This is Book 3 in the Scottish Queen Trilogy and I plan to publish it mid-November. That gives me time for last minute checks so that it will be typo-free.Here are the opening lines:
May 14th 1544
Matho tilted his stool until his shoulders touched the
sun heated stone of the tavern behind him and let out an involuntary yelp.
“God’s blood,” he muttered, hitching his jerkin between himself and the wall. “Wouldn’t
ye think there’d be a breath of wind up there somewhere?” For days now, the
east coast of Scotland had sweltered in sunshine with only the merest hint of a
breeze.
“Aye.” Jordie consulted the cards in his hand and flipped
one onto the mounting block built into the inn wall beside them. “Ye can wait
weeks fer the wind ye want. It’s been blowin’ up out o’ the sou’west for days
now.”
“Not today, it isn’t. There’s no wind at all.” Matho wiped
sweat from his face with the tail of his already damp shirt and picked up his
cards again. “I’m not asking for much,” he added plaintively. “All I need is a wind
that’ll get me to France.”
“Isn’t it allus the same, though?” The inn-keeper’s son was thirty
if he was a day, but Jordie’s plumpness and lack of beard made him seem much
younger. “Say ye want tae sail north tae Aberdeen and ye’ll get nowt but a wind
that’ll take ye south. Venture a wee word that it’s France yer after an all
ye’ll to get is one gannin’ north.”
“I don’t want to go to Norway, Jordie. France’ll do fine.” Matho
dragged his hair away from his damp forehead. Days this warm were rare in Scotland
and a windless one was very nearly unheard of so close to the sea. Seawater
swirled around the posts of St. Andrews wharf, fishing cobles stood idle at
their mooring and the smell of seaweed and fish numbed the nose to everything but
the thick, heavy smell of hot pitch from the sailor busily painting his boat
thirty paces away.
“The English were damned lucky with the wind back at the
beginning of the month,” Jordie remarked. “It blew from the south just when
they wanted it.”
Matho scowled. The English attack on Edinburgh held unpleasant
memories for everyone, and especially for him. If Phemie had not died that day,
they would have been married now and living happily in his cottage in Aydon. The
memory of her lying on the grass, her throat savagely cut by English soldiers,
rose from the back of his mind. Abruptly he pushed away from the wall, scattering
cards across the stone block. “I’m fed up with cards and days too hot to bear,
and by God, I’m fed up with this miserable town. I know the streets down to the
last stone sett and every pathetic excuse for an inn on this foreshore. Another
day of it, and I’ll go mad.”
“Yer getting restless,” Jordie said placidly, squinting up
at him through a lock of hair. “I can understand it, reet enough.”
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