A Wilderness of Sin - available for pre-order (and the first chapter for your delight and astonishment)

Naseby, Northamptonshire

June 1645

It was a pale pearl of a midsummer dawn, and Thankful Russell looked like a dead man.

            Sitting on his bed, he looked fragile and very, very young. As well he might. He'd turned twenty-one two weeks before the battle at Naseby. He was twenty-one, poor bugger, and as of three days ago, he was blind.

It had been an accident, or a case of mistaken identity, or something of the sort that inevitably happened to Russell. It hadn't even been during the battle. Colonel Hollie Babbitt hadn’t got to the bottom of it, didn't want to get to the bottom of it. Thank God, he had spent most of that particular sickening low point in the trajectory of the New Model Army, laid out cold in a churchyard in the nearby village of Marston Trussell, perfectly, and literally, unconscious of the vile massacre being enacted by men he'd fought shoulder to shoulder with. His own troops. One of the troops under his command, at least. Hollie had been endeavouring to stand between the ravening ranks of the godly, hellbent on unjustified revenge, and those poor bloody brave, stubborn, doomed camp-followers. One of the women had had smacked him in the side of the head with a griddle. Collapse, as Lucey would put it, of stout party. It had done no good in the end, either. There'd been over a hundred of those poor women dead or mutilated - hacked apart by good Parliament men. And there had been nothing Hollie could do to stop it.

            Whatever Russell had been doing to stop it, he ought not to have, because it had ended with him shot in the head, not to say having been, by the look of him, very badly beaten. Sitting upright on his bed after three days unconscious, Russell was a horrible sight, and he hadn’t been that lovely before. The scarred lieutenant had a stunning black eye, and a series of clotted, black gouges torn into the cheek that wasn't already marred: his mouth was swollen and torn, and there was old, dry blood on his top lip and his chin. The funny thing was, the pistol ball had only grazed his skull - the troop bonesetter had taken it out from under his skin with no trouble at all. Hollie had always said Russell had a thick head, and now he had actual, slightly-flattened, lead evidence of same. It had been enough to leave him senseless for the better part of three days, though, and it had bled something fierce. 

"You can’t do this, Hollie." Luce was bumping about like a bee in a bottle, trying every way he knew to deflect Hollie from his stated business of removing Russell to a place of safety. "You can not expect a man with a serious head wound to ride sixty miles. You'll kill him."

Russell turned his head to look in Luce's direction. That was the pitiful thing, that the lad was trying to look as if he was intact. Looking at the blank wall behind Luce's head, his head slightly cocked, looking alert and intelligent and facing in just slightly the wrong direction, his eyes not moving. "I should rather not be left behind," he said, his voice as cool and accentless as ever it was. "That would kill me, Cornet Pettitt."

"Hapless!"

"My baggage is packed, sir. I will ride when the colonel wishes to leave. At first light."

Luce looked at Hollie and his mouth quivered. It was first light. And proper, impeccable Russell's baggage was shoved anyhow into a saddle-bag, one forgotten stocking still flung across the bed where it had been missed. Hollie reached across and very quietly emptied the bag, smoothing the crumpled shirts and folding them before replacing them. Russell was frowning very faintly, his head jerking almost imperceptibly as he tried to pinpoint the sound. "What are you doing?" he said, and his voice had gone high with anxiety. "Sir? What -"

            Hollie put his hand on Russell's shoulder. "Nowt, lad. I'm not doing nowt. I just thought I'd dropped summat a minute ago."

"Colonel Babbitt, sir, I will not allow the lieutenant to leave my care!"

All he needed, bloody Witless. The troop bonesetter, who may have been christened Witcombe but who was definitely Witless, was a fat young man with bad skin who stuttered and blushed and only had any degree of competency at all when he was bloody to the elbows. As a plain trooper he was almost wholly useless. He'd managed to put a pistol ball through the brim of his hat in battle, on one occasion. Clear through, clear enough to see daylight. Give him a lancet or a fleam and he was transfigured. The worst thing was, that lummox had trained Luce in his own image, and now the brat was an eager apprentice in his own right. Frightening.

