Welcome to Paragraphs Of Power winner for November 2012, Jean Gill.
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| Books by Jean Gill |
Christmas GIVEAWAY to all my readers; ‘Song at Dawn’ by Jean Gill available free in all ebook forms from www.smashwords.com if you use the coupon code FF49C when you check out. UNTIL 24th December – spread
the word!
If
you can find the time to post a review, whether on smashwords, amazon,
goodreads, your blog, wherever, Jean will be very grateful. Feel free to add
your comments to this post or contact her at jean.gill@wanadoo.fr Comments and
questions from readers are always welcome
YOU’D PREFER A
PRINT VERSION? Visit, ‘like’ and post a comment on https://www.facebook.com/jeangilltroubadours
There will be a random draw on 24th December and one signed copy
of ‘Song at Dawn’ will go to the winner, anywhere in the world.
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| Author Jean Gill |
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Biography:
Jean Gill is a Welsh writer and photographer living in
the south of France with a big white dog, a Nikon D700 and a man. For many
years, she taught English in Wales and was the first woman to be a secondary
headteacher in Carmarthenshire. She is mother or stepmother to five children.
Publications are varied, including prize-winning poetry
and novels, military history, translated books on dog training, and a cookery
book on goat cheese. With Scottish parents, an English birthplace and French
residence, she can usually support the winning team on most sporting occasions.
Song
at Dawn, Winner of the Global
Ebooks Award for Historical Fiction (Medieval)
Book 1 of
The Troubadours series
Jean Gill
1150
in Provence, where love and marriage are as divided as Christian and Muslim. A
historical thriller/romance set in Narbonne just after the Second Crusade.
'Believable, page-turning and memorable' -
S.P.Review
On the run from abuse, Estela wakes in a ditch with
only her lute, her amazing voice, and a dagger hidden in her petticoats. Her
talent finds a patron in Alienor of Aquitaine and more than a music tutor in
the Queen's finest troubadour and Commander of the Guard, Dragonetz los Pros.
Weary of war, Dragonetz uses Jewish money and Moorish expertise to build that
most modern of inventions, a papermill, arousing the wrath of the Church. Their
enemies gather, ready to light the political and religious powder-keg of
medieval Narbonne.
Extract
from Chapter 7.
Contrary
to popular opinion, baths were taken frequently in the civilised regions of
what we now know as southern France. Sometimes tubs and buckets of water were
taken to individual chambers but often there were separate women’s and men’s
bathing rooms in chateaux, such as the Palace of Narbonne, where Estela is
learning to be a troubadour. Her day included an assassination attempt and a
murder, and she went to the women’s bathing room, exhausted and shocked,
thinking of other people’s enemies rather than of her own…
Estela had no sense of falling asleep nor of waking
but the cooling water told her she must have done so and she shivered. Time to
dry herself, to return to the world. She stood up, held onto the edge of the
tub, thinking perhaps she should have kept a servant to hand after all and she
placed a tentative foot on the floor beside the bath. She put her weight onto
one foot to climb out of the tub and cried out with pain, trying clumsily to
reverse the weight, adding more slicing pain to the foot outside the tub before
she could draw it over the side and back into the bath where the blood tricked
in swirls into the water. She inspected her foot and saw the cuts, some still
with splinters of glass protruding from them. She picked out the splinters,
dropping them over the edge of the bath away from her intended exit.
Kneeling, Estela looked over the tub at the floor
where she had put her foot. Broken glass. She looked all round the bath for a
clear space but there was broken glass everywhere, all round the bath, in a
ring two yards or so wide. There was no way she could jump over it, assuming
that she could bear to stand on the glass beside the bath and then jump. The
very thought made her wince. The bath stool? No. Whoever had strewn the glass
had also moved the stool to mock her at the back of the room, beside where her
clothes should have been. She took in this new piece of information. Clothes
gone. Towels, towels... she scanned the room, knowing already what she would
find. No towels. But there was no point worrying about that until she had
actually got out of the bath in the first place.
She yelled for help and heard the echoes disappear
into the steamy acoustics, the thick walls and no doubt into the clatter and
chatter of a grand kitchen before evening meal. Maybe after the meal, or maybe
not till the morning, if then, someone might hear her. She shivered as much at
the thought of a night in cold water as because she was already cold. There was
no way to get rid of the water unless she could make a hole in the tub and use
a chunk of the bath itself as a board to walk across the glass? Puncture the
solid wood tub with what, exactly? Estela had a bar of soap and her own body.
There was no way of scratching or kicking her way through the tub. Think again.
She hated the only plan she could come up with but she
had to get out of the tub and there was no other way. Once more she knelt in
the bath, leaning over the side so that she could drop her waist-length hair
over into a pool on the floor. Contorting herself to reach the hair with her
first foot, she climbed out of the bath, bent double all the time, to place her
feet on her hair. Then, little by little, she shuffled hair and feet forward,
one at a time, in a monkey-crouch that strained her knees to shaking point. An
occasional splinter would pierce through the hair into a foot but it was
bearable and she kept going until she was sure that she was past the broken
glass, when she straightened up with a groan of relief and complaints from her
aching muscles, Her swinging hair caught her side and again she felt stabbing
pains. Stupid! Her hair was a torture-machine, spiked with splinters of glass.
She gathered her hair in one hand, near enough her head to be above the glass
splinters and she held it in a pony-tail as far out from her body as she could.
Now there was nothing for it but to go out the door, stark naked, holding her
hair where it could give her no covering at all. She could only hope that the
first person she met would take pity on her. She swallowed hard at the thought
of walking through the door into the busy kitchen and her hand was on the
latch, ready to face the music when she heard a voice she knew well, on the
other side.
‘Estela, are you in there? It’s me, Dragonetz. Aliénor
wants you to play tonight and you’re going to be late.’
Help from Dragonetz or face a kitchen-full of curious
eyes? Some choices are quickly made. Estela lifted the latch, opened the door
enough to hiss round it, ‘Come in here!’ She stepped back quickly so no-one
could see her through the doorway as Dragonetz entered the bathroom. ‘Shut the
door!’ If she hadn’t been cold, anxious and humiliated, she would have enjoyed
the momentary shock in his expression but he mastered himself quickly.
‘It seems you wanted a swim after all,’ he drawled.
Then he saw the glass in the hank of hair swinging beside her. ‘What happened?’
‘Turn your back,’ she told him.
‘It’s a bit late for that! You have two breasts and
the place of Venus, like all women. I’m not going to ravish you and you’re
going to tell me what happened. Let me hold your hair while you put this on.’
While talking, he had removed his tunic and passed it to her.
‘My feet hurt.’
He picked her up in his arms and carried her over to
one of the tubs with no glass around it. ‘Can you kneel and lean into the tub?’
he asked her quietly and on her assent, he swept up her hair and unloosed it into
the clean water in the un-used tub, swishing it back and forwards so that the
splinters were dislodged. He took off the belt round his undershirt and used
the buckle like a coarse comb, grooming the hair for more splinters. And
finally he ran his hand over the hair, combing it with his fingers, checking
that it was clear and clean.
Want to read
more?
‘Song at Dawn’ is
available in all ebook formats from www.smashwords.com
FREE if you use the coupon code FF49C when you check out. UNTIL 24th December – spread
the word!
Also available in
print from lulu http://www.lulu.com/shop/jean-gill/song-at-dawn/paperback/product-17800067.html
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