Surfacing Again: Lindisfarne

Surfacing Again came out yesterday and I thought today I’d give you some back ground about it’s setting, the ‘Holy Island’ of Lindisfarne, just off the north-east coast of England.

Map of northern Britain in the post-Roman period.
Map of northern Britain in the post-Roman period.

It’s a tidal island, accessible twice a day during low tide. These days there’s a causeway to drive across, but in days gone by you had to walk across the sands to reach it, along the ‘pilgrim way’. The path is marked by large stakes driven in to the sands and you can still do it today reasonably easily, so long as you don’t mind a bit of paddling.

The first monastery there was founded in 635AD by St Aidan as a daughter-house of Iona. That monastery was probably where the parish church stands today, but was made of wood, so no visible trace remains. It’s this monastery that was responsible for the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels and where St Cuthbert was Bishop in the 680s. After his death it became a place of pilgrimage. Most of what we know about St Cuthbert comes from his ‘Life’, written by Bede, a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in the early ninth century. You can read a translation of his Life of St Cuthbert here.

The monastery was devastated by a Viking attack in June 793. There was a huge sense of disbelief across the continent that one of the largest and holiest foundation in European Christendom could be destroyed rather than protected by its patron saint. Subsequent attacks finally drove the monks out to Northam on the mainland in the 830s and in 875 they formally abandoned the island and eventually settled in the old Roman fort of Chester-le-Street seven years later. St Cuthbert’s remains ended up at Durham, where they became a good money-spinner for the abbey there.

In the meantime, there’s evidence from gravestones on the island that a small Christian community remained on Lindisfarne; but the priory wasn’t rebuilt until after the Norman conquest of 1066 as a daughter-house of Durham. That’s the ruins that are visible today. The monks were turned out and the priory abandoned during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century. You can read more about the history of the priory here. With annotations!

The castle, at the opposite end of the island to the priory, began life as a fort in the mid-1500s with stone robbed from the abandoned priory. At that time England was still very much threatened by Scotland. However when Elizabeth 1 died in 1603, the two countries became ruled by the same monarch and the threat disappeared.

By 1900, the fort was in ruins. It was bought by Edward Hudson, who employed Edward Lutyens to turn it into a little castle, where the nobility of the day came to socialise. He also employed Gertrude Jekyll to create a walled garden for him.

You can visit Lindisfarne for the day or you can book accommodation. If you can’t manage that, I recommend the magic of Google Street View. You can visit the priory ruins, walk along the beach where Lin meets her otters, see the ruins of St Cuthbert’s monastic cell on the additional tiny, tiny island and even walk across the sands on the Pilgrim Path.

And as a final note, I was at Ofelia’s blog yesterday with the ginger biscuit recipe that Rowan uses in her café.  Find it here!

Read on for more about Surfacing Again and an excerpt.

Surfacing Again: A short contemporary lesbian romance

Cover: Surfacing Again

Melinda is staying on Lindisfarne for a Christmas break with her old friend when an unexpected argument leaves her alone for the holiday.

It’s the first Christmas since her mother died and the island’s peace and wild tranquillity bring balm to her wounded heart. Two chance meetings, first with a pair of wary otters and then with cafe-owner Rowan, bring her genuine joy.

Will her tentative relationship with Rowan survive the end of her holiday and the turning of the year?

short sapphic Christmas story. With otters.