            "Why? You going to give him a better haircut?"

Russell looked uncomprehending. Actually, he looked like a lunatic, with a patch of hair cropped to the skin where Witless had stitched that bloody runnel through his scalp. Witless was never going to make a gentleman's gentleman. He'd hardly flattered Russell's vanity, such as he had had in the first place. What the lieutenant was going to say when he regained his sight - and he bloody well would, Hollie would not have it any other way - and realised that possibly the only beauty he had remaining to him was stuck out at crazy angles to his head and matted with blood. Hollie shook his head, and then remembered that he had a row of stitches of his own, slightly more considerately put in by Luce, who might only be a half-trained butcher but at least he had warm hands. Head-shaking, notwithstanding, made him feel somewhat dizzy.

"I'm not sure you ought to be racketing about the countryside on your own, either, Hollie," Luce said gently, and Hollie scowled at him.

"That'd be it, then, brat." Luce might be his dearest friend in the world, but he was still ten years, and at least one rank, Hollie's junior. Brat he was and brat he would remain. "You can come with us. There you go, Witless. Lieutenant Russell's got his own private physician. There's posh for you, Russell."

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Writing. It's a dirty job, but....

Caution - a totally non-historical, and apolitical, post...

It is an odd thing, but there comes a time when you write when you realise that actually, you're not writing for yourself any more.

You put the words on the page, and they come out of your head, but actually, there are people out there - real, living, breathing, feeling people - who read them and care what happens to your characters. And that's a sobering reflection.

Now I am not, by any stretch, a best-selling author. Meh. Occasionally. But it scares me that that rebel rabble are out there - unsupervised - and that I have a sort of moral obligation to take care of them. They have acquired a life outside my head, and people have been known to talk to me about Luce and Rosie and Hapless as if I know them and may bump into them shortly this week.

Absolutely, Russell will be a lot happier when he gets a steady girlfriend. (I'm sure he will, he's just a little busy with Army politics at the moment.) - but he's not very old, remember, they can be a little silly at that age. He'll steady up when he settles down with a nice girl.

Luce is going to be fine. He's young, he'll get over it.

Yes, I think Rosie should be sterner with his daughters, too. Hardly fair, to come home every six months and spoil them rotten, then get off and leave his poor wife to clean up the wreckage. Typical, though.

There is a part of me that thinks it's funny that there really are people who believe there was a Caroline poet called Lucifer Pettitt who was the 17th century's answer to William McGonagall. And I am toying with the idea of the Holofernes Thomas Babbitt Wikipedia page, detailing his military campaigns. (1632, Siege of Nuremberg, serving with Wallenstein - in a ditch, mostly drunk, or suffering from a lesser pox. You can see how it'd go...)

Always happy to provide Het Babbitt's recipe for ember tart, on request. Hetta really does exist. Het is every woman who's ever stood behind a famous man and looked obliging and serene, whilst secretly trying to work out how many clean shirts he's got left and how many more meals she can get out of the ham bone in the pantry. I have been accused of being Het's non-fiction alter ego and I'm not altogether denying it.


...And on that note, my Real Life cat has just stuck his Real Life wet nose down my ear and demanded that I feed him.

John Webster - With A Soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails

 Is that not absolutely the BEST review of a book ever?? Three copies to give away.... find out for yourself!

 
 

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          A Wilderness of Sin
     

     

          by M.J. Logue
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends April 12, 2015.
         

         
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The Poorest He that Is In England...

I have thought long and hard about posting this, and I will try to make it as un-spoiler-like as possible, because somewhat astonishingly there are those people who actually want to know what happens to that russet-haired menace and his rebel rabble. And this will not be that post, so you can breathe.

However. I'm told that my Magnificent Octopus (Octopi?) has been passed on to the Leveller Association to cast an eye over - *waves to the Leveller Association* - and that set me to thinking.

