Duking Days Revolution Released Today

The sequel to Duking Days Revolution has been released today on Amazon
Here’s the Blurb:
Helena Woulfe has put the horrors of the Monmouth Rebellion behind her and the respectability and security she always wanted. Her brother Aaron is in Holland with the Prince of Orange, and surely what he plans is treason? While Henry carries his own sorrow, pining for another man's wife. Prince William arrives in England to re-establish the Anglican Church, and when riots break out in London, Helena is forced to flee from her home - again. Guy Palmer grows more prosperous and their marriage is happy, until Helena's discovery of her husband's weakness drives her into an unwise liaison and she learns there is a price to pay for recklessness and keeping secrets. While Helena strives to keep what she holds dear, can she and her brothers attain what they desire and above all, will the Woulfe siblings ever learn the fate of their missing Father?

Do drop by Anita's Website to read an excerpt or see the trailer, even just to sign the guestbook and say hello. I love hearing from readers and authors alike.

May Madness and Scotsmen

We have leased a brand new, hi-tech apartment in central Manchester for six months while we are opening a northern office, and there is a Premier League Football match being played at Old Trafford today between St Petersburg and Scotland – 100,000
descended on the city. There’s not a hotel room to be found within a ten mile radius and five super tankers of lager have been brought in to supply the concessions being set up. [They have machines which pour twenty pints of lager in one go – efficient or what?] A three minute walk from the apartment is a large square where all those without tickets, and that’s most of them, can watch the match on a giant screen and carry on drinking.

Those writers who have a romantic, dark, handsome and brooding, Scottish hero in their Medieval novels. You know the type, ones with a tortured but spiritual head of his clan who rides his magnificent steed across the heather, his kilt wrapped round his manly torso and flung over a muscular shoulder, in pursuit of his lady into whose ear he whispers in a soft highland brogue before whisking her off to his lonely grey castle on a hill overlooking the sea.

I’d be willing to bet it would take only one ginger haired, pot-bellied Glaswegian yelling ‘Do ye wanna gi’ me some hied, hen?’ as his mate displays his bum cleavage and offers a swig from his tin of lager at 9.30 in the morning - to cure them of that particular delusion.

‘Romantic Scotland’ – you have to be joking!

When History Can Bite You

Are you proud of your historical trivia knowledge, unearthed while reading or researching historical fiction? Does the idea that in 1660 it became law to bury people in woollen shrouds rather than linen to promote the English wool industry fascinate you? And that most well off people ignored it and preferred to pay the fine because only ‘low folk’ were buried in flannel?
Or is your retention of little nibbles of information from a long forgotten past, something a majority of people would prefer you left there and didn’t mention at all?

I was taken to a restaurant recently by my family at a local hotel, a vast, restored Jacobean mansion. Now a fine dining restaurant, they boasted on their literature and expensive looking menus that, Prince Charles had stayed there overnight whilst hiding from Cromwell’s men on his flight from the Battle of Worcester in 1660.

I should have said nothing to anyone, but it nagged at me. Well it would wouldn’t it? So I whispered to the Maitre de Hotel that Charles was king by 1661 and he wasn’t fleeing from anyone by then. That perhaps the date should read 1651?

I didn’t even call him over especially, but squeezed my little snippet in between serving our drinks and ordering the meal. The man gave me a completely silent, polite nod, though the colour did start to creep up into his rather stern face as he bowed and left us.

No one thought anything about it, well I didn’t anyway and we were halfway through our starters when my son noticed that the waitresses were rapidly collecting up all the menus. “Now look what you’ve done.” My daughter whispered fiercely. “No one is being allowed to read the menu.”

She was right, another member of staff was writing the courses down on a blackboard.

After the HNS conference on 12th April, some of us are attending a meal in the Georgian Assembly Rooms at York. Their blurb says they were completed in 1735 and received praise for its sumptuous marble columns from people such as Daniel Defoe. Shall I call the manager and tell him Daniel Defoe died in 1731?

No perhaps not.

The Victorians

I’m well into my Victorian wip about a young woman who suffered a traumatic experience in her youth, begins her emotional growth through a series of family secrets.

One of these is the discovery that her mother had a lover before her marriage to her father and to clarify what this means in her own mind, she alludes to the sex act, but doesn’t actually give it a name.

I’ve been criticised for making the character ‘too naïve’ in her attitude. However my research illustrates, and my own family history where Victorian characters are remembered with awe and affection, confirms, this wasn’t an unusual attitude.

Victorian sex among polite company was rarely alluded to, much less referred to directly. My twenty year old heroine may sound naïve by modern standards, but no well brought up girl in 1882 would talk openly about sex – apparently. Who really knows what went on within polite families?

Attitudes had changed by the later Victorian years. At one time, women attracted all the sympathy and none of the blame over indiscretions as they were considered as bordering on sexless. Men represented the fallen, sinful, lustful creatures, wrongfully taking advantage of the fragility of women.

By the 1870’s, it was the women being held accountable, while men were regarded as slaves to their sexual appetites and couldn’t be blamed. This put women into two categories, frigid or insatiable. A young lady was only worth as much as her chastity, and once she was awakened sexually, there was no stopping her. I can only assume a fair amount of wishful thinking went into this conclusion; must have been all those corsets and tight binding!