Chapter 2: Christmas Eve

“You look like you could do with a hot drink. Your lips are blue,” the small woman wrapped in the huge green apron said. She was sweeping the windswept grey pavement outside the little cafe on the corner in the village as Melinda peered through the window at the menu, wondering whether they were open.
“Are you serving?” she asked.
The woman was about her own age, with a geometric blonde haircut and an impish expression as she looked at Lin over her broom.
“I’m not actually open for another couple of hours,” she said, smiling and leaning the broom against the wall. “But come inside while I set up. You must be frozen. It’s a bitter wind.”
Melinda smiled at her. “Why are you bothering to brush the pavement then?” she asked.
The other woman smiled again. “Habit,” she said. “It’s habit. I like my routines. Come on, come in. I’ve lit the log burner already, so it’s toasty inside.”
There were a couple of sofas set at angles in front of the log burner and a few small tables squeezed in around them. It really was a tiny cafe, probably converted from someone’s front room that had been knocked through into the room behind at some time in the past.
“Here,” her saviour said. “Sit down, take your coat off. “What would you like to drink? I’ve got…well, anything really. Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”
“Tea would be wonderful, actually,” Lin said. “I haven’t had any yet this morning. I got up early to watch the sunrise.” She was determined to make the most of her stay on the island of Lindisfarne, despite the drama of the last couple of days.
She sighed.
The other woman flashed her another grin before she could get too lost in her thoughts. “It was beautiful this morning,” she said. “I’m Rowan,” she said in a friendly fashion, going behind the counter and putting a kettle on.
“I’m Lin,” Melinda said. “Is this your place?” She hunched forward and stretched out her frosty hands to the fire.
“Yes. Me and my girlfriend started it a couple of years ago, but it’s just me now.” She shot Lin a sidelong glance.
Melinda smiled back. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Very cosy.”
“It’s tiny, but it works. I live upstairs.” She nodded toward the back of the cafe where there was a closed door beside the one that led out to the kitchen, presumably leading to some stairs. “We only do drinks and cakes, and soup and sandwiches and breakfast rolls; a very limited menu. But it’s all people need if they’ve come over to the island for the day. No-one wants to waste time with a full sit-down lunch.”
She put a tray with a pot of tea, a jug of milk, and two mugs down on the low table between the sofas, sinking into the one opposite Lin.
Lin nodded. “Yes, that makes sense. It’s quieter at this time of year, though?”
“Yes, very much so. Although it can get busy now for a bit, around Christmas. And people stay in the self-catering properties and guest houses all year round, obviously. If I didn’t need the income to live, I’d say I prefer it when it’s quieter.” She said that with an open smile. “Present company excepted, of course!”
She leaned forward and poured them each a cup of tea. She seemed to have all the time in the world to chat to a random stranger she’d rescued from the freezing morning.

Buy Surfacing Again

#Am Reading

This week a sweet, sapphic holiday romance set in Victorian Scotland by Meg Mardell, and two gay romances… Astounding! by Kim Fielding, and the audio of Shattered Glass by Dani Alexander.

A Highland Hogmanay by Meg Mardell

Cover: A Highland Hogmanay by Meg Mardell

I really enjoyed this sweet sapphic novella. It’s a Victorian Christmas delight, a seasonal hug with just a nip of whisky. The two main characters are Sharda, an heiress who is just beginning to realise she is her own person and doesn’t have to run around after her terrible relatives; and Finella, a woman who’s taken over her father’s job as the manager of a Scottish estate. The contrast between them is very marked at the beginning of the story. Sharda has never had any agency and has been content to drift along trapped in the web her family have woven around her in their hopes of getting access to her fortune. Finella has had entirely too much put upon her by her scapegrace employer and is constantly weighted down with the responsibility of looking after the castle, farms and people in her care.

Initially this is a case of mistaken identity; but the two women move through that to cement first a friendship and then a romance. I really liked both of them and wanted them to sort their misunderstanding out. They are well drawn, well rounded characters and the secondary characters are charming, particularly Finella’s brothers! The period detail is nicely researched and held up well for me. I felt there was enough dialect speech to give a flavour of the period and the location, but not so much it overwhelmed the pace of the story. Recommend for a comforting holiday read! (Also the cover! It’s gorgeous!)

Astounding! by Kim Fielding

Cover: Astounding by Kim Fielding

This is an homage to the golden age of science fiction magazines as well as a very satisfying, sweet love story. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Kim Fielding I haven’t loved, in particular her science-fiction and paranormal stories. This is no exception. The golden age of the science fiction magazines is over and Astounding! is dying. Carter, its founding editor, is a purposeless, broke and depressed borderline alcoholic. He writes a snippy rejection letter to a writer who persists in sending him terrible, terrible submissions and then in a fit of remorse drives to his house to apologise. The guy, John, is a) gorgeous and b) bonkers, as he claims to be an alien wanting to send a message via Astounding! to his people to come and take him home. They’re both lonely and they quickly make a connection despite Carter’s reservations. It’s a really satisfying read with the well-rounded, complex characters you’d expect from this author. There’s also a road-trip with Carter’s super-star-writer friend (who I pictured as a cross between George R. R. Martin and Arthur C. Clarke) and his husband, which is a delight. Recommend!

Shattered Glass by Dani Alexander  (audio)

Cover: Shattered Glass, Dani Alexander

This is another favorite I suddenly realised I could get the audio for with Whispersync. And again, one of those stories that definitely allowed me to pick up further detail and depth in the audio. Contemporary USA. Austin Glass is a rich boy playing at being a Detective. He’s very good at it and wants to segue into the FBI. He’s got a society marriage lined up, he tumbles through life without much touching him. The reason for that is…revealed as the story goes on. He finds himself unexpectedly attracted to a male witness/suspect in a people trafficking ring. This is not something he’s prepared for and once that thread gets pulled, all sorts of things in his life begin to unravel. That’s the main focus of the story, but the thriller plot is very respectable and kept me interested, with another two books clearly being set up in this one. These haven’t happened yet, but I still check occasionally to see whether they have because this one is so good.  The narration is great. Adds depth and clarity to the story and makes it really enjoyable.

