This week, we're pleased to welcome author and the newest Unusual Historicals' contributor Piers Alexander with his debut novel, THE BITTER TRADE. Join us again on Sunday for an author interview, with more details about the story behind the story. The author will offer a free copy of The Bitter Trade to a lucky blog visitor. Be sure to leave your email address in the comments of today's post or Sunday's author interview for a chance to win. Winner(s) are contacted privately by email. Here's the blurb.
“I am Calumny Spinks. Between me and the satin blue sky hangs the hempen
noose. It has swung there in the faintest of breezes, waiting for me, all my
life.”
Learn
more about Piers Alexander
In 1688, torn by rebellions, England lives under the threat of a Dutch
invasion. Redheaded Calumny Spinks is the lowliest man in an Essex backwater:
half-French and still unapprenticed at seventeen, yet he dreams of wealth
and title.
When his father’s violent past resurfaces, Calumny’s desperation leads
him to flee to London and become a coffee racketeer. He has just three months
to pay off a blackmailer and save his father’s life - but his ambition and
talent for mimicry pull him into a conspiracy against the King himself.
**An Excerpt from The Bitter Trade**
Chapter 1: Salstead
In
which Calumny Spinks carelessly provokes Mistress Ramage
I
was born to a raging Frenchy slugabed mother, sired by a sulking silk-weaver
with a battered box of secrets under his floorboards. From her I got my flaming
hair, so red that the scabfaced villagers of Salstead spoke of the devil’s
seed, spitting in the dust for salvation when I walked past. From my father
came my sharp tongue, the quick wits to talk above my station, and the
shoulders to take the blows that followed.
I was the lowest fellow in Salstead. I
had not even been apprenticed by this seventeenth sweaty June of my life. I had
to greet men by “Master This”, and “Mister That”, thumbing my forelock. To them
I was but “Boy”, a long-limbed red-haired Frenchy gawk, spinning and twisting
silk like a halfwit.
The goodwives laughed behind their
tippets when they passed me at the wayside, where my father Peter made me sit
outside to work. “The silk must be spun in the fresh air, but woven in the dry
dark,” he said. If he had his will, I would rot in that village like Squire
Salstead, whose bones hung in the rusty gibbet at the crossroads.
I should have been in London, not in this
Essex midden swirling with pigeon-chest men and their gossiping dry-venus
wives. I was no fighter, could not read or write; but by Christ I had the
smooth tongue to fool any man. And so I dreamed of becoming a city gentleman by
the power of my own wit. But London was a forbidden, fading memory: of dazzling
lights, the broad river bristling with sails, of laughter and scented wealth.
We once had land-title in the city, so my
father was known as Mister Peter Spinks then. But he weakly let merchants cheat
him from his property and his title, and now he was merely a craftsman.
My own apprenticeship had been delayed so
long that in little more than two months, on my seventeenth birthday, I would lose
the right to learn my craft and be called Master. And without a trade, I would
never have the coin to buy my own land-title, to rise up and become Mister
Calumny Spinks.
The
night before Peter betrayed my dreams, the rain crushed the slender grass-stems
outside my window. For a short while, I watched the fierce dawn make steam
swirl from the earth, then went down into the dim workshop. I was hungry, and I
had not tasted meat since the spring.
Peter had been at work since before
sunrise. Silk-weaving paid less each year, and there had been no silver in our
house for many a month, only copper coins, their edges jaggedly clipped by
thieving merchants.
I stared at my father between the
warp-threads: his long white hair split in the middle and curled inwards to his
shoulders, its ends stained yellow from years of weaving-sweat. Though his neck
was humbly bent, his back was pike-straight as he sat on a crossbar, his feet
on the long slim treadles. He let his fingers see for him in the dark, always flitting
back and forth along the weft to pull out flecks of dirt. At night the whole
house was filled with his dingy smell, waking me as it rose up through my
little coffin-room.
Peter was reaching the end of a fathom
bolt of silk. It crept across the frame and slid sullenly over the rolling-bar
in front of my thighs. Like a man taking honey from a bee’s nest, he reached up
and slackened the nuts that held the warp. Then he ran his cutting blade along
the trailing threads, a steel butterfly’s wing clenched between scarred thumb
and liver-spotted forefinger. Taking care to hold the finished silk as it was
cut away, he swept the bolt into neat folds in the wicker trough.
Leaning my head against the low wormy
joists, I cleared my throat.
“Shall we thread the headboards? Will you
show me?”
“It is forbidden by the guild law,” he
snapped.
“Then let me be apprenticed!” The
squeaking in my voice shamed me.
My father reached down into the round
basket that held my fresh-thrown silk. He pulled a thread out, running his
thumb and forefinger along it, trying to fault my work. Cack-fingered potrillo,
his weaving had more flaws even than my throwing.
“Calumny, you cannot be apprenticed
without we have it written in the London guild-book. Should I carve the law on
the eating-table?”
“And how would I read the words?” I
mumbled, picking up my other work-basket and stalking out of the front door.
How indeed, when he had denied me the learning?
I was too afraid of him to say it out
loud: that by Saint Matthew’s Day, the fourteenth of September, it would be too
late. I’d be condemned to a life of servitude or thieving.
The Bitter Trade is Piers' first novel. He is also a serial media entrepreneur, and lives in London with the singer-songwriter and author
Rebecca Promitzer.
Twitter: @thebittertrade
Facebook: /thebittertrade
