About Time We Heard From Luce... an interview with young Pettitt

"How are you feeling now?" I say, and Luce looks up from under his hair and makes a noise which is, I think, intended to express malaise.

"Horrible," he says, with heartfelt sincerity, and to prove a point, honks into an extremely sodden handkerchief, and subsides back into the warm corner of the settle by the fire with a groan. "I hate having a code."

"Mustard plaster," Hollie says from the shadows. "That'll settle what ails you, brat."

I suggest a hot toddy, and have to explain what one is, but upon explaining the combination of whisky, lemon juice and sugar, am met with a series of further groans from which I infer that both Hollie and Luce may have already entertained this suggestion on an earlier occasion. It apparently ended, on that occasion, with Luce's disclosing that his Auntie Het had something of a soft spot for one large, scruffy, russet-haired captain of horse - and the rest, of course, is history. "As well you should know, you baggage, for you set every bloody word of it down in that damned book," Hollie mutters darkly. "Every bloody word."
(I think he means "Command the Raven". And he's right, he does get sweary when he's drunk. Swearier.)

So. Yes. I'm expecting Luce to still be full of zeal and ardour for the Parliamentarian cause?
"Ye-es," he says, "well, sort of, but - perhaps not as hot as I was."
It seems Witless - Witcombe, they've got me at it, the fat lad who serves as troop surgeon, having been apprenticed to one before the war - has taken Luce on as his apprentice. Nothing too responsible, but -"I should rather mend men than hurt them," Luce says, and for the first time, he sounds grim. "It should not come to this. It should never have come to this."

"Well, we know whose door to lay that blame at," Hollie says, and Luce looks at him thoughtfully. As if he can't quite decide, two years into this most uncivil of wars.

On the other hand, Luce has seen the world. (He says ardently, and who am I to dissuade him that getting as far as Yorkshire does not constitute seeing the world? In 1644, it pretty much does, bless him.) He's seen the Humber and the Ouse, and the ships that go down to do their business in great waters - Hollie, that most notoriously appalling sailor, makes a horrible gurgling noise - eaten toasted cheese in Cheshire, ridden across Yorkshire in the dark, listened to seditious sermons in Bolton. Eaten strawberries in the Vale of Evesham and had his heart broken at Edgehill. 
- it's not cured him of a degree of cork-brained romanticism, Hollie mutters. 

So, you know, is there anybody special at the moment? I say. (I do get asked that quite a lot, regarding our dashing young cornet.) 
Hollie makes another horrible noise. "Aye. Several somebodys."
"Shut up," he says, quite amicably, and it's rather nice to see how far they've come, in two years. That Hollie, who is neither so grizzled nor so cantankerous as he pretends to be, at thirty-six, has acquired a habit of heavy-handed playfulness, and that Luce, who was so very proper and conscientious two years ago, can now call his commanding officer an arsehole without turning a hair. 

There's a smart tap at the door. "Colonel Babbitt. Sir. Company coming up the York road."

"Reckon you'd best get on, then, mistress," Hollie says, with a sigh. "Duty calls. You remember Russell?"

Of course, I say, and the scarred lieutenant gives me one quick starry-eyed glance of purest joy from under his eyelashes. He says nothing, of course. Hapless Russell has been in the throes of a crush of epic teenage proportions on one author of his acquaintance ever since she rescued him from a future of monumental boredom as the Earl of Essex's secretary. Luce looks at his friend, who is now blushing like a rose and trying to look cool and unruffled, and then at me. 

"Not going to happen, Hapless," he says, with a degree of sympathy that makes me think that Luce has, somewhere, grown up. Somewhere in three books, that daft principled romantic boy has become a young man. "Come on." 

Rosie and Tyburn. Luce and Rosa. Meet Russell's Doubting Thomas....

