Fifty Shades Of Darker Gray - when characters fight back

 

Marston Moor really is going to be a grim book.

(With much humour in it, but I very much fear that it will be a sort of grisly, Babbitty battlefield humour.)

Today I have been much thinking about Gray. It's no spoiler that Gray is a woman; we'd call her genderqueer now, but in the 1640s cross-dressing women were sufficient of a menace that King Charles went public about his disapproval of such wenches in the Army, issuing a proclamation in 1643 to prevent the horror of it all.

There will be probably one day be a Gray story, because she intrigues me, too, but I'm not always sure I like her, never mind understand her.

This all comes from a remark about Tom Hiddleston - an actor who's doubtless a mighty fine actor, but who doesn't float my boat - one of those daft little memes that goes "Tonight, darling, all your neighbours will know my name."

And I thought that was too funny not to use. Now, you know, Hollie - staid old married man whose idea of naked is leaving his sword on the table downstairs and whose definition of ecstasy is ember tart and Het in the same place at the same time - it's not something he'd ever say. And Luce would probably be too busy kissing his way up the inside of the lady's wrist and trying to look poetic and yearning whilst wrestling with her laces. Venning - nah, Alice would kill him. And the chances of Russell going to bed with anybody for another... well... a while, are remote: he's too scared, after the last time.

So it's going to be Gray, isn't it? It's going to be Gray, trying to demonstrate to a troop full of testosterone that she has bigger balls than they do.

The thing is, though, I was thinking about that young lady. I just can't work her out at all. She is a woman, who dresses, fights, and behaves like a man. Does she want to be a man? I'm not sure she does. (I'm not sure it would cross her mind to, either.)

Does she want to be a woman, though - I'm not sure she does that, either, and given that she is going to have a relationship with one and possibly two members of the rebel rabble, that's what I find intriguing.

And that's where I start to flounder a bit. Because imagine this: there's Gray. Young, not exactly what you'd call pretty, but in possession of all the necessary female anatomy, kicking around one of the rowdier sorts of knocking-shop with some disreputable sorts. There she is, swaggering about making slightly tipsy remarks of the nature attributed to Mr Hiddleston. This is the point at which she's going to fall into the arms of some young man who's going to make her a real woman... right?

And the answer is - no. I wish to goodness it was, but she's resisting it every step of the way. She just is not going to let me write it that way. And she's going to have her fling with one of the whores, and ... so she's going to be gay, right, and that's why she dresses as a boy, because she's some sort of butch drag queen?

And - nope, she won't let me do that, either. (She's currently glowering at me with her bottom lip sticking out like a baggage-mule's, and her eyes narrowed. Definite no, then. )

Gray's mother was raped by a soldier at the siege of La Rochelle, but I don't think that's it, I don't think she's frightened of men, I don't think she has any trauma in her past from which the right man will free her. (Don't think she's frightened of very much, actually.) And when it comes to it - so to speak - she does like sex. Though she is, very definitely, the dominant one. So to speak. And then again, possibly not.

Which leaves me with an unpalatable fact.

She's a woman, who is not motivated by "feminine" things. She's not moved by relationships, or sex, or love. She's not gay, and she's not straight either. She enjoys the physical aspects, but she enjoys them just as much with a woman as a man, and she's quite open about that.

Now I could decide that I'm going to write her differently. That I'm going to make her change, when she meets the right man: that really, she's got a heart of gold - because that'll make her nice and accessible, it'll be a nice comfortable read.

But she's not like that.
And yes, the man she marries - and she will, and if you've read all the books you know who she marries - she will break his heart. He's one of the more likeable lads of the rebel rabble and there is a strong argument that he deserves better. But does he? Or is he marrying her because he thinks, in typical cork-brained romantic style, that love will change her into someone he likes much better...?

If you work on the assumption that people in books should be real people - should be themselves, should be believable, even if that means they're not always nice, or kind, or comfortable - she's good.

But by heck, she's hard work to write as herself. 

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.

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?

Selby - a poll, please!

I have a certain situation, in Selby, and your opinion would be much valued.

Luce, Gray, and Russell, inside the barricades. Doing deeds of daring nefariety, if that is a word, which Hollie is going to go mental about when he finds out, but there it is.

("You did WHAT!! If you get your damn' fool self killed Lucifer your bloody auntie will never sleep with me again!")

Luce - nice young man, earnest, principled.
Gray - no principles at all but likes Luce and wouldn't want to make him sad
Russell - stark mad most of the time and nothing to lose, but essentially a decent young man

So.... having been helped by a Royalist sentry, how would you feel, as a reader, if either Russell or Gray cut the sentry's throat?

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...