Rosie Babbitt is not, by political inclination, a Leveller. He may spend the first book reading Lilburne and he may pal around with Colonel Rainsborough in the second and third, but he's not a natural activist. What he is, is a man with a (possibly overdeveloped) sense of fairness.
I think it's fairly obvious even from the synopsis of "A Wilderness of Sin", that that notorious gobshite and firebrand is going to end up as one of the two regimental Agitators. And he will do it because he has the tools - ie a big gob and a reputation for saying what he thinks - to do it, whereas the other of his Agitators will do it because he's essentially a crack-brained romantic with a death wish. Glorious martyrdom, any cause you like? Oh, yes, please!

One wonders, three hundred and fifty years later, how many of the Army Agitators went to Putney, and took up their grievances - not out of a desire to change the world, but because it wasn't fair. To them, right there, right that minute. Starving in the south-west, with Fairfax cutting deals with the Clubmen that there should be no looting, which is very fine and honourable until you bear in mind that until the Parliamentarian treasure convoy finally arrived in the West Country in early October 1645, the soldiers hadn't been paid for weeks, and were getting restless. (Again, as Babbitt might say, with some cynicism.) Presumably, when Fairfax agreed in mid-July that the local population should be unmolested, and that the New Model Army would pay for supplies, he was either possessed of supernatural prescience or he was having another attack of Elijah and his infernal ravens - never mind, gentlemen, the Lord will provide. Of course the Army will pay for supplies, but until it has the money to do so, you will keep your hands to yourselves, no matter how hungry you're getting. Jam tomorrow!

Oh no, Hollie Babbitt wouldn't ally himself with any organised political movement. He might, on the other hand, find himself being asked to speak for a troop who felt that they'd been well and truly shafted by a Parliament who'd asked them to shed their blood and leave their homes and families, to fight for a cause that many of them still didn't fully comprehend. Our Rosie might be absolutely appalled that Thomas Rainsborough - who'd served the Army so faithfully both on land and at sea in a military capacity even before he started involving himself in military politics (and who, in the Uncivil War series, happens to be a mate of Babbitt's) - could be brutally murdered, and that rumour might have it that Oliver Cromwell himself might have been responsible for arranging that murder.A literal and figurative stab in the back.

You can see why a plain fighting man who'd never considered himself a great political intriguer, might have been moved to speak on the soldiers' behalf - not because he wanted to see a finer England, but because he had the care of a couple of hundred lads, and he could not in all conscience stand in front of them and say he hadn't tried to see them done right by, to the best of his ability.

 You can see why any man with any sense of honour, might feel that the actual fighting men of the Army of Parliament had been somewhat hard done to, and that in denying them their right to protest, the Army Grandees were going back on any number of their previous promises. The ordinary soldier was fighting and dying for a very nebulous freedom that the King apparently threatened, but suddenly when it came to those freedoms being actually granted it was a different story. The King's a threat to the stout English church... but no one is allowed to preach to the New Model after February 1645 who isn't an ordained preacher. (Not that we want to stop those nasty little Dissenting voices who wanted to say things like, but you won't grant us indemnity for crimes like stealing horses that you commanded us to steal, how does that work? That King who's an evil threatening menace... you want him back? What - tell him he's been a very naughty boy and he's not to do it again? That kind of thing?)

Ah, poor old Hollie, he had no choice about it, did he?

Bloody Russell, on the other hand, that rather endearing Puritan nutjob - he's in it for the dream. Typical bloody Hapless Russell.

(And Luce, that most middle-class and pragmatic of idealists, thinks it's all a splendid and noble idea, but, er, chaps, can you - you know - not upset anyone? Some of us might have to work again after these wars, you know.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - Thankful Russell and Hollie Babbitt, the first, and to the best of my knowledge the only, Leveller heroes in popular historical fiction.

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?

Kitty, My Rib - the story of Katie von Bora

Now I have two heroines in this world, and one of them is Elizabeth Cromwell (well, dear, if you wanted orange sauce, you shouldn't have made war on Spain, should you?) and the other is Katharina von Bora, die Lutherin. After those two stubborn, domesticated, marvellously level-headed females is Het Babbitt patterned.


