I am rather ashamed to realize how few of my characters seem to have mothers! But here, from Captain’s Surrender, is Peter Kenyon working through his grief at apparently having lost his lover, while remembering to reassure his mum that although he’s a prisoner of war, he’s still doing fine.
~*~*~*~
“May I write to my friends in Bermuda?” Peter asked after another pause in which both men felt they should be saying something but neither knew what. “I…there is unhappy news to tell to many, which I would wish them to hear from a more sympathetic source than the naval gazette.”
His calm began to fracture at that sentence; he could feel the cracks spreading out from it, as they spread from an incautious foot stepped on thin ice. He was fragile at present, but beneath him the cracks were widening above the plunge into icy depths. He tried to ease away from the flaw but could not. It spread and spread beneath him, and he tensed for the sudden final break.
“Of course. Just go on into the drawing room. I’ll have Nancy bring you paper. I heard about the fight, of course. Don’t let my wife hear me say this”—he shook his head at the thought, his eyes shining—“but that must have been something! A French ship of the line and a little, tiny thirty-two? Hoo! I don’t mean to be unpatriotic, but that was a brave man.”
“Yes.” Peter was startled into a small smile. “Yes, he was. He was my particular friend, but I had no idea he intended anything so rash or so…so glorious.”
“Your friend, was he?” Ward rocked back on his heels. He wore no wig, so to Peter he seemed always informal, but the look in his pale eyes was unmistakably kind. “Well then, I won’t say that all this could have been avoided if Westminster had chosen to treat with us like civilized men. How they ever thought they could beat us into submission is probably as much a mystery to you as it is to me. So go and write your letters, son, and mourn your dead. You won’t be the only man doing the same.”
Peter considered the justice of this rebuke as he worked his way through the letters of condolence. His handwriting grew progressively shakier as his grief insinuated itself under his guard.
He had never failed in anything, and yet when had he ever done anything but what was expected of him? He had great sympathy for the colonists’ desire for self-rule, but when had he ever said so? When had he ever stood up for those things that really meant something to him? He had not. He had chosen always do to what everyone else thought was right, not what his own heart told him.
And in doing so—he put the pen down, rubbed his stinging eyes, telling himself it was fatigue that made them burn—he had rejected the one thing in his life that had ever made him completely happy.
He looked out at the sea, the ships in the harbor visible and yet so far away, and wondered if he could pray. He wanted to pray, “Oh, God, please, don’t let him have done this because of me, because I hurt him, because I put an end to something that he said must end.”
Pulling a fresh sheet of paper towards himself, he took up the pen again and began to write. My dear Mr. Summersgill, I am happy to inform you that I am alive and well, though confined. I am under house arrest in the dwelling of a worthy gentleman of Boston named Mr. Ward. I am quite comfortable and lack nothing but my freedom.
I am including here my wish that you should have power of attorney over my small estate in Bermuda and beg leave to ask you to see that my servants are paid and are not in distress in my absence.
Peter wondered if he should express some conventional sentiments of attachment to Emily, but his disordered thoughts rose up against such base hypocrisy. When the world lay at his feet, it had seemed natural that every prize should be his, but now he wondered if she even liked him, and more, he wondered if—beyond a basic physical appreciation of her charms—he even liked her. How much did he know about her? Not half so much as he had known about Josh, and he had cared not half so much to know.
Please pass on my love to my mother, and the reassurance that I am as well as it is possible to be, though I may not be able to send her the bird-of-paradise feathers she asked for in her last. My regards to Emily, and I remain, sir,
Your most obliged servant,
Peter Alexander Kenyon.
The Macaronis 
March 10, 2013 at 2:49 pm
yes, me too. Most of my characters’ mothers are “died when he was a boy”; or as George Clooney’s character so aptly put it in “O Brother, Where Art Thou” – “r u n n o f t” (spelled so the children won’t hear the scandalous news! Sorry to be so late in, we had daylight saving time happen in the very early hours and I am completely discombobulated.
March 10, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Parents in general are difficult, I think – particularly if your characters are off in far-flung corners of the world. But there’s also a natural antagonism between male characters and their fathers which makes fathers easier to work into a plot than mothers. There’s the whole ‘proving yourself to the old man’ plot which there isn’t with mothers, who are assumed to already approve of you as you are.
March 10, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Oh I remember that scene and how much I loved it. So much said underneath the words.
March 10, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Thank you! Peter was such a terribly stiff-upper-lipped sort of guy, it was so hard to get him to say anything, even though he felt it all really deeply.
March 10, 2013 at 9:50 pm
Not nearly enough of my characters have mothers they’re close to either.
That was lovely.
March 10, 2013 at 11:19 pm
Thank you 🙂 And yes, a lot of the time they aren’t really relevant to the story, because when your characters are adults most of the time they are doing things that don’t immediately affect their mothers. I don’t think that’s a terribly bad thing, (although it’s something I might need to be aware of for the future, I think.)
March 11, 2013 at 6:16 am
Yes! I think that my 1970s characters are the ones closest to their mothers because their actions do affect them (or at least the characters expect their actions to affect their mothers). Other eras I write, mothers are either more likely to be deceased or less likely to be directly affected by what the characters do).
March 11, 2013 at 7:29 am
That’s right – one of my characters in Shining in the Sun is very close to his mum, and she’s very important in the plot, but that’s a contemporary. Not that people in history were less likely to keep in contact with their parents, but that in my case I’m usually writing about people who are stationed half way across the world and with no phones or internet, keeping in contact is difficult.