A Writer's Lot Is Not A Happy One

Today, I cannot settle to writing.

There are too many little sub-plots going on in my head. I want to write the Putney Debates, where I know Hollie is going to lose his temper with the prosing and I know Russell will be hurt and humiliated. (I want to know where that one is headed, because I think there may be friendships broken at Putney, and they are characters I like.)

I want to write Ireton's wedding, which may be done as a standalone just for fun, because Het will attend that (well, dear, you couldn't expect poor little Bridget to stand up on her own in front of a room full of soldiers, could you?) Where Het goes the girls will go, and where the girls go there is often trouble, of the sort customarily engendered by toddlers.

I want to carry on with the start of the as-yet untitled Marston Moor book, which starts so horribly, and is likely to continue for a good three hundred-ish pages with brawl after brawl until the Gray/Russell dynamic sorts itself out to everyone's satisfaction. Russell is taller than Gray and considerably madder. Gray is rougher than Russell. Neither of them will back down, and both of them have their little sore points on which they cannot bear to be baited, and both of them will continue to bait each other until they've worked out who's top dog. Russell's a half-mad Puritan with a drink problem. (He drinks because it hurts, and it doesn't stop hurting, so he doesn't stop drinking. All too logical. She says ruefully.) Gray is an enigmatic little bugger with a chip on his shoulder who can't stand authority and doesn't take orders. You might wonder at this point how come Gray hasn't yet been shot or disciplined for his rebellion and there is an answer to that...

And of course it's such a lovely sunny day that I find myself sitting in the garden with a sprig of rosemary in my fingers, snuffing at the scent of clean linen and rosemary and fresh air. Thinking that even in the mini Ice Age of the 17th century, even in the middle of a civil war, surely Hollie must have got a bit of time off for good behaviour. Time to skulk off somewhere by himself for an hour with a pen and a bit of paper, and find himself a nice tree to lean up against and write letters home to his wife. (He has a habit of gnawing the end of his pen when he's thinking, and as Luce has pointed out, if it causes him that much internal anguish to set pen to paper, it can't be good for him and he ought to stop doing it.)
It won't be the good-humoured Blossom that's snuffing the back of his neck at this point, the velvety muzzle exploring Hollie's collar will still be Tyburn's. But I think for the morning, we can leave Captain Babbitt sprawling in the grass trying to edit his recent exploits so as not to scare his good lady, and sending his best love to his daughters. Luce is reading the poetry of Catullus, to the amusement of the rest of the troop.
http://io9.com/a-latin-poem-so-filthy-it-wasnt-translated-until-the-2-1589504370
(This one shuts 'em up somewhat. Um. Girly? Sorry, Luce, no offence, mate...)

And Russell? He's doing - absolutely - nothing. And he's enjoying it.

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?

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?"

Pettitt's Poetry Corner: A Young Officer Looks Back on a Singularly Undistinguished Career

 - with annotations by Col. Hollie Babbitt, literary critic of no renown whatever

 

When first my wond'ring eyes did turn

On SOMERSET's streams and rills

On Bristol's many marvels

On GLASTONB'RY's famed hill

The flat wolds of LINCOLNSHIRE

The busy town of Leeds

The barren wastes of LANCASHIRE  (watch itt, Pettyt, I am stille yr commandeing officer - HTB)
Which yet gives us good cheese           

 

Twas then I first did comprehend

The beauty of this isle

For having come from ESSEX

A march of many a mile

I have seen many wonders

And many varied scenes

Of inns and streets and lovely fields

In many a different green

 

For now I am come home again

And by the LORD's grace whole

'Tis not, I find, a palace

That yet exalts my soul

But 'tis a humble cottage

With a welcome at the gate

With loving and with friendship

Where my dear MIST'RESS waits.  (thatt must bee a diffrent maistress than the one I mett - HTB)           

 For near or far where'er I roam
Where my love lies, is my home.

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!

Pettitt's Poetry Corner - A Sonnet to His Mistress Gray's Left Eyebrow

Upon the event of being challenged by Mistress Gray to produce lines to her particular request.

More lush than fashionable beauty's brow

And scorning false pretence

Arched like the ancient SCYTHIAN's bow

At thy lover's want of sense

Thy scorn conceals a woman's heart

Most passionate and warm

But pleasure at the poet's art

Moves not thy shapely form

'Tis not my love you'd turn away

Or spurn beneath your feet

You'd take your faithful Lucey, GRAY

Without the literary conceit.

Remember, when you next make fun

Without my verse I am struck dumb.



Cornet Lucifer Pettitt, the most junior officer of Babbitt's Troop of Horse, is a young man of many parts.
The miracle is that most of them are still attached.