Where Your Treasure Is
By M. C. Bunn
Feisty, independent heiress Winifred de la Coeur has never wanted to live according to someone else’s rules—but even she didn’t plan on falling in love with a bank robber.
Winifred is a wealthy, nontraditional beauty who bridles against the strict rules and conventions of Victorian London society. When she gets caught up in the chaos of a bungled bank robbery, she is thrust unwillingly into an encounter with Court Furor, a reluctant getaway driver and prizefighter. In the bitter cold of a bleak London winter, sparks fly.
Winifred and Court are two misfits in their own circumscribed worlds—the fashionable beau monde with its rigorously upheld rules, and the gritty demimonde, where survival often means life-or-death choices.
Despite their conflicting backgrounds, they fall desperately in love while acknowledging the impossibility of remaining together. Returning to their own worlds, they try to make peace with their lives until a moment of unrestrained honesty and defiance threatens to topple the deceptions that they have carefully constructed to protect each other.
A story of the overlapping entanglements of Victorian London’s social classes, the strength of family bonds and true friendship, and the power of love to heal a broken spirit.
Publication Date: 23rd April 2021
Publisher: Bellastoria Press
Page Length: 454 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Victorian Romance
Grab a copy HERE!
GUEST POST
First, thank you for hosting me! I’ll try to explain what inspired Where Your Treasure Is, though if I any deeper insight into the depths of my writing process, I might not need to write. I love romance and adventure, a legacy of my father’s, and Treasure has both.
In my early twenties, I spent time in London and Norfolk, where Treasure is set, but my fascination with England dates back to childhood, novels, television, and films.
Like many writers, I’m a magpie, always collecting details, consciously or not. When I lived in London, I didn’t earn much money. I went sightseeing and visited museums. I attended the theater on cut-price tickets. When I was at the end of my pay packet, I’d buy a Tube ticket, get off the train in part of the city I hadn’t yet visited, and wander back to my room. I loved Camden Town’s market. I sat in chip shops, observing, listening. Strangers shared the most extraordinary details about their lives.
Some writers say that stories find them. That’s what happened with Where Your Treasure Is about a decade ago, one late August afternoon. It was dreadfully hot—too hot to walk our dear, now sadly-departed English pointer, Bella. The sun had dipped behind the poplars. I was cramming in the last of the summer’s pleasure reading before getting serious about lesson plans for the high school English classes I taught at the time.
Maybe I nodded off, but I don’t think so. I heard voices and saw a Victorian woman and man arguing. It was like being in a movie theater with a bad sound system. Her enunciation was fine, like her dress, which was a brilliant emerald green. His Cockney accent and purple velvet coat marked him as some sort of driver—dapper, but louche and terribly shabby. Her freezing hauteur and his brash indifference were fronts, but only I seemed aware of that. She was terrified of him. He was frightened as well, but of whom or what?
The man’s words became distinct. “What you needs is tamin’!”
Though I’m used to living with scenes and dialogue percolating, this couple’s exchange felt different, electric. As quickly as it sparked, the scenario dimmed.
As I walked Bella a few evenings later, the pair flashed before my mind’s eye again. As soon as I got home, I wrote Treasure’s opening: Winifred’s trip to the Royal Empire Bank on the eve of her dreaded twenty-fifth birthday.
Words spilled out: Winifred’s beloved Uncle Percival and his valet Morrant, her mother’s fabulous Indian necklace, her irritation with her suitors and her deeply conflicted attraction to George, her handsome, roguish neighbor. Court and his friends’ ill-conceived debt-collection scheme at the bank soon followed.
During the next months, I wrote when I could—before work, late at night, weekends. Characters popped out of nowhere, proliferated, and propelled me to prizefights, horse races, brothels, bank and estate offices, Egyptian boats and Continental trains. Scenes unfurled while I waited in traffic, grocery shopped, scrubbed dishes, or graded quizzes.
As it grew, I read the draft to my mother. “Are these people real?” she asked. They felt real. They obsessed me. It was only after I’d chased down the whole story and revised it several times that I realized what was going on.
