When I draft a book manuscript, inevitably I omit sections that don’t serve the plot. But I never completely delete them. Below is a short omitted section of Sheltering Angel that gives insight into Andrew Cunningham’s character.

Fog reminded me of rainy afternoons in Scotland when I was a lad. Da built a fire in the hearth and the cat curled purring by the heat. Mum baked biscuits, and the house smelled of butter, tea, and apricot jam. Those were the best of days, but for most of my life I felt caged in the gritty town of Shotts. It was fine for Da, but I was more like Mum. As a girl in Largo, a village of ancient stone buildings at the edge of the sea, she had watched boats sail gracefully into the harbor, sun glinting off catspaws raised by the wind. When Da won her love, he lured her inland to the mining region where even golden gorse couldn’t cloak the bitter scents of coal and iron. Steam engines tearing into the land all the way down to limestone caused Mum to shudder. She yearned for the sea, and that yearning seeped into me in those months she carried me.

While I sat at her knee, she told me stories of ships she had heard about when she was a lass on the Largo coast. One in particular struck me—the frigate Northfleet. At Gravesend the ship had lifted the sails on her three masts and made her way down the Thames, her compass set for Tasmania. She carried three hundred fifty laborers and their families and over three hundred tons of iron rails to help build the Tasmanian railway. It was to be a jolly cruise for the captain, my mother had recounted in her sweet voice, because his new bride had come aboard with him. But the winds were strong that day and the gale picked up as the frigate entered the English Channel.

The captain ordered the Northfleet crew to drop anchor off the coast of Dungeness to wait out the storm. The beaches were rocky there in the narrow passage where channel waters meet North Sea tides. Billows rocked the frigate, but the water was eleven fathoms deep and the captain was sure the Northfleet would be secure until morning. At ten-thirty that evening, a Spanish steamer dared to brave the gale. When it passed by Dungeness, the steamer rammed into the Northfleet then backed off and disappeared into the darkness, oblivious to the damage it had done. The Northfleet’s load was weighty and within half an hour the ship sank.

I remembered asking Mum about the captain and his bride.

“The captain’s wife was saved,” she had said. “But sadly, more than three hundred aboard the Northfleet drowned. The captain, too, I’m afraid.”

There had been children aboard, and she said they had drowned as well. “But never you, Andrew. If you’re on a ship that goes down, you’ll swim, won’t you?”

Mum had taught me to swim in the cold waters of the Firth of Forth and I had enough padding around my middle that I didn’t mind the cold.

“Yes, Mum,” I answered. “I’ll swim like a dolphin.”