A Silence of Three Parts

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The silence of the wind not stirring the leaves, as the night around the inn becalmed; the silence of an empty bar, glasses cleared away, messes mopped, the last of the lost items put into the box to be claimed, or not, the next day; and the silence of Jeremy, the landlord, pretending to sleep.

He pretended to sleep while he watched the woman creep into his room, looking for something. Where she had hidden was something Jeremy did not know. He had certainly locked all the doors, and all the windows, so the woman had to have hidden somewhere. Why she had hidden Jeremy did not know either. He was watching her, and wondering: should he rise up and confront her? Or should he just whack her with something? Whacking her seemed like a good idea. Luckily Jeremy was not the trusting sort, and kept a whacking stick beside his bed. He rolled over, muttering to try to make it seem that he was still asleep; letting his arm fall off the bed (where he took hold of the whacking stick). She froze, poised, watching to convince herself he was still asleep, and then , after but a few moments, she continued her search. She was going through his drawers! Unlikely to find treasure there.

She worked her way through the main chest of drawers, and came over to the bedside cabinet. Jeremy forced himself to keep breathing, counting the seconds in and out to keep it regular. He got a firmer grip on his stick, and as she bent down to look inside the cabinet, he swung the whacking stick. Unbelievably fast, she reached behind herself and grabbed the stick, stopping it, and rolling, using the momentum of the stick to thrust Jeremy up, up and out of bed, and him in his nightclothes, through the air, like some fat, badly put together seagull, to crash into the chest of drawers. That hurt.

This had not gone according to plan. Who was she? What did she want? At the moment, it seemed to Jeremy, that his best bet was to find out what she wanted, and to give it to her, if he possibly could. He suspected that otherwise, he was likely to get broken. Or more broken than he already was at any rate.

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This is the result of a writing exercise wherein you take as your starting point the first sentence of a piece of writing you like, and then create your own story from there.  I cheated, and used the first two sentences from Patrick Rothfuss' 2007 book 'The Name of the Wind', which you can buy in lots of bookshops, and probably for your tablet too.  There is a second book in the trilogy out, called 'The Wise Man's Fear', and another one is being written.  Patrick Rothfuss' story is a lot better than mine, and doesn't involve anyone called Jeremy.

I've been wondering about the woman in this.  I think she might be one of the characters from my Chaptershill big story, but what do you think?  Who is she?  And what is she doing there?