In 2006 my father passed away suddenly after a routine operation. For a couple of years my mother did much better on her own than anyone thought she would. I should have known better. They were business partners for over 30 years and had offices at their house. When he died, they were planning the next stage of their life, the transition to semi-retirement, a trip to Italy, and a drive cross-country to see Air Force buddies. By 2010, Mother still had not sold Daddy’s golf clubs or cleaned out his closets and office. She was having mini-strokes and showing all the signs of incipient dementia.
Daddy had been a brilliant story-teller. His family tales were so entertaining that my cousin said she didn’t care whether they were true or not.” They usually were. I’m not funny like he was, but I can hear his turns of phrase in my mind, his descriptions of a country childhood during the Depression, his impressions of traveling abroad in post-war Europe for the first time.
He was also a passionate reader who cherished his books. He read to us during supper: classics, National Geographic, his Sunday school lesson, spy thrillers, James Herriot, travel guides. He particularly loved history and had a stack of overdue books which kept him perpetually in arrears with libraries in several counties.
One Christmas when I was about eight years old, he let me stay up past midnight to watch Great Expectations. We started the book, and I still hear his voice as he read Chapter III’s whimsical opening lines. Pip says, “It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.”
“Isn’t that wonderful, the way Dickens does that,” Daddy asked.
I’m not sure that before then I’d ever considered that a writer did anything except write the story. Daddy was the least didactic of men. He never said we were going to read because it was good for me. He just wanted to share his appreciation of finely crafted writing, his boyish wonder and joy in a story well-told.
As much as my father loved literature, he also loved fairy tales and children’s books, and re-read the westerns and comics that brought his own imagination to life. He never forgot where he was from, so to speak. He kept a connection to childhood and was ever loyal to his first book-friends. In many ways, the man who read me Great Expectations remained the country boy who sat alone in the woods, reading and dreaming of the life he would create in the big world when he grew up. I’m amazed by all he did with his years and all he gave to our family. He identified with Pip’s ambition to become a gentleman and would’ve understood Court’s desire to transform his life.
There are tales we have to re-tell. For pleasure, for love, for remembrance. To work through our troubles. I think John Irving said that writers have one story and write variations of it, over and over. I’ve kept many of Daddy’s favorite books. I hold and smell them, and re-read the stories we loved. Writing Treasure was a way to honor his many gifts to me. I hope he would’ve enjoyed it. Dreams live in the stories we tell and write, that we pass on with love.
M. C. Bunn grew up in a house full of books, history, and music. “Daddy was a master storyteller. The past was another world, but one that seemed familiar because of him. He read aloud at the table, classics or whatever historical subject interested him. His idea of bedtime stories were passages from Dickens, Twain, and Stevenson. Mama told me I could write whatever I wanted. She put a dictionary in my hands and let me use her typewriter, or watch I, Claudius and Shoulder to Shoulder when they first aired on Masterpiece Theatre. She was the realist. He was the romantic. They were a great team.”
Where Your Treasure Is, a novel set in late-Victorian London and Norfolk, came together after the sudden death of the author’s father. “I’d been teaching high school English for over a decade and had spent the summer cleaning my parents’ house and their offices. It was August, time for classes to begin. The characters emerged out of nowhere, sort of like they knew I needed them. They took over.”
She had worked on a novella as part of her master’s degree in English years before but set it aside, along with many other stories. “I was also writing songs for the band I’m in and had done a libretto for a sacred piece. All of that was completely different from Where Your Treasure Is. Before her health declined, my mother heard Treasure’s first draft and encouraged me to return to prose. The novel is a nod to all the wonderful books my father read to us, the old movies we stayed up to watch, a thank you to my parents, especially Mama for reminding me that nothing is wasted. Dreams don’t have to die. Neither does love.”
When M. C. Bunn is not writing, she’s researching or reading. Her idea of a well-appointed room includes multiple bookshelves, a full pot of coffee, and a place to lie down with a big, old book. To further feed her soul, she and her husband take long walks with their dog, Emeril in North Carolina’s woods, or she makes music with friends.
“I try to remember to look up at the sky and take some time each day to be thankful.”
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M. C. Bunn
ReplyDeleteThank you for hosting and sharing Where Your Treasure Is with your readers!