How do you
overcome the loathing, lust and bitterness threatening you and your family’s honour?
It’s 1363, and in Steyning Castle, Sussex, Dickon de Bohun is enjoying life as a squire in the household of Earl Raoul de Fougère. Or he would be, if it weren’t for Edwin de Courtenay, who’s making his life a misery with his bullying, threatening to expose the truth about Dickon’s birth.
At home in Meonbridge for Christmas, Dickon notices how grown-up his childhood playmate, Libby Fletcher, has become since he last saw her and feels the stirrings of desire. Libby, seeing how different he is too, falls instantly in love. But as a servant to Dickon’s grandmother, Lady Margaret de Bohun, she could never be his wife.
Margery Tyler, Libby’s aunt, meeting her niece by chance, learns of her passion for young Dickon. Their conversation rekindles Margery’s long-held rancour against the de Bohuns, whom she blames for all the ills that befell her family, including her own servitude. For years she’s hidden her hunger for retribution, but she can no longer keep her hostility in check.
As the future Lord of Meonbridge, Dickon knows he must rise above de Courtenay’s loathing and intimidation, and get the better of him. And, surely, he must master his lust for Libby, so his own mother’s shocking history is not repeated? Of Margery’s bitterness, however, he has yet to learn…
Beset by the hazards these powerful and dangerous emotions bring, can young Dickon summon up the courage and resolve to overcome them?
Secrets, hatred and betrayal, but also love and courage – Squire’s Hazard, the fifth MEONBRIDGE CHRONICLE.
Follow the tour HERE
Buy Links:
This book is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
The paperback is available to buy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones.
¸.•*´¨)✯ ¸.•*¨) ✮ ( ¸.•´✶
CAROLYN HUGHES
FUN
FACTS
Not quite as old as the Ark…
I’m
so old that my first job, as a computer programmer, was a very new profession.
How computers have changed since then! When I started (decades ago), a single computer
filled a room and looked something like this:
Source : Steve Elliott from UK - HP system, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia
Writing programs for the computer was done on paper, and the instructions (which were all in code) were transcribed onto cards (and eventually, the cards were replaced by disks) to be fed into the machine. It took hours for the program to run, and then it printed out the results in a great long “printout” which I then had to “debug” for errors before submitting it all over again. I loved it!!
Source: ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons
I didn’t remain a programmer but eventually found my vocation as a technical author, writing all sorts of business documents for a variety of organisations, including banks, software developers, medical instrument manufacturers, and an international hotel chain. I loved that job even more and did it until I retired! But it still very much involved computers, and over the long years of my career, I saw the machines both shrink in physical size and grow massively in power. I’ve read that the phone in your pocket now has more than 100,000 times the computer's processing power that landed men on the moon in 1969. How astonishing is that? And a pretty fun fact!
Abattoirs and submarines…
In
between being a computer programmer and becoming a technical author, I had
another job entirely, with nothing to do with computers. I trained to be a Careers
Officer, working with young people, mostly in schools, to help them decide what
job they wanted to do when they left school (and what subjects to study in
preparation for it).
I only stayed in that job for a few years – somehow, “working with young people” didn’t seem to suit me. But there was one aspect of the job that suited me very well, and that was visiting potential employers. That might sound dull, but I found it absolutely fascinating. Not many jobs give you the opportunity to discover what people actually do on a dairy farm or sheep farm (I worked in rural Dorset) or what goes on in an abattoir (grim, of course, but interesting too – I wasn’t squeamish). Or give you the opportunity to visit Royal Navy ships, to find out what work young sailors do, or even more exciting, to go down inside a submarine (claustrophobic, I have to say!). And I’ve always had a fascination for factories! I used to love watching industrial processes in action – making things, sometimes on a small scale and sometimes huge. And that’s an interest I’ve retained all my life, though now my pleasure is in visiting historical workplaces: mills, old mines, and manufacturers.
