Title: The Flowers of Time

Series: Lost in Time #3

Author: A. L. Lester

Publisher: JMS Books LLC

Release Date: 22 February 2020

Pairing: Female/NB

Length: 50,500 words

Genre: Romance, Fantasy, Thriller/Suspense,

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Synopsis

Jones is determined to find out what caused the unexpected death of her father whilst they were exploring ancient ruins in the Himalayas. She’s never been interested in the idea of the marriage bed, but along with a stack of books and coded journals he’s left her with the promise she’ll travel back to England for the first time since childhood and try being the lady she’s never been.

Edie and her brother are leaving soon on a journey to the Himalayas to document and collect plants for the new Kew Gardens when she befriends Miss Jones in London. She’s never left England before and is delighted to learn that the lady will be returning to the mountains she calls home at the same time they are planning their travels. When they meet again in Srinagar, Edie is surprised to find that here the Miss Jones of the London salons is ‘just Jones’ the explorer, clad in breeches and boots and unconcerned with the proprieties Edie has been brought up to respect.

A non-binary explorer and a determined botanist make the long journey over the high mountain passes to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest? It’s a trip fraught with dangers for both of them, not least those of the heart.

Hello there, thank you so much for having me visit today as part of The Flowers of Time blogtour! I have a deleted scene for you!

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First Draft Drama

The first draft of The Flowers of Time was a mess, honestly. I wrote it over a long period and there were quite a few repeated scenes and double-ups that eventually got chopped out. It really hurt to take out this one- Edie, well on the way to becoming a seasoned traveler.

Deleted Scene: Edie’s Journey

The wolves howled mournfully in the distance as Edie lay awake under the thin blanket. She was starting to be able to distinguish the different sounds of the night. It had been so different in Bombay. The clatter and clutter of the crowded streets had been at least similar to London in some ways. Being woken by the early morning street cries of the hawkers and barrow-boys had allowed her for a moment to pretend that she was curled up in her soft bed in the house on Russell Square under layers of quilts and surrounded by the cozy curtains waiting for her maid to bring her early morning cup of tea. Then gradually as she woke up, she would realize that she was asleep in her wooden framed bed in the center of the room, draped with mosquito nets instead of brocade, and the sounds of the street she was hearing weren’t cockney after all.

Despite their father’s occupation as a navy captain and two of her brothers following the same profession, and despite her mother’s early married years taking place on the oceans on board her father’s ship, Edie had never left dry land before this adventure. It had been a terrifying and amazing journey. The cramped quarters and frankly noxious living conditions had been a revelation. She had much more sympathy with her father and brothers now she had lived for a few months in the way they did their whole lives. It had taken seven months from leaving Portsmouth on the Athena to their arrival in Bombay. She had spent the time sewing rough hessian and linen in to bags that would hopefully help to keep alive the plant specimens she planned to send home by retaining moisture round the roots.

When they finally arrived at Bombay it had been a feast to her sense-starved self. The sea-voyage had been magnificent, but the ship was so confining. She wanted to be off seeing the countryside, drinking in all the new experiences she could.
She had left the practical travel arrangements to Bennett and Henry since they seemed to wish to be busy and were dismissive of her assistance. They had procured good quality square tents, one for each of them, a folding camp bed each, some stools and chairs that also folded and the various bedding and cooking accoutrements that were necessary. There were conical tents for the servants and Carruthers’ assistants to sleep in and some mules and camels to carry it. All in all there were a couple of dozen in their party, which included a handful of Company Lieutenants that were both to assist Carruthers in his geographical and astronomical measurements and serve to protect them.

She had refused to travel in a litter around the city or on their journey like the few other British ladies. Most of them thought her peculiar. Why take up the time of four men though, when she could just as well ride her own horse? She found the handful of ladies married to the East India Company men a little tedious, if she was honest with herself. The whole of the John Company, really. They were very concerned with keeping up standards as though they were in London and had seized on her the moment she had crossed the pounding surf in the small boats that ferried passengers and goods from ship to shore, wanting to know the latest gossip and fashions.
More interesting were the ladies who were not quite ladies, married to some of the soldiers and lesser Company employees.

There had been a pair of sisters on the ship who had been going out to join their cousin. Because Edie had left her maid at home, she had engaged both of them to help her with her toilette aboard ship. Their cousin was married to a soldier and ran a millinery shop. Both sisters were hoping to find husbands. One was a seamstress who would to join her cousin’s business and the other was a baker who was hoping to open her own patisserie near the Company accommodations. There were a number of women in equivalent trades in the small British community and to Edie, their way of life seemed much more sensibly geared to the foreign heat and customs than that of the greater ladies who strove to maintain British manners.
That aside, Bombay was fascinating. A swirl of heat and noise and color and dust and smells that turned her head inside out and round again . They had stayed in the city for three weeks preparing for their onward journey to meet Miss Jones and her party at Srinegar in late May in order to travel over the Himalaya to Leh before the monsoon came in July.