“Got a surprise for you, Hapless,” Hollie said smugly.
Percey had groomed the bay horse till its coat gleamed like a dark conker. He'd even acquired some chalk from God knows where and he'd whitened the gelding's stockings. There were times when you had to wonder about Mattie Percey's previous career in a stable-yard in Essex. Just how honestly he might have come by certain skills. That lad was a better painter than Lely.
What he hadn’t done was improved the big horse's temper, and it came out of the line rearing, ears pinned against its skull. Mattie had his hand gripping the bit-ring, trying to keep the horse's head down, and even so the bay nearly had him off his feet.
It was a bloody fine horse, though. Big-built, not one of your lightweight sprinters like Luce Pettitt's spindly witless Rosa: backside like a gable end and a proud arch to its thickly-muscled neck that hinted that someone might have been a little behindhand with the shears to its gelding. That was a beast that'd go all day chasing Malignants and come in at the end of it dancing. It was the sort of mount any junior cavalry officer with any dreams of a future career in the Army might covet, provided a man could train some sense into its thick head. Plenty of staying-power, plenty of fire and dash, though possibly a bit light on good humour. Hollie closed one eye and looked at the bay horse consideringly where it ramped and curvetted like some maniac heraldic emblem.
"What d'you reckon to him, then?" he said, and looked at the scarred lieutenant, expecting to see gratitude and pleasure on that cold, half-lovely face.
Instead the lad was white to the lips, the great scar on his cheek standing out a most unlovely purple, and his eyes were as mad as the bay horse's.
"Is - thish - intended to be meant in humour?" he said stiffly, and his voice had that funny slur it had when the ragged muscle in his cheek had gone stiff as wood, like it did when he was tired or ungovernable. Or drunk. That was still always a clear and present possibility.
Hollie shook his head, thinking he must have misheard, or Russell must have misheard, because –
"All right, ain't he?" Percey said happily, still being jerked around like a rag doll by the beast's flinging head, but as cheerfully good-humoured as ever he was even when his arm was being yanked from its socket by an unwanted cavalry remount. "Want to take him out, Hap- uh, Lieutenant Russell? Take a bit of the ginger out of his heels?"
"I. Should. Rather. Be. Dead," Russell said, through gritted teeth. Flung his own head up, looking not unlike the bay horse, and glared fiercely at Hollie, and Hollie would have sworn to it the lieutenant's dark eyes were brimming with wholly incomprehensible tears. "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
"What?" Hollie said blankly, and Russell snarled at him, actually snarled, baring his teeth like a dog.
"The Book of Proverb. Ss." He bit off the last consonant with a hissing, furious sibilance, and then hit himself in the temple with the heel of his hand. "Shir."
And then wheeled about and was gone, shoving Luce rudely out of the way, storming back to the house. "What," Hollie said again, shook himself, "what the bloody hell was that all about?"
"What on earth did you say to him - oh, sir, that was not well done!"
There were times when Luce didn’t half remind Hollie of Het. Well, Hollie's wife was his cornet's father's little sister, it wasn't so much of a surprise, but even so. That hurt, shocked, disappointed look was pure Het, an expression she reserved for when he did something completely stupid. What, precisely, he'd done this time, he did not quite know, save that he was still trying to make things all right for a lad who was as tricksy to handle as a barrel of rotten gunpowder, and he didn’t know from day's end to day's end what mood he was going to be on the receiving end of. Like walking on eggshells, if eggshells were volatile, suspicious, and prone to soothing their tempers by getting fiercely rat-arsed.
"What wasn't?" he said warily. "What, seriously, sir? You did not mean to be - um - funny?"
"No, of course I bloody didn't!"
Luce gave a great sigh. "Ah, God. So you - you know - did you look at the beast? Other than, um, you know - professionally?"
"What -" With one final jerk of the bit, Mattie had the bay horse with all four feet on the ground. It was still a handsome beast. It was just - odd-looking. Three white feet, and a great lopsided white blaze to its face. One blue eye, and one, slightly manic, brown one.
A perfectly sound, sturdy, fine cavalry mount, who just happened to look both ugly and irregular. It was a bloody good horse, sound in wind and limb, beautifully put together, a mount a man could rely on - could be proud of. But now Luce came to mention it, the brute did look a bit like it had been sewn together from bits of at least two other horses. Good ones, but -.
And that had been a coincidence.
"Ah," said Hollie.


The Smoke of Her Burning. October 2015.

About Face - thoughts on disability in fiction

Too often in fiction we like to see characters with a disability as "brave" or "tragic" - something that can be mended, or magicked away, or ignored, or overcome. Sweet, and gender-neutral, and slightly romantic, but broken: a thing not quite right, that can be made "right" - and socially acceptable - by an external agency, under the right circumstances. Because that's the point of fiction, isn't it? We can edit out the things we don't want to know about, airbrush over the horrid bits, especially in historical fiction.

