Today sucked. The outline for "Jubilee" is incredibly detailed, with one or two patchy bits. Today I hit one of the patchy bits. Somehow I had to turn the sentence "Sandford and Roxanne begin to investigate the murders" into four or five thousand words of narrative, chock full of useful backstory, some of which I'd only worked out in sketchy detail. Joy! I spent hours pouring over 19C maps, researching what sort of fabric women's summer walking dresses would be make of, and trying to work out just where in Lambeth the School for the Indigent Blind had been, anyway.

60,935 / 120,000 (50.8%)

If you can't tell from looking, I did only a bit more than 3K words today, which is far shy of my daily goal, and my worst full day of writing to date on this one. Yeesh. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit better. I've got only a couple of scenes to go before I bring the Ghost Fox on stage. Chinese Triads in the Limehouse! Hurray!

The high point of day's writing was the bit where Roxanne changes clothes in the afternoon. Non! Stop! Action!

The driver let them off in front of Number 9, Bark Place, and while Miss Bonaventure climbed the steps to her door, fishing in her reticule for the front door key, Blank paid the driver, enjoying the relative silence of the block. Bark Place was a short road just off Bayswater Road, near the Orme Square Gate of Kensington Garden, whose green leaves could be seen just the other side of Orme Court. With the serene quiet of Kensington on one side, and the relatively sedate bustle of Moscow Road on the other, Bark Place was as a consequence inordinately quiet, even in contrast with the relative calm that hung like a heavy blanket over the whole of Bayswater. Blank had once remarked to Miss Bonaventure that it seemed hardly a fitting place of residence for a “New Woman” such as herself, who was as likely to go for a bicycling tour of the countryside as she was to stay at home knitting doilies, and was more skilled in arts martial than marital. He had difficulty imagining her in a typical domestic setting; but then, he had difficulty imagining a typical domestic setting, full stop, given his scant experience with them, so that was probably hardly surprising. In response, Miss Bonaventure had simply explained that the signal feature of Bayswater, and Bark Place in particular, was that it changed little with the passing years, being now virtually identical to the street it had been almost half a century before, and promised to remain unchanged for centuries to come.

Of course, Blank had known perfectly well that Miss Bonaventure had her own reasons for desiring that sort of immutable permanence in a residence, but he had no desire to queer their friendship, and refrained from mentioning it. After all, who was he to begrudge someone their secrets?

Blank waited in Miss Bonaventure’s study, on the first floor up, while she was upstairs in her bedroom, getting dressed. Mrs. Pool, the day maid, had sniffed audibly on seeing Blank accompanying her mistress, evidently disapproving of the notion that an unmarried woman should spend so much time in the company of an unmarried man, but had accompanied Miss Bonaventure upstairs without comment.

Blank passed the time scanning the spines of the books on Miss Bonaventure’s shelves. Her collection was impressive, as catholic in its breadth as it was detailed in its depth. There also seemed to be, Blank noted with amusement, a small number of titles which had not, as yet, been published.