I wanted the physical journeys the characters made, to England for Jones and to India for Edie and then on over the mountains together to reflect their character growth. There were a lot of strands to plait together and I said a lot of things more than once and had a lot of scenes in there that didn’t move the story forward.

****

Thank you so much for hosting me here today! If readers would like to catch up with the other stops on the tour you can find a list on my own blog, here: http://allester.co.uk/flowersoftime-blogtour

 

 

Edie was still washing when she heard the commotion. The sheep and goats were making a dreadful racket, baaing and wailing much louder than she had ever heard them, even when they were on the move. Then the herd dogs joined in, giving tongue like Edie had never heard before. She didn’t have her stays on. Or her chemise. Or anything. She hastily pulled her dress over her head, grabbed up the pistol she kept by her camp bed and dashed out toward the noise in her bare feet, hair flying.

She ran without a thought. She didn’t know where anyone else was, but she assumed Henry and Bennett and the young men had already started the day of surveying they had planned last night. She and Jones had discussed riding out to look at the ruined caravanseri they had glimpsed from the hilltop yesterday as they were riding down into the valley, but Jones was usually up and about well before Edie emerged from her tent each morning, as were her men.

When she reached the little flock of sheep and goats, she stopped in horror. She wasn’t at first able to make out what she was seeing, but then it came into focus sharply, with scents and sounds and colors. There was a tiger in among the goats. It was eating one of them. Margery, the leader of the herd. The three herd dogs were going berserk, barking and making short forays toward the tiger, before backing off again. The goats couldn’t get away because they were tied. The tiger was sat in the middle of them, with its kill. It was peaceably eating Margery for breakfast.

Edie screamed. The dogs barked. Distantly she heard voices shouting, but they were a long way away.

The tiger looked at her. Or perhaps through her. It had big, black, bottomless eyes and looked annoyed that she had disturbed its breakfast. It stood up, ponderously, and growled. If anything, its eyes became darker and more menacing.

“I really don’t want your breakfast,” Edie said. “I liked Margery, I’m not going to eat her.” The dogs were still barking like mad.

The tiger growled again, sniffing the air. It took a step forward.

Edie raised the pistol. She was pretty handy with it now. Henry had made her practice and practice at home before they had set out on their journey. She could shoot a musket as well, although she wasn’t very good at loading. Her pistol was loaded. Henry had said that it was dangerous to keep a firearm loaded but that at night, fumbling in the dark to load one if the camp was attacked would take too long and might get her killed. Generally speaking, Henry had been very brutal in his explanations before he had agreed to bring her along. Edie spared a brief second to be grateful to her brother, although not too grateful, because a proper brother would be here at this point defending her from the tiger.

The tiger took a step forward. Edie said “I really don’t want to shoot you. Please take Margery and go away.”

The tiger growled some more.

Edie swallowed. She was going to have to shoot it. She had no idea how easy it was to kill a tiger, but she had a vague idea that shooting it and missing or shooting it and only wounding it would be a bad outcome.

It had Margery’s blood all around its mouth and down its front. It looked like it was a male tiger. It had a beard and lots of muscle. It was very large and its eyes were completely black. It probably came up somewhere between her waist and her shoulder. She really hoped it wasn’t going to kill her and eat her. She didn’t have her stays on. She didn’t want to die without her stays on. Her mother would be mortified.

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A. L. Lester likes to read. Her favourite books are post-apocalyptic dystopian romances full of suspense, but a cornflake packet will do there’s nothing else available. The gender of the characters she likes to read (and write) is pretty irrelevant so long as they are strong, interesting people on a journey of some kind.

She has two and a half degrees, a BA in Archaeology and History; a MSc in Geographical Information Systems; and a few half-arsed courses as part of a Science and Science Fiction undergrad. In galaxies long ago and far away she has coded GIS, taught computing skills in the community, was a very expensive secretary and worked as an audio-visual technician. It came as a great surprise when health and safety got upset about pregnant people climbing ladders to do rigging; and so she gave all that up to breed poultry, bees, plants and children.

Now she has a chaotic family life and has become the person in the village who looks after the random animals people find in the road. She is interested in permaculture gardening and anything to do with books, reading, technology and history. She has stress-related seizures and lives in a small village in rural Somerset with Mr AL, two not-quite-teenage children and various animals and birds. She is seriously allergic to both rabbits and Minecraft and struggles to find time to write, but manages anyway, because it’s what keeps her going.

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