Well, I've been reading a lot lately about the soldiers in the first World War who suffered facial disfigurement, and the reconstructive surgery they were (and weren't) offered. It's been an ongoing battle in my head, around Thankful Russell, hence the research around facial disfigurement. Because it's so hard not to slip into romantic hero mould and have him just lightly damaged but noble, like a sort of 1640s Heathcliff - dark and brooding and, well, Ross Poldark. After all, he's handsome, right, our Russell? Fair and elegant and rather stunning from the right side - he can't be too disfigured, not so it shows: that's not how it works in books, he's got to be just a little bit enigmatically damaged.

And he ain't. The stories of those young men in the early twentieth century were heartbreaking - young men who'd lost their beauty by shrapnel, by machine gun, by fire, and who came home to find their sweethearts turning away, or that nurses didn't want to remove their bandages because they didn't want to see underneath. Their children cried to see them. Many of them turned to drink, many committed suicide because they were -
"..not meek and biddable, He was not grateful. He was sullen-mute and his cheek was an agony for most of his waking hours, itching and burning and throbbing. He whimpered and sobbed through most nights. He was barely worth the pennies Parliament paid for his care." ( -A Cloak of Zeal)

I used to work with a man, some years ago, whose face had been badly burned in an incident at his old workplace and who had ended up having to be redeployed because he could not bear to be looked at. He'd grown a beard, which was possibly not one of his better ideas, because it had grown in patchy and fair over the scars. (He was rather gorgeous, actually, with or without the scars, but he wouldn't have believed me if I'd told him.)

I had a really interesting review of the short story in which Russell meets the lady who will eventually become his wife (which is called "Si Tu Dois Partir" and it's available in the anthology "Steel and Lace" HERE) in which it was described as the story of two less physically-fortunate people who manage to find a touching and meaningful love. I get that, I get that absolutely, but why on earth should the fact of Russell's scarred face preclude him from romance?  Imagine a hero who isn't sure if he can still kiss a woman, who slurs his words when he's tired, who's not prepared to meekly put up with being stared at by the curious and patronised by the great and the good. Imagine a man with a conspicuous facial disfigurement who's still got a sexual identity, who is bloody good at his job, and who, every now and again, falls off the wagon when the strain of conforming to everybody else's normal is too much for him.

Thankful Russell's not pretty, not any more. Get used to it.

To His Coy Mistress, Some Lines After the Battle New-fought at NASEBY

Why court'st thou death instead of me?

Why, mistress, must thou prove thy worth

By putting all thy foes to flee

Despite the virtues of thy birth?

For lady, spurn me as you must

I know and love thy bravery

That's never failed to keep thy trust

In th'face of the King's knavery

Yet may I hope, my mistress gay,

My plea your fair ear reaches:

You dress yourself in fine array

And put on skirts instead of breeches?

I dare not test, lest what I find

Is frailer yet, a bubbled glass

That shatters in a changing wind

Or withers, like the mower's grass

Yet, lady, your secret's secure

- As yet is mine: that I am yours.

If you wondered what Luce was writing during A Wilderness of Sin....

The Smoke of Her Burning - and a bargain!

 

To celebrate Yorkshire Day, an exclusive cover reveal of the new book, The Smoke of Her Burning, set in Selby 1644. And to celebrate the cover reveal, the first three books in the series will remain at 99p each till the end of August! - help yourself here.

I hope there's a good explanation for this, Colonel Babbitt," Fairfax said, with a sigh. 
"No," said Hollie honestly, "but there is an explanation." 

There's a lot of miles between Essex and Cheshire.... 

...and newly-promoted Colonel Hollie Babbitt is cursing the most recent additions to his company, for every step of them. 

A scarred lieutenant with a death wish, and they don't call him Hapless for nothing. 
Captain Drew Venning. And his dog. 
Captain Penitence Chedglow, last seen smashing up the inside of Worcester Cathedral in an excess of godly zeal, and his new companion in bigotry, the silent but violent Webb. 
The mysterious Trooper Gray, a one-man insurrection. 

Forced to leave a posting to Cromwell's Eastern Association as a result of some more than usually scatter-brained chivalric meddling by the posh poet Lucey Pettitt, Hollie finds himself up to the elbows in freezing mud at Nantwich, mired in intrigue and insubordination. 

When Hollie's old nemesis Prince Rupert relieves the siege at Newark, freeing up a cavalry force to hammer Fairfax’s garrisons in Yorkshire, it looks as if the gallant Parliamentarian defenders will be overwhelmed in the North. But after a fierce attack is repulsed, the Northern Royalists retreat to their foothold at Selby, with its vital strategic command of both the Ouse and the road to York. 

It will be hard. It will surely be bloody. But Hollie’s rebel rabble may be the difference between victory and defeat for Parliament in the North.