Chastity, or at least the appearance of it, was crucial, for once a woman fell victim to sexual urges, nothing could redeem her reputation. A great deal of prudery resulted and of course - the word prude means ‘one who pretends to an ignorance he or she does not possess.’

Or perhaps I am only seeing one end of the social scale - the bottom end!! [Excuse the pun]

My own mother, born in 1928 was brought up in a household where no one actually said ‘it’, but everyone had at least a vague idea of what ‘it’ was and especially when and with whom you were supposed to do it.
Fiercely proud of her parents and the fact they brought up nine children in a three-bedroomed house in turn-of-the-century London, she responded to my perfectly innocent twelve-year-old question of, "If they only had a three bedroom house, why did Grandma have so many children?"
"She couldn’t do anything about it, they never discussed what happened in the bedroom. No one ever talks about such things."
"Not even to say 'Get off?"
I got a clip round the ear for that!

HNS Writers' Conference

I signed up for a one day conference run by the Historical Novel Society in April at the Railway Museum in York. I t's not a massive venue and there isn't a published agenda yet, but coffee and lunch is laid on, so that's me sorted!

The panel of speakers will include Elizabeth Chadwick, Suzannah Dunn, Jude Morgan, Andrew Martin, and Lynne Patrick, publisher at Crème de la Crime.

I'm looking forward to a whole day of listening and talking about nothing but writing! Bliss! Only other writers could understand that, my family certainly don't.

To illustrate, here's a conversation I had with my son MD [He won't let me call him Michael and I don't particularly like Mike. That makes him sound like an adolescent doesn't it. Well he's 26!]

MD: "Are you telling me you want to go away for two nights to sit
around and talk books and history?"
Me: "Yes, and I'm really looking forward to it."
MD: "Why not take the train in the morning and come back the same night? It's only an hour's journey."
Me: "Because then I can spend the previous afternoon exploring ancient York and pottering in bookshops, there is an after-conference meal planned. Then I can look round the museum on Sunday morning before driving back."
MD: "You mean, you're going to talk about books all evening too?"
Me: "Yes, yes, yes and it's going to be great."
MD: "You're weird, Mum."

I am soooo misunderstood

The Great Plague

Plague came to London during most summers in the 17th century. In April 1665, when the first victims appeard, few people paid much attention.

That summer was unseasonably hot and the plague bacillus thrived. People fell sick across St Giles; then cases broke out within the City walls and spread across the districts of Whitechapel, Westminster and Southwark.

The rich left the city and most of the physicians went with them. Many clergy left too. The king and his court decamped to Salisbury. The poor, on the other hand, were forbidden to leave London. Seen as carriers of the disease, they were turned back at the boundaries.

By June the roads were clogged with people desperate to escape London. The Lord Mayor responded by closing the gates to anyone who did not have a certificate of health. These certificates became a currency more valuable than gold, and a thriving market in forged certificates evolved.

Victims died within days, in agony from fevers and infected swellings. With no cure, the authorities declared the ‘plague orders', which decreed that victims should be shut into their own houses and left to die.

Those found to be infected were shut into their houses with their uninfected family, the doors nailed shut and marked with a red cross. Guards were posted at the door to see that no one got out and he had to be bribed to allow food in to the inmates. It wasn't unknown for families to break through the walls of the house to escape. In some houses, the inhabitants lowered a noose over the guard's head from an upper window and hung him so they could get away.

To try and protect themselves, people sniffed herbs and nosegays to drive out the bad air. They fasted and prayed, while the Privy Council closed inns and lodging houses. Many markets were cancelled and street stalls banned. Forty thousand dogs and 80,000 cats were slaughtered. This last move actually made things worse, as the plague- carrying rats were now free of predators. By the end of July, more than 1,000 Londoners were dying each week.

Edmund Berry Godfrey was a magistrate who refused to leave the city and presided over the burial carts, dressed in his trademark black hat with a gold band to ensure grave robbing and looting was kept to a minimum. Charles II ennobled him for his services.

Plague Doctors were mostly unqualified volunteers - the real doctors having fled the city in the early stages of the plague.

Gown: A full-length gown of waxed canvas, under which he wore leather breeches.
Mask: The mask covered the head completely and was gathered in at the neck.
Leather Hat: To indicate the man was a doctor and to add protection to the head.
Undergarments: An embroidered smock soaked in exotic preservative liqueurs, camphor oil and wax. Again, intended to isolate the doctor's body from plague-causing bad air.
Beak: The beak that was attached to the mask was stuffed with herbs, perfumes or spices to purify the air when the doctor was close to victims.
Wooden Stick: To drive away those who came to close.
Glass/Crystal Eyes: Built into the mask to protect the eyes.
Leather Gloves and Full Length Boots: to protect the hands and feet from contact with the disease.

The specter-like appearance of the garb was designed to communicate hopelessness! In a time when there when few people could read, the costume sent a powerful message: "Stay in your homes. There is plague in the streets."