The Mending-est Lady in Essex..... A Wilderness of Sin - May 1st

 

A Wilderness of Sin available to pre-order

But who is she?
You might have to read Wilderness and find out...

Pretties #2

The New One..... Babbitt #3 Out in May!

 

June 1645

Shattered after their defeat at the bloody battle of Naseby, the King's troops are in disarray, their last hope a loyal Royalist hardcore in the West Country.

Parliamentarian Colonel Hollie Babbitt's troop of cavalry are always in disarray, so he has a degree of sympathy.

But certain members of the troop are hiding a secret, after Naseby - a secret that left the brutal sadist Captain Chedglow dead, Hapless Russell invalided out in Essex under the watchful eye of Het Babbitt, and posh poet Pettitt and fierce, enigmatic Trooper Gray locked in a most unlikely alliance. And they're not telling.

Hollie's too busy wrestling with his own conscience to pay too much mind to the internal politics of his troop, though. The Army of Parliament might be winning the war, but their soldiers aren’t seeing much of the benefits, and there are voices within the Army starting to make petition for the common soldier. And Hollie - partisan, cynical Hollie, who's fought alongside both Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, who's always claimed his loyalties lay with himself first and foremost - is beginning to wonder if perhaps he should lend his distinctive Lancashire voice to those petitions. Which is going to make him about as popular as the bloody flux, with Parliament.

Love, in both likely and unlikely places. Death. War. Bubonic plague. Blood. Politics. Intrigue. Transvestite Huguenots, and bad poetry.

Who said the Roundheads were the dreary side?

Name that Horse! eBook competition

It's competition time - win a Kindle collection of short stories, including what did happen to Thankful Russell at Edgehill, how a seventeen-year-old Lancashire boy took up arms in the Low Countries in the Thirty Years' War, and more.

All you have to do is name the new equine addition to Babbitt's troop.

A hint:
Rosie himself has Tyburn (large, black, and menacing) and The Rabbit, who's the only remount big enough for him, and whom he cordially dislikes. When Tyburn is invalided out after Marston Moor, he's replaced by Blossom, named by Mrs Rosie in a whimsical moment.
Trooper Gray has Pig, and I think the name says it all about Gray's horse.
Hapless has Thomas, who has doubts about anything and everything, from the threat posed by a strip of rag in a hedge to strange dogs.
Drew Venning's horse is Samson - large, sturdy, well-mannered and hairy. (Not unlike Venning, come to think of it.)
Kenelm Toogood's horse is Charles, and was baptised as same in Lostwithiel church during the Earl of Essex's Cornish campaign in  1643.

Now, at the beginning of the series, Luce acquired a witless and overbred thoroughbred mare which he tagged as Fair Rosamund, in a fit of poetic stupidity. Rosamund is now, predictably, deceased in an excess of equine zeal.

The question is, o gentle reader, who will replace the Fair Rosamund in Babbitt's horse-lines?

The choice is yours, and you have a week to do it in....Winners to be announced on Wednesday 4th Feb!