If you like it, put a vote on it - A Broom At The Masthead preview....

He sniffed surreptitiously at the lustrous collar of his court suit.

It smelt, faintly, of stale rosewater and tobacco and sea-coal fumes, with an acrid note of sweat, and a slight overlay of wine. Under that was the strange, fugitive scent of silk, of tar and the sea and the spices of the hold of an East Indiaman - although that was possibly in his imagination, for he had never set foot on a ship bound for anywhere more exotic than the Low Countries.

He'd been told, in no uncertain terms, that he'd shirked long enough. That an officer of some seniority, even a supply officer of no great military significance or birth - General Monck had been very specific on that last, and Russell could still hear his commander's round rural Devonshire accent in the memory of it - it was his duty to present himself at court, and pay his loyal respects to His Majesty, on the glorious event of his restoration to the throne after eleven years of misery under the Commonwealth.

And then Monck had glowered, and narrowed his little bull's eyes, pouched in sagging red flesh. "You'll do the pretty, Major Russell, for all ye were a damnable Roundhead."

The which Major Thankful Russell could not argue, for with a name like Thankful, he could scarcely deny his staunch Puritan upbringing, and having almost had himself executed as a political subversive, he had to admire General Monck's perspicacity.

But. He had thought that after twenty years of keeping his head down, of being a ferociously good supply officer of no great military significance or birth, of waking and sleeping lists and requisitions and logistics - after a life of ruthless and selfless service, he might not, actually, be forced to show his face at court against his will. Monck said it was a matter of respect. Russell was a god-damned administrator, a jumped-up pen-pusher, who the hell did he think he was, in his arrogance, to refuse to present his respects to His Majesty in person?

They forgot, you see. They saw this neat, slightly austere, mouse-haired gentleman in his forty-second year, tall and a little stiff in the shoulders as a result of stooping over his requisition lists these last years. Short-haired, where preposterously curled wigs were the fashion, and so they called him Old Crophead, for his old Parliament leanings and his present lack of vanity. Not given to excess, of any nature, but a most prim and sober and respectable senior officer, the sight of whose scarred face could be relied upon to damp the high spirits of any gathering.

They forgot that twenty years ago he had been a firebrand, and a rebel. He looked cold and implacable, but how else might a man look, who had taken the thrust of the shattered butt of a pike through his cheek in the early years of the civil wars?

And so it had been a matter of duty, and a direct order, that Russell should present himself at court. Well, he had. He remembered little of it. He had, admittedly, fortified himself with perhaps more wine than he ought to have: anything to stop the shaking of his hands, his absolute bone-deep horror of being so conspicuously displayed in a public place. More than that, though, it had just been dull. Nothing happened. Lots of nothing happened. Just a lot of people talking a lot of nothing in a big room, that smelt of stale bodies and tallow and too much scent. He didn’t remember being presented to the King, though he supposed he must have, or Monck would have made him go back. Smiling politely at everyone, because he didn’t have a clue who was sleeping with whom, male or female, and it did not do to cut the reigning favourite, or the court wit. Being called Bosola, which he did not understand, but which had been kindly explained to him some months later by a friend who had read such old-fashioned tragedies that it referred to a most notorious court malcontent and bird of ill omen, in a play.

Being told, by a gaggle of cackling, bewigged striplings, that if one gilded a turd, it remained, regardless, a turd.

Suggesting to the Earl of Rochester that if he passed such remarks in Russell's hearing again, Russell would take Rochester's ungodly ape and insert it where the Lord's grace did not shine.

(Russell had known poets, in his time. The men he knew would have hesitated to scrawl such doggerel as Rochester wrote, on the wall of a troop latrine. He was not impressed by a seventeen-year-old libertine. And he meant it about the monkey.)

He'd stayed close to the wall, mostly, trembling, with the small of his back against the moulded plaster, taking some comfort from that cool strength. Holding to his duty, because that was what he did, what he had done since he was seventeen, and first a young officer. Feeling like an impostor, in his charcoal-grey lutestring silk, with a jacket that was so short and tight it barely covered his arse, and great billowing shirt-sleeves hanging from under the shrunken sleeves. Festooned with ribbon, like a damnable maypole, with a cravat that trailed in his supper if he was not cautious how he sat. Ribbons and lace and high-heeled shoes, which made him mince like a girl, and he could not and would not grow one of those ashy smears of moustache, even if his scarred face would allow it.

