Like
most of the authors who have posted about supporting characters here, I have
more than one I love, so I’ll jump right in. I write historical romance, and my
favorite supporting character is from my least successful book, Sass Meets Class. He appears in Arizona
Territory where my heroine’s family is starting a general store.
EXCERPT
An unfamiliar man
clumped across the creekbed carrying what may have once been a chair. He
stopped at the porch, the toes of his dirty work boots almost touching the
bottom step. His disfigurements set Susan back on her heels. He possessed only
one eye, the empty right socket sealed shut by scar tissue trailing down his
cheek and jaw much like wisteria flowers over a porch rail. He'd swathed the
stump where his right hand should have been in the sleeve of his blue and cream
striped cotton shirt. His legs appeared to be intact, sheathed in worn but
clean denim. "Morning, ma'am," he said cordially. The lips puckered
around a mouth missing so many teeth it made his speech slur. "My name's
Clive."
"I'm
Susan."
"Dynamite,"
he said. "Everyone wonders, so I'll tell you straight out. Mining
accident."
"O-okay,"
she said cautiously.
"I hear you're
starting a store here."
"That's
right."
"An excellent
notion. You'll do well." He mounted the stairs carrying the rocker he
might have been sitting on when the dynamite blew. He brought the creaking pile
of sticks onto her sparkling porch then roosted like he owned the place.
"Every town needs a store, and every store needs an old coot on the porch."
He didn't even look at her as he said it, just peered around with his one eye
surveying the little town of Gateway as if it were his kingdom.
Susan blinked at
him. She'd given the store a good deal of thought on the long days of travel. A
coot never entered the picture, especially one who would just as likely scare
the customers away. Still, he filled the left side of an otherwise empty space
with a comfortable, small town feeling.
"Any chance
you'll get a new chair?" she asked resignedly.
"None whatsoever,"
Clive replied without even looking at her.
Clive
begins as a stereotypical small-town geezer, but little hints of his difficult
past crop up throughout the book. He becomes Susan’s watchdog, surrogate
parent, and champion, while continuing to provide occasional comic relief.
Some
of my other supporting characters have interested me enough to warrant their
own books. I am augmenting the three novels in my Evolution Series of
historical romances set in Charlemagne’s Empire with two shorter stories, both
featuring servants from the larger works. My next release, coming out in a few
weeks, will be a novella I’d originally visualized as a short story. Little Witch grew into 49,000 words
featuring a character who originated as the Lord of Ribeauville’s stableboy,
Nox, now all grown up and adeptly avoiding as many emotional bonds as possible.
In the first excerpt, we see him as a teenager in Vain, and in the next, as an adult.
EXCERPT
FROM Vain
Lily forced herself
out of the chair. With the lord gone, she could safely fetch some water at the
well near the rear wall of the house. With the only two chipped cups to be
found she approached the wood lined well. She cranked the windlass to lower the
leather bucket down to the water, then rewound the rope on the shaft. She
dipped a cup of the liquid and brought it to her dry lips, drinking thirstily.
The water was refreshingly cool, and she drank another full cup.
“Hey ho. I got a wood
bucket in the stable if you want to keep one,” a boy said from behind her. Lily
turned to see a lanky frame dressed in a tidy homespun tunic, all topped with a
riot of curling brown hair. Ribeauville was a small enough town that Lily
recognized him, though she did not know his name. “Gusta said you would be
livin’ in the shed.” His voice cracked unexpectedly, heralding his approaching
adulthood.
“I am Lily,” she
offered. “I would very much like to borrow a bucket, since I only have these
two cups.”
“No way to wash in
those,” he observed cheerfully. “My name is Nox because I was born at night.
Could have been worse. My little brother’s name is Diem. Guess why.”
Lily smiled, instantly liking the
forthrightness of the boy. “My mother named me Lily because I was born in the
spring when the snowflake lilies were blooming. My father brought me some every
year on my birthday….” Lily stopped. He hadn’t brought any this year. He hadn’t
even been here. How could his love for her disappear in the span of a
year?
If
Nox noticed her sudden silence he covered it well. “Lily is a good name. For a
girl.”
Here, in Little Witch, Nox meets Salena, a friend from the childhood home
where he lived before his family died and the Lord of Ribeauville took him in.
He has come to investigate a disagreement over land boundaries.
EXCERPT FROM Little Witch
“What work do you do
for him, other than checking on arguments about land?” Salena asked.
“He calls me his
‘reconnoiter.’ I do not think that is even a real word, at least not as a title
for someone. He finds it amusing, and Lady Lily shakes her head at me every
time he does it.” Nox smiled, obviously comfortable as he talked about the lord
and lady who had jurisdiction over a large region around their town.
“Theophilus must be away from home so much of the year — far away, on official
business — that someone else must do this sort of investigation. He dislikes
leaving, even for a day, to look into smaller issues like this. Not that he
does not think them important,” he hastened to add. “I gather information. His
clerk and I do our best to sort through things before setting the problems
before him.”
Salena thought the
work sounded fascinating. “That must be wonderful, to be able to travel all
over the countryside meeting new people every day.”
He shrugged, a little
embarrassed by her enthusiasm. “It sounds very lofty. I still help around his
house, too, with things like firewood and the garden and exercising his horse.
I wanted to come to the army with him in the summers, but he needs me here. He
feels more comfortable with a man nearby in case Lady Lily and the children
need help.”
“He must trust you
above anyone,” she said, impressed and a little jealous. No one outside her own
blood would ever ask her to watch over their family.
“I have never given
him reason not to,” he replied, unaware of the pinprick he gave her feelings.
“He has been good to me. I have often wondered why, out of all the orphans he
has encountered in his life, he picked me to muck out his stables. He claims
that another nobleman had stolen his former stableboy away the week before.
That seems like an incredible bit of luck to me,” he said earnestly.
Salena smiled at him
and gestured to their right, pointing out a path that would lead downhill
toward the river. They would not go all the way to the water, just to a fertile
square of flatland. “Lucky for certain, but probably not an easy change for
you.”
“In its way, it was
best.” He glanced over at her, as if weighing whether to say more. “Being
removed from here allowed me to hold onto a childish notion for a time.” He
paused again. “I used to imagine my family still lived here, that I had gone
away and they continued on. That was a great comfort to me in the early years,
pretending they were here, though I suppose I would be a very odd man if I’d
never outgrown the fantasy.”
“What did you do, the
first time your work brought you back here?”
The rawness flashed at
her again. “I saw the new owner — Burke I think is his name — out front with a
child. I walked right past, down the road, weeping like a baby,” he admitted.
Salena did not know what to say. She had
cried through more than a few steps of her own walks and hated the idea of her
old friend, now a fine young man, taking the same lonely journey.
In
the first excerpt, Nox talks about Diem as if he were still alive, but in this
one he admits that he used this pretense to cope with being in a strange place,
alone and grieving. This tidbit is partially revealed in Vain, and I think is the kind of backstory that makes supporting
characters interesting enough that readers want to see more, even if only in a
short story. It also gives the opportunity to show your fans what is going on
with your major characters.
As
I mentioned above, my next release will be the last piece of my Evolution
Series, Nox’s story told in Little Witch:
Historical Romance Novella. It has been a pleasure visiting here today!
* * *
You can also stalk her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jillhugheyromanceand be enlightened by her tweets @jillhughey.
Jill
Hughey’s most interesting characteristic is that she can sing really, really
high. Her books are available at most vendors and are easily found from the
links at 
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