Character Showcase: The Deverell and Miss Greenwood

 (Or the Tortoise and the Hare!)

Detective Inspector Ptolemy Deverell and Miss Lucy Greenwood -- owner of Bespoke Temptations Bakery and Very Proper Tea room, in York-- have known each other now for a year. They have spent that time becoming slowly better acquainted and events have now progressed to the point where local folk think they must be engaged. If they’re not, they ought to be.

Lucy has known, for some time now, that Tolly is the only man for her, but he tends to enjoy teasing her and suggesting that he’s only after her cakes. It’s been six months since he used the word “love” in reference to her and he’s such a cautious fellow that she fears she’s frightened him off with her bossiness and her new bicycling bloomers. Well, it’s partly his fault since he bought her the bicycle in the first place!

The man really doesn’t seem to know what he wants. Sometimes, when he looks at her, she thinks he only sees a Victoria sponge!

 Tolly Deverell is a cautious man. He is eight years Lucy’s senior and, in his eyes, she is often too reckless and “devil-may-care”. He knows he moves too slowly for her, but he wants to cross all his ‘T’s and dot all his ‘I’s.  After all, he was married before, briefly. Six years ago it ended in tragedy, when his wife threw herself from a bridge and drowned in the river Thames. Although the coroner’s inquest at the time decided it was suicide, Tolly never agreed with that verdict. It’s a matter that has haunted him ever since and he knows he cannot move forward with his own life until he’s resolved the questions about his first wife’s death; until he’s put her spirit to rest and knows that it was nothing he did that sent her to the river that day.

He wants to be sure that he’s doing the right thing this time – for Lucy’s sake more than his own.

Can Lucy find a way to stop shocking the poor fellow and let his eyebrows relax from their sadly quizzical dance? Being a modern woman she would propose to him herself, if she could be more certain of how he felt about her. But she made the mistake, once before, of misreading the fellow and pushing herself forward rather improperly. Not long after they met— and disdaining the rules of gift-giving between unwed people of the opposite gender— she bought him a warm, new coat, thinking he needed it to replace the shabby old thing he wore every day. Now he keeps that new coat for special occasions only, still preferring the comfort of the familiar, no matter how ragged it gets, and Lucy fears he might think she meant to change him, or to rush him into a more intimate relationship before he was prepared. Or before he even thought her anything other than an annoying, revolutionary female. 

She must not overstep the boundaries again, for he is likely to bolt if he feels himself being cornered. She knows that people are talking about them and this too heightens her anxieties in regard to their friendship. Lucy wants the fine beast that is Tolly Deverell to come to her by his own choice and stay at her side; not because he feels it is expected, or his duty; not to save her reputation or try to 'fix her', but because he is ready to love and trust her with his shy, guarded heart.

Can she convince Tolly that she doesn’t want to change him; that she welcomes the steadiness he brings to her life, and that she is not out to cause him trouble? Can she prove to the Detective that she intends to be a companion and a loving wife, not just an ambitious “new woman”, running her own business, and that she can make a success of both? That she will wait for him, no matter how long it takes, because she's not going anywhere with any other man?

Will Tolly finally succeed in finding out what really happened to his first wife, even as he embarks upon a tangle of mysteries – both new and old – and tries to unravel their twisted threads. He’s a man on a mission. Several missions, in fact. At the end of it all, will he finally get the reward he deserves, or will Miss Lucy Greenwood drown him in a large vat of hot, raspberry jam?

Find out what happens next to Lucy and Tolly in A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT (A Bespoke Novel III) coming March 5^th and now available for pre-order.

**

This week I will be sharing a few more tidbits from the new release, so keep an eye open for more teasers on this blog!

Thank you for reading!

(Images: cover art courtesy of Twisted E-publishing, of course; author's own recent photos of very old York streets; and The Wedding Morning by John Henry Frederick Bacon c. 1892)