Gollum’s Precious by J Vincent

When the topic of writing about the most prized possession of a character was suggested I presumed it would be an easy blog to write. After thinking about my main characters for several days I came to realize that it is a difficult subject due to very slim pickin’s. There’s not even a whimper of a glimmer of Gollum’s enslavement to the ring among the characters that inhabit my mind. Now I wonder, why don't my characters have some object they prize above all else? Notice that I didn’t say I wonder why I didn’t give them precious objects, but why they don’t have them. I give my characters problems to overcome which is only just since they always go their own way even when I object, but back to our topic for the day.

The first characters I considered didn’t cherish possessions but intangibles. Daphne Stratton, in my unpublished Regency Never to Part, prizes her ability to read auras. She thought this ability a nuisance as a child but grew into it, so to speak and finds it helpful in wending her way through life’s pitfalls. After all, you can hardly be led astray or fooled if you can “read” when a person does not speak the truth. Not until she finds a person, the hero, whose aura she cannot read does the full value of this talent become apparent to her. But of objects she treasures, Daphne has none.

My second round of cogitation proved more fruitful. Lady Barry Gromley, the widowed heroine of my published Georgian set circa 1760, A Promise Rose, Avalon Books, 2003, kept the rose given to her by Mr. Prideau as a pledge of love for twelve years. This despite Prideau’s betrayal of his promise rose. He went to America to make his fortune and when he had, wrote her a “Dear Joan” letter. She stores the long dried rose in a paper mache box she made for it the first month she had it. Though tempted to throw both box and rose away after she was forced to marry the much older Baron Gromley by circumstances beyond her control, Barry could not. The box secreted beneath old gowns in the bottom of a trunk in the attic, she strove to forget the rose and Prideau. Lady Barry never completely manages to do this but it fades into the background of the life she builds for herself. That is until Prideau, now an earl, reappears. Retrieving the box that holds that long ago pledge Lady Barry studies the fragile dried petals. Betrayal again or love? Which does Prideau bring?

The other instance starts with a six year old boy rescued from the Terror in France by his aunt as told in A Bond of Honour a Regency set circa 1795, published by Dell books, 1980, and now available as an ebook from
Regency Reads. When the aunt saved the young boy and his infant sister she allowed him to take with him some toy tin soldiers, gifts from his parents. At the end of A Bond of Honour the tin soldiers are discovered to contain emeralds. By the time this boy, Andre Ribeymon, Baron de la Croix, appears in my Honour Series (as yet unpublished) he is a young man (and a British spy) whose aunt had one of the emeralds set in a gold stick pin for his cravats as a memento. This he treasures. She risked her life in saving him, raised him, and he loves her as he did her sister, his mother.

But of equal, if not more, value to Andre are the tin soldiers which once held the emeralds. They are the only keepsake he has of his murdered parents. Andre stores them carefully arranged in an intricately carved box that once held his mother’s trinkets. (How he retrieved that from France is another story.) This box he has on a shelf on a book case in his bed chamber. Whenever he handles the toy soldiers Andre recalls his mother and father and finds solace. They touched them as he now does when they played “battle” with him and the soldiers.

A long dried rose and tin soldiers. Nothing like Gollum's ring. But do they tell you something about my characters?

What object would you like to give a character? Why?