There is an argument which I often hear, and it goes something like - but women in the 17th century, they were the weaker vessel, right? Poor dependents, meek and milky and subservient.... right?
Well - some names to look up, to begin with, then. Bess of Hardwick. Elizabeth Cromwell. Elizabeth Lilburne. Brilliana Harley. Anne Fairfax.

All noblewomen? Hardly. Elizabeth Lilburne and Elizabeth Cromwell were merchant's daughters - and Bess of Hardwick knew how to make a penny work for its living, by all accounts.

But die Lutherin is sadly neglected. Her 16th-century life-story reads like something from a lurid romantic fiction - convent-educated, she was brought up in cloisters until at the age of 24, she started to become interested in the growing reform movement and became unhappy with her secluded life within the Cistercian monastery. Now, the weaker-vessel argument would have die Lutherin meekly submitting to male domination, right? Um, nope. She wrote to Martin Luther, a 41 year old rebel, subversive and politically active cleric. An excommunicated priest, mind, who was not known for his tactful expression of his opinions. Katie von Bora wrote to Martin Luther - a man she had presumably never met formally in her life - and asked him to bust her and another twelve nuns out of the Cistercian monastery.

And he did. They were smuggled out in the back of a cart, in herring barrels. A credible fiction author could not make this up.

Luther, despite being the man behind the Reformation, now had twelve rogue nuns on his hands. Their families wouldn't take them back, this being a breach of canon law, and so he found them all husbands. In the end, there was only Katie left. He found her husbands. Nope. Eventually she gave him the ultimatum - sorry, Martin, the only man I'm taking is either you or Nicolaus van Amsdorf, your friend. (Check out the portraits. She made a good call in Martin.)

Katie von Bora then took on the massive tasks of a) running the enormous monastery estate atWittenburg, where they boarded at the Cistercian monastery, b) running the brewery there, c) running the hospital, d) looking after all the students and visitors coming for audience with the notorious rogue priest behind the Diet of Worms, and e) keeping an eye on Martin, who had not been exactly the most promising of eager bridegrooms - he admitted himself that before his marriage his bed was often mildewed and not made up for months on end. By the sound of Katie, she'd have put up with neither the mildew, the unmade bed, nor the grubby husband.

The Luthers had six children (not all of whom survived to adulthood, sadly), Katie had one miscarriage, and they brought up another four orphans. This was not, clearly, a nominal marriage of platonic and dutiful affection. Martin freely admitted prior to his marriage that despite his clerical celibacy he was aware of the existence of the female form, even in spite of the mouldy bed. Had it not been for the admittedly rather pretty Mistress van Bora, it's not impossible that the Protestant clergy would have remained formally celibate for many years - not that Martin and Katie were the first, but their wedding set the seal of approval on clerical marriage. It was a long and happy marriage, if often short of money, and even then it seems that she had the habit of accepting gifts from benefactors on his behalf, and putting the money away for the rainy day that seemed to follow the Luther household around.

They were married for almost twenty years, and he had counselled her to move into a smaller house with the children when he died, but she refused. A sentimental attachment to the marital home where she'd been happy and useful for so long? Struggling financially without his salary, she stayed stubbornly put until soldiers in the the Schmalkaldic War destroyed farm buildings and killed the animals on their farm, and she was forced to flee, living on the charity of the Elector of Saxony until it was safe for her to return to Wittenburg. Bubonic plague then forced her to flee a third time, this time to Torgau, but she was thrown from her cart near the city gates and very badly bruised, and died less than three months later.

She was not buried near to her Martin in Wittenburg, but since one of the Lutheran doctrines was that "It is enough for us to know that souls do not leave their bodies to be threatened by the torments and punishments of hell, but enter a prepared bedchamber in which they sleep in peace," - she probably didn't mind too much.


Ladies  and gentlemen, a toast to die Lutherin, Katie von Bora - the role model for the Mrs Cromwells and Mrs Fairfaxes, the domestic rock on which a political citadel stood firm.

Rosie Babbitt Reads His Reviews....