He had been a little drunk, and a lot nervous, and his teeth had been chattering on the rim of his delicate Venetian glass goblet even before he'd seen a face he knew, however vaguely: the chubby, deceptively amiable countenance of Charles Fairmantle, a distant Buckinghamshire neighbour. Member of Parliament now, he thought. Couldn't remember, and did not care, overly much. Fairmantle was a toady and a lecher, and a hanger-on to the peripheries of Rochester's lewd cohort, and the touch of his pudgy hand made a sweat of sheer repulsion break out on Russell's top lip, as if a warm slug had crawled over his skin.

They exchanged idle pleasantries, or at the least, Fairmantle made idle pleasantry and Russell stared blankly at him for the most part. And then,

"Accept my condolences, Major. A bad business. A bad business, indeed. You must be devastated."

"Oh. Indeed. Which condolences?"

The pudgy hand on his sleeve, solicitous, leaving a faint, damp print on the glimmering silk.

"I am so sorry, sir. I had assumed you knew. Your sister, major. God rest her, she - Four Ashes was burned, not three months ago, and poor Mistress Coventry with it." Fairmantle shook his head. "I am sorry. I had not meant - I had not known - sir, you turn positively pale -"

And Russell, who had hated his sister, and not set eyes on her in the better part of ten years, had bitten clean through the rim of his goblet in his shock nonetheless.

He thought that had been the moment when he had decided to come back to Buckinghamshire for good and all, though it had taken him a few months of despair and penny-pinching and soul-searching to work out how he might rebuild the house at Four Ashes.

And then a further few months of despair and soul-searching when he realised that there was only one woman he'd have entertained as mistress there, and that she was as utterly, irrevocably not for him as the moon for the moth.

Possibly he ought to have mentioned that fact to Thomazine Babbitt, for she was under no such doubts at all, as it turned out. There had only ever been one man for Thomazine, and the Lord be praised, it turned out it had always been Russell. It seemed she'd considered him her especial property since she was three years old. It might have saved him some considerable distress if she'd thought to tell him, though, he thought wryly.

Well. He smoothed the charcoal silk again, absently.

He'd thought to do her honour on their wedding day, and wear his finest.

Well, she was marrying a plain gentleman, not a courtier. He'd given all that up, along with his commission, just under a year ago. He was no man's but his own.

- And hers, of course. Always hers.

He took a deep breath, and pulled on the plain, decent, pewter-grey wool waistcoat with the plain silver buttons, and the plain, old-fashioned, straight-fitting coat that went with it.

"At least the lass will recognise you," he told himself, smiling wanly at his reflection in the mirror.

Ruffled a hand through his hair - grown to his shoulders, now, and no longer so indeterminately mouse as it had been when he'd worn it close-cropped, but streaked fair and dark as a field of wheat when the wind blows through it. She liked it so, worn long, and straight.

He was scarred, and worn, and weary, and his head hurt when the wind was in the north.

All that was true.

But Thomazine loved him. And further than that, he did not care.  

If you liked the first chapter of A Broom At the Masthead, vote for it HERE

Luce's love life

Wilbrecht is five today.

It's an odd thing, being in a room full of happy, healthy, lively, noisy, well-nourished children. On the one hand, it's something like being dropped into a pan of boiling water, when you first walk through the door. Hot and well-nigh unbearable, for about thirty seconds, and then you start to become numb.

And then on the other hand, you think how very fortunate they are, and how lucky we are to have them, and what a privilege it is that the vexatious little buggers are happy and healthy.  (And that five years ago there was no Wilbrecht, and six years ago I did not imagine there ever might be.)

And, you know, I wonder what it might be like, if you were on your own - that you loved someone, maybe, but that maybe they didn't know, or that it just wasn't the right time or place to tell them - if maybe, it might choke in your throat, to see a room full of happy, healthy, bright children, and to think - I could do that. One of those screaming, laughing little whelps could have been mine. If she hadn't died. If she had known.
That everyone you knew, even the unlikely, even the plain and the unpromising, belonged. And there you were, at twenty-ish, single, a widower, someone who had known what it was to be a part of a little commonwealth, and who had lost it. Thinking, perhaps, that life was unfair, and wondering what your own children might have looked like, if you had been blessed.
If she hadn't died.

How you might have loved your never-children. Dried their tears, kissed bumps and grazes, told stories. Wiped noses. And it would have all been a kind myth, because you would have been just as cross and impatient as any other of these harrassed parents at times, but not in your never-world.

They loved their children, even in 1645.

Reckon we need to get Luce married off?