I like the image of her listening to the music just inside/outside her tent, thinking of everything she's missed in her unhappy marriage. Maybe even a wistful thought on what she can't participate in due to the requirements of society.

Mmm, yes.

this scene has captured my imagination (and made me sigh, lovely).

Thanks! One of the hardest things for me as a writer is to take a visually evocative scene like this with all kinds of hidden undercurrents and capture it on the page--my gifts run more to dialogue and a good historical voice. So if just the basic description I gave is enough to make you feel this way, I'm either getting better, or the scene is so good it's going to come through despite my deficiencies!

the scene is so good it's going to come through despite my deficiencies!

I think it summarizes one of the primary themes of fiction: yearning for things you can't have, especially when you're trying to fit yourself into expectations.

The scene makes me think of gypsies dancing around a fire. I have no idea why.

Sorry, I'm really no help when it comes to historical fiction.

If an upper-class woman sits down by the fire with the ranks, she's going to throw a chill on the atmosphere; the soldiers are immediately going to feel pressured to behave themselves. (Some of them are going to resent this, too.) They certainly aren't going to cheerfully start singing bawdy ballads.

So if just the basic description I gave is enough to make you feel this way

I could just see it in my romantical head right away. And it made me all wistfull sitting here at my desk trying to write a description of a database table based on input from a Russian programmer.

Betsy, I know you're right--I just came across that particular bawdy song while doing my research, and it was just so catchy and so perfect for the story that I got carried away. But I think the new version will be even better--more sexual tension AND more historically appropriate. Win-win.

Yes, what Betsy said - it's what I was getting at. Plus, there was the whole "would her social rank and upbringing even allow her to sit down with them?" thing. But Susan, yep, the altered version is true to the mores of the period, and even prettier. As you say, win-win.

Is it just me, or is anyone else imagining Sharpe-era Bean in his 95th uniform as the fellow, here?

And as to that, I'm curious. Does anyone (else, besides me) "cast" your stories with actors or people you know? I know I've done that, and then as I wrote, the characters fleshed themselves out in a completely different way from how I imagined them at the start. Quite a lovely thing, when it happens.

Any "casting" I do with original fiction goes down pretty fast to the pictures building in my head. Maybe the new faces are actors I've seen soemwhere, but they don't connect as being "cast" in the parts.

Is it just me, or is anyone else imagining Sharpe-era Bean in his 95th uniform as the fellow, here?

I deliberately made sure his coloring is different--my guy has chestnut-brown hair and light brown eyes--but I'll admit to having stolen Bean's body for him. Yum.

I sometimes start with an actor or person I know, but as the story goes along they develop their own look. So whenever people in my critique group try to cast my novels, I'm all, "But for Lucy you'd really need a woman who was somehow simultaneously the child of Ioan Gruffudd, Amy Acker, and Sasha Cohen the figure skater," or "But Anna is my friend Diana, only short and curvy instead of tall and willowy, and with just an eensy touch of Vivien Leigh." So yeah, the same thing happens to me--and it's not even that Lucy and Anna quite look like any of the people I used to describe them. It's just that I can't draw, so that's my shorthand description.