Hollie Babbitt lifts his head and stares out of the tiny, greenish-grey bubbled glass panes, out onto the rain-swept gardens of the house where the troop are presently quartered. He looks like an old warhorse, smelling the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.

"Russell," he says, running a hand through his long and already-disordered cinnamon-brown hair. The scarred lieutenant looks up from scanning the satchel of dispatches that was dumped on him not two hours ago, and raises an eyebrow.

"Mm?"

"Are you listening, Hapless, or are you reading your love-letters again?"

"Well." Russell sets the satchel down and looks smug. "It is funny you say that, sir. D'you remember that lady who spent some time with us last year - writing the books?"

"Could hardly forget the wench. By, she couldn’t half curse. She did make a decent cake, mind. Why - she written to you?"

Russell looks out of the window as well, although the gardens have no more exciting a vista. A careful observer might have noted that Hapless Russell has gone a very faint rose-pink. "Not - recently," he says cautiously. "But - um - sir, it would seem that we - ah, you - even such as I - we seem to be acquiring a certain, how shall I say, a degree of admiration. From an Amazon, apparently."

"You don’t want a lass with a habit of violence, Russell. Especially not if she's lacking a tit. Look where it got Luce, and so far as I know, that lass was in possession of both her bubbies. Not that I looked," he adds hastily.

"No, no, this one is giving us stars. Five of them. Several times -"

"You what? What the hell do we want stars for? Is it foreign coin, or something, or what?"

"No, sir." Russell glares at his commanding officer. "For an educated man, you know, you can be remarkably thick at times. It says here that you are oddly likeable -"

"Give that here." Hollie scans the paper and then looks up, looking smug. "Well, well. Fancy that. So next time somebody calls me a bad-tempered gobshite wi' no manners - hang on. Raffish? You?"

The prim Puritan lieutenant looks down his elegant nose and smirks. "I don’t believe anyone said you were unconventionally handsome, did they?"

"Good God."

"Mind your tongue," Russell chides him, slightly absently, in the manner of a man who knows his breath is wasted. "What would the Amazon think, if she knew you habitually blasphemed as you do?"

"She'd probably think I fit right in with the rest of the bloody Army." Hollie shuffles the papers on his desk and gives a snort of disbelief. "You do know these buggers think I need a haircut? We've all got to have short hair, apparently."

Russell touches his thick fair ponytail with an expression of horror. "What? Like one of those dreadful apprentices from the Trained Bands in London?"

"Oh aye. And you know that collar of yours with the -" he waves an inky and not too clean hand irritably, "the fancy stuff, that you turn out in when you've got your eye to a lass? - that's got to go, apparently. Poetry - they reckon the King's men are supposed to have the monopoly on verse. Be a bit of a blessing telling Luce, but I don’t fancy breaking it to Fairfax, do you? And his is worse!"

"Sir, what are you talking about?"

Hollie rubs the bridge of his nose and sighs, unaware of the smear of ink he has just transferred to that prominent feature. "D'you know what, Hapless, I don't know why we bother. According to this - to that lady-friend of yours with the books - we're supposed to be a load of abstinent, godly types, apparently with nits going by the haircuts, who never do nowt but sing psalms and probably take their wine watered. They never seen Cromwell on the spree, evidently. Apparently people think the Cavaliers had all the fun, and we spent most of the war praying and prosing." He stands up and crosses to the window, and the colonel and his subaltern look out into the rain, watching Drew Venning strut across the grass in a hat that must have left several ostriches bald-rumped. "Mind," Hollie says thoughtfully, "the Cavaliers could have kept that feathered excrescence, and welcome."

"Ah, well, fashion knows no politics," says Russell, who wears black a lot, not because of his puritanical leanings, but because he's a vain so-and-so on the quiet and well aware that at just over six feet tall, with pale blonde hair and dark eyes, black suits him very well indeed. "Now where are you going, sir?" 

"I'm going to have a word with that lady-friend of yours with the books, lad. On the matter of that slander on the private life of the Army of Parliament. You coming?"