Читать книгу Lady Folbroke's Delicious Deception - Christine Merrill, Christine Merrill - Страница 5

I went into this story wondering why more people didn’t have blind heroes. By the time I was halfway through writing I knew.

It had seemed a simple enough thing at first. But after a few days of writing I noticed how much of what we put into a book relies on the sense of sight. Removing the visual cues from my story made me learn to use my other senses to feel what my hero was feeling. And I needed to remember the dimensions of my imaginary rooms, just as he did, to navigate my way through them, one pace at a time.

And then there was the illusory idea that blind might not mean totally blind, and that there were situations where a little sight was almost as bad as no sight at all. My eye doctor told me that the type of blindness I had given my hero would make him lose all sense of colour, even if he could still distinguish some light and shadow.

And after a little research I found that many of the great advances in dealing with the loss of sight were several years in the future for Adrian. There would be no Braille until 1821. And, though it would come as a result of the very war that Adrian had fought, it would be meant to help the French defeat the English. The majority of education available to him in his own country would be vocational in nature, and far beneath his station.

For a man of Adrian’s temperament, who had expected to control his world and his destiny, the adjustment would have been difficult. If he learned to accept his condition, his first reactions to it would leave him with much to apologise for.

Fortunately for him, I gave him Emily, who is a very patient woman.