That’s the lot for this time!

Meg Mardell: The Time Before Christmas

Meg Mardell is visiting today to talk about her new release A Highland Hogmany and the time before Christmas was widely celebrated in Scotland. Welcome, Meg!

‘For weeks before the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scotch bun — a dense, black substance, inimical to life — and full moons of shortbread adorned with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the family affections.”

Robert Louis Stevenson only lets us press our faces to the glass of the sweet shop for a moment on his whirlwind tour of Victorian Edinburgh. But, for me, one glance was enough. I could practically smell the holiday scents wafting out the bakery doors and mingling with the hint-of-snow December air. Add in the long Northern nights brightened by gas-lamps and I was salivating to set a holiday romance in late nineteenth century Scotland. After all, there are few places in the world I’d prefer to celebrate the season!

Inspired by the Highland castle romance tradition, I quickly sketched out a mistaken identity romp: English heiress Sharda follows feisty Scotswoman Fin back to her Highland castle – only to discover she’s not the owner. And then they’re stuck for Christmas! One slight problem: “the great morning” Stevenson describes? Turns out it wasn’t Christmas morning! What were the mottos Edinburgh’s confectioners spelled out in candied peel? “‘Frae Auld Reekie,’ ‘A guid New Year to ye a’,’ ‘For the Auld Folk at Hame’.”

Yep. Happy New Year. Not Happy Christmas. Because, for around 400 years, Christmas wasn’t popularly celebrated in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament abolished the festivities in 1640, which in the 17th century would have been the Twelve Days of Christmas, as part of their clean sweep of the Catholic Church. “The kirke within this kingdome is now purged of all superstitious observatione of dayes.” The Puritans in England also banned Christmas at the same time, but the feasting and dancing of the Twelve Days came roaring back when the Monarchy was restored in 1660. You have to wonder if Christmas would have stayed cancelled in Scotland if they hadn’t had New Years to fall back on. Instead, all the holiday baking and bustle in December neatly lead up to Hogmanay, the traditional Scottish celebration of the New Year.

As an historian, I find this all fascinating. But, as a fiction writer, I had a dilemma: how was I going to add Sharda and Fin’s story to my queer Victorian Christmas series? Could I still do it? To answer that question, I sat down and made two lists. First, what makes a great holiday Romance for me? Next, could I still tick all these boxes in Sharda and Fin’s queer castle romance with Hogmanay at the centre of the celebrations? 

Home for the holidays – Hogmanay was absolutely a time when all Fin’s family would descend on the castle. So Sharda gets all the awkwardness of meeting her not-quite girlfriend’s family for the holidays. Yes.

Eating everything – Those shortbread full moons of Stevenson’s definitely make an appearance! And I updated the traditional haggis dinner to some tasty fish pie with all the trimmings because I wanted something on the table I would eat. 

Roaring fires – One of most memorable features of Hogmanay is the torchlight processions. Why couldn’t my book have its very own parade right up to the castle gates?

Surprise snow – What Highland castle would be complete without a sugar-sweet dusting of snow? One of Sharda’s requirements for her holiday visit is seeing the hills of North-East Scotland transformed by the first snowfall. No prizes for guessing if she gets her wish.

Poignant presents – Gifts are an essential ingredient of Hogmanay. Particularly the ceremonial presents carried by the first person over the threshold at midnight: bread for plenty, coal for warmth, and whiskey for cheer. But obviously I wanted something a bit more sentimental and schemed for ways for our lovers to make a private exchange.

Finding family – This one might seem like a gimme at the holidays. Find your family? You’re practically tripping over them! But I’m taking about the ‘gets a family for the holidays’ trope. It’s one of my absolute favourites. Could I deliver it without a Christmas tree? I figured, as long was I’d got all the other holiday romance ingredients at my fingertips, I’d give it a go.

This checklist was a real confidence boost that I could give Sharda and Fin the holiday romance they deserve at Hogmanay. I also discovered the Scottish new year is simply awesome. I love its emphasis on clearing old debts and starting the new year with a clean slate. It almost made me sorry not to live somewhere that Christmas got cancelled. The 25th of December became a public holiday in Scotland in 1958, but it’s still overshadowed by the pageantry of Hogmanay. Now I understand why!

