they would forgive her the lack of a religious subplot.

She reached her house and leafed through her mail. She separated the junk from the important, tossing one in the recycle bin and stacking the other on the kitchen countertop. The red and green Christmas cards sent to her from her sister, brother and old friends would be sure to be filled with pictures of happy families and dogs in Santa hats. They were the last thing she wanted to see right now. She ran her fingers through her wet hair and realized that it had frozen slightly on her walk to the mailbox. She walked over to the thermostat and turned it up two degrees.

Perhaps the bachelor son believes India is not safe for his mother. He denies her travel because he loves her. That would be a good reason for the exile to Derbyshire.

Kit Kat returned to the comfy chair and picked up her laptop, feeling its warmth on the thighs of her legs.