Very pleased to announce that the third book in my French historical The Bone Angel series, Blood Rose Angel, has been longlisted in the MsLexia Women's Novel Competition 2015. A short extract...
… Ava woke moaning and clawing at her temples. I started rubbing
lavender and rose-oil across her brow, then her eyes rolled back till
all I could see was the whites … no colour. Just all white.’ ‘How horrible.’
‘Worse than horrible, Héloïse. By that time I was screaming … begging the Blessed Virgin to spare my twin––as close to me as my own soul. I’d always thought we’d go together, you see … I couldn’t imagine living if Ava was gone.’ She exhaled a long breath and looked down at the river; at the mountains standing upside down in the water.
‘The Devil crept inside Ava,’ Isa said, ‘and started up a shaking as an earthquake might splinter the earth when Dieu was in a fury. My mind was spinning. What physick could stop the brain spasms? A potion of dandelion roots? Saint John’s Wort seeds eaten for forty days? I didn’t have forty days, Héloïse. Not forty seconds! All I could do was kneel beside her and watch the falling sickness snatch my sister to the dark side.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just curled my hand over hers.
‘There wasn’t a second to grieve,’ Isa said. ‘I had to free the unborn and baptise it before it died too, or owls would devour its soul. I didn’t ponder … knew I’d lose my nerve if I did. So I swiped a wine-soaked cloth over her belly, made the sign of the cross and sliced an arc clear across Ava’s womb. Then I unfurled the tiniest baby from the gaping red darkness.
‘At first I couldn’t look at that limp, underbaked non-born,’ she said, ‘dragged into the world against every force of nature. But then I couldn’t resist, and you know what? That little girl seemed too lovely to be doomed: pale wisps of hair, eyelids veined like a butterfly’s wing, fingers curling like flower petals at witch-light.’
I gave Isa a small smile as the sun sank onto the rim of the hills in a brilliant orange rind.
‘I laid her between her mother’s legs,’ Isa said, ‘and thought I glimpsed a movement … an eyelid blinking, a fluttering so slight I could’ve imagined it....