A Highland Hogmanay

Cover, A Highland Hogmanay by Meg Mardell

The daughter of an Indian raja and renegade Englishwoman, Sharda Holkar, was gifted with a magnificent dowry but little say in her future. Until now. She must endure one more depressing holiday season with her controlling cousins, then she will be free to begin her emancipated life. But her discovery of a plot to marry her off to the preening son of the house has Sharda wondering if her new start should begin at once. When Sharda meets the intriguing owner of a Highland castle at a Christmas Eve masquerade, she wastes no time in forming a plan—she will escape across the Scottish border!

Finella Forbes cannot imagine why a sophisticated heiress like Sharda would even associate with someone who manages a castle for a living, let alone accompany her all the way back to the Highlands in time for the raucous celebration of Hogmanay. But a wealthy buyer is just what Balintore Castle needs. Fin is determined to prove she is just as good an estate manager as her father, but with the negligent lordly owner refusing to do his duty, she needs help fast. When mistaken assumptions jeopardise their initial attraction, Sharda and Fin will need all the mischief and magic of a Highland holiday to discover the true nature of their feelings.

NineStar Press | Books2Read

About Meg

Meg moved from the US to England because she fell in love with the Victorians’ peculiar blend of glamour and grime. After a decade of exploring historical excesses in a prim scholarly fashion, she realized that fiction is the best way to delve into that period’s great female-focused and LGBT+ stories. Weaned on the high-seas romances of the 1990s, Meg’s lost none of her love for cross-dressing cabin boys but any tolerance for boorish heroes. She’s delighted to now have a whole raft of quirky and queer characters to cheer for on their quest for Happily Ever After. She frequently breaks off writing for an Earl Grey tea (milk not lemon). She’s trying to learn Polish and Portuguese at the same time. She plans to escape Brexit Britain.

Website | Twitter

English Villages

Let’s talk about English villages today!

Most of the action in The Fog of War and The Quid Pro Quo takes place in Bradfield…it’s a fictionalised version of a small village on the Quantock Hills. The dead body at the beginning of the story is found in the duck pond on the village green.

aged houses located in countryside
Photo by Olga Lioncat on Pexels.com

When I talk about the village green, you probably see the same mental image I do…a green space in the centre of the village, with a big shady tree and a bench, maybe a pond. It’s used for cricket on Sunday afternoons, Maypole dancing, maybe a bonfire and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night.

However the actual evolution of the village green is much more practical and it actually wasn’t always at the centre of the village. They served as places to graze or gather stock, with the pond to water them or to protect them against thieves or for market trading. The Inclosures Acts of the nineteenth century and finally the Commons Registration Acts of 1965 formalised what was left of English Common Lands into what we have today, including Village Greens. New areas can be designated Greens if they’re used for recreation for more than twenty years, but otherwise the pattern is static. You can read about it here.

I envisage the Green at Bradfield to be about the size of a football field. It’s bounded by lanes and by houses that have clustered around the edges—the church, the shop, the Post Office, the blacksmith and the Police House. Since the inception of regional police forces in the mid-nineteenth century, rural police forces had place constables in tied housing in country villages and they were very much a part of the community.

I think the English have always had—and continue to have—and idealised idea of their countryside. Here’s a piece of 1930’s footage of a drive through rural England. No poverty or damp housing to be seen.

Bradfield is a very rural community and my characters are mostly middle and upper class. I think that’s because I started off with an Agatha Christie but make it gay sort of vibe. Walter is from the East End of London and is working class. But his particular situation and the vagaries of the war have separated him from that. Simon is working class but has worked his way up in the police to a position of authority and relatively good wages—watch out for another blog post about the police service before too long.

If you want a realistic account of English rural village life between the two world wars, I recommend Laurie Lee’s autobiographical Cider with Rosie. It’s beautifully, bucolically written, a moving memoir that takes you back to Slad in Gloucestershire.

I leave you with a clip of haymaking in 1904. These days the hay is made into bales and stacked by machine…but it’s still hot, heavy work. I can remember playing in the drying hay like these Edwardian children.

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Trans people in history

This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!

One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.

The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.

This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.

In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.

However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.

I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!

I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.

I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.

Lastly, here is a brilliant collection of books about trans history and trans issues, curated by Christine Burns and available from independent bookshops.

The Quid Pro Quo

Cover: The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.

Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but  he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.

Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.

Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on  a relationship of his own?

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