FUN FACT ABOUT MY WRITING
I DIDN’T “choose” to write historical fiction…
My
choice to write historical fiction (as opposed to some other genre) was mostly
down to chance. I’ve been writing on and off all my adult life – short stories,
novels, children’s stories, and non-fiction. But, relatively late in life, I
decided to study for a Masters in Creative Writing, for which I had to write a
“creative piece.” I’d written a couple of contemporary women’s novels by then (neither published), and I wanted to
do something different. I looked for inspiration amongst my old scribblings and
found the handwritten (in pencil, in a school exercise book) draft of ten
thousand words of a novel I’d begun in my twenties. It was set in fourteenth-century rural England, about peasant families' lives. The plot
wasn’t up to much, nor was the writing, but I was really attracted by its
period and setting. Somehow, I had a lightbulb moment, and a few days later, I
had an outline for the novel that became my first Meonbridge Chronicle, Fortune’s
Wheel. Having written that, I found I wanted to write more historical
novels, and so here I am, five published books later (I have others in the
wings awaiting publication), and I do think of myself as a Historical
Novelist. And I wouldn’t have it any different…
FUN FACT ABOUT SQUIRE’S HAZARD
Poison is in everything…
Paracelsus,
a sixteenth-century Swiss physician and alchemist said: “Poison is in
everything, and nothing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison
or a remedy.” And so it proves in Squire’s Hazard, where the same
plant is described as effective as the means to harm a man and as the remedy
to heal a cow. How I enjoy this sort of research! I knew nothing about herbal
remedies or the use of plants for nefarious purposes, but I needed to find out
(on behalf of one of my characters, of course) what was possible in terms of
both healing and harming. So, I
investigated which plants – commonly available in the English countryside – might be used as a remedy for curing mastitis cows and might also
be good for stilling a lout’s vicious, misogynist tongue. And – fun fact! – I
found they could be one and the same! Belladonna that is, or deadly nightshade, was good for both and an anaesthetic called “dwale.” But, as
Paracelsus said, whether it was curative or fatal depended entirely on the
measure given! How intriguing…
A spicy stew, awash with bright red sauce…
I
always put food in my novels. It’s one of the ways to bring my Meonbridge folk
to life, showing what they eat. However, just occasionally, the food has another
purpose in the novel than mere sustenance. And, in Squire’s Hazard,
where the eponymous squire, Dickon, is the target of bullying by one of his
fellow squires, I was trying to think of a prank that might involve food. I knew
that ordinary people in the Middle Ages ate a lot of “pottage,” a sort of
vegetable stew, and, although wealthier people had pottage too, if a rather
more refined version, they also had meaty stews, which might be rich and
spicy. These were called brewets. And it was reading about the varieties
of brewet that gave me my idea about the prank.
As part of his role as squire, Dickon is required to serve his lord at table and, at an important dinner, he’s faced with serving a particularly tricky dish. The platter contains a “Sarcenes brewet”, a meat stew with a sauce coloured with alkanet, a herb whose roots produce a crimson dye. The dish wasn’t supposed to be wet and sloppy, but the bully had arranged for it to be badly made on purpose so that “the pieces of meat were almost awash with the garish sauce.” Poor Dickon! Why Dickon was forced to serve the bright red brewet, and what happened when he did can, of course, be discovered by reading Squire’s Hazard!
CAROLYN HUGHES
CAROLYN HUGHES has lived much of her life in Hampshire. With a first degree in Classics and English, she started working life as a computer programmer, then a very new profession. But it was technical authoring that later proved her vocation, as she wrote and edited material, some fascinating, some dull, for an array of different clients, including banks, an international hotel group, and medical instruments manufacturers.
Having written creatively for most of her adult life, it was not until her children flew the nest several years ago that writing historical fiction took centre stage, alongside gaining a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Portsmouth University and a PhD from the University of Southampton.
Squire’s Hazard is the fifth MEONBRIDGE CHRONICLE, and more stories about the folk of Meonbridge will follow.
You can connect with Carolyn through her website www.carolynhughesauthor.com and on social media.
Website Twitter Facebook Book Bub Amazon Author Page UK Goodreads
Thank you for hosting Carolyn Hughes today, Mary Ann. Great post!
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure.
Delete