by Celia Lake
Thus far, it had worked out surprisingly well. She leaned back against Roland’s shoulder, just looking out. “It’s beautiful here. Despite everything. I feel quite guilty.”
Roland kissed her hair. “We’ve both been in the wars, love, and come out the other side. No reason there shouldn’t be some beauty there. Mother said there’s quite a bit of gossip about your work, that you’ve managed to help people. Delphine in particular, there’s some connection. I can never keep track with Mother, but it helped her with one of her plots.”
“Her many plots.” Elen shook her head. “Is she going to be pressing me again?”
“I believe,” Roland said with some dignity, “That I may finally have persuaded her that you and I will be arranging our wedding. When it suits us, and not before. I did say we will certainly tell her as soon as she can be of assistance.” He paused. “But I admit that I’m glad she’s going off again, so she can be busy sorting all of that out, and not aiming it at us.”
Elen nodded. “It’s, you know I will.” She hesitated.
“When it’s time. And it’s not time yet. And we have time, I’m quite sure of that. Now. I wasn’t, but then the world changed.”
She tilted her head to look at him. “You went by the Temple again.” He had that particular tone to his voice.
“The baths, yes. Nothing startling. I didn’t expect that. Just knowing that things will be all right. That there’s healing and the water flowing, and quiet, and that’s a fine thing to have.”
Elen shook her head. “I’d never have taken you for a mystic, when I met you.”
“To be fair, I wasn’t anything of the kind, when you walked into my room and closed the curtains.” He kissed her temple again, almost absently. “What did you think of me?”
“I thought you were a man of rather conventional tastes? Given your books and what you asked me to read. But I know rather better now. You just were keeping to what was safe to show.”
“And in private?” Roland was teasing her now, but he did enjoy that. And she knew he’d had a long and difficult day.
“And in private, good sir, I am delighted to enjoy your more adventurous and personal side. As you know perfectly well.” She glanced down at her watch fob. “We don’t have time before supper, though. Twenty minutes, if you want to wash and change.”
“If we’re to be gone tomorrow, I suppose I’d better put in an appearance.”
She turned in his arms, and stood on her toes to kiss him once on the lips. “Much appreciated. Lionel had a question about one bit of the reconstruction, and you’re a better person to answer him, or at least put him off.” Elen let herself settle on the ground again. “Anything else, before I go wash up?”
“Can you get free to meet Healer Rhoe mid-afternoon? She said if we were going to be handy, there’s a patient she’d like to discuss with you. She’s not sure this is the right place. Rather a tricky case, I gather, he’s having a bad time with hallucinations, and no one’s been able to figure out what’s going on. Nothing dangerous, he says a lot of them are rather pleasant music unless he’s startled, apparently.”
“I’ll bring my notecase, then.” Elen let out a long breath. “We’ve three rooms spare at the moment, and no other imminent prospects, so it wouldn’t be a bad time to take on someone new.” They were ideally a house of fifteen or sixteen residents, as well as Elen and her staff. Small enough to be a community, but large enough that people could find their own amusements and friendships without having to deal closely with everyone.
“Excellent. Oh, and she said the actual proper Ozymandius Cole has finally turned up, to take a position for a few years. He’s delightful and thoughtful, apparently, and she thinks you should meet him.”
Elen tilted her head. “I - I suppose?”
“With me, if you like. She made that face at me, the one that’s about necessary healing, you know how she does.”
“No use fighting with that, no.” Elen was clear about that particular folly, then turned back to the more important part. “If she doesn’t think her current patient’s ready yet, I might see about going to the country shrine for a few days? If you can do without me?”
Roland grinned. “Never, but I can bear up for a few days, of course. You’ve not had a chance for months.” Then he kissed her forehead. “There. That’s all my messages.” The bell chimed on the clock, and he grimaced. “I do want to wash up. See you downstairs.”
Elen nodded, watching him go out the door. Then she took one last look out at the gardens, seeing everyone beginning to make their way to settle in for the evening meal.
If you enjoyed Carry On and would like to read more of this series, please sign up for my mailing list to get all the latest news and fun extras. Your reviews (on whatever review site you use) are much appreciated, too!
Read on for more historical details about this book and an excerpt from The Fossil Door, the next book in the series.
Author’s notes
Thank you so much for reading Carry On. My thanks (as always) to Kiya Nicoll, my inestimable friend and editor. And I owe a lot to my early readers, including Erin and Anne Libby (along with half a dozen others) for making this book much better through their comments and suggestions. I particularly owe my knitting consultants a lot of thanks for this one!
This book has been a chance to dip into two new areas for me: the Temple of Healing (and more broadly how religion works for people in Albion), and a book set during the Great War itself.
The Temple of Healing is the main hospital in Albion, located in Trellech, in southern Wales. Devoted to healing in all its forms, it also has a variety of staff - Healers (functionally equivalent to our doctors, but with more magic), nurses (ditto), and orderlies, as well as the many other people making sure things keep running smoothly through cleaning, laundry, cooking, paperwork, and all the other tasks of any big institution. Each has their own supporting structures and hierarchy - and degree of formality.
Healers and nurses both make formal oaths to some power that they recognise as meaningful. It is possible for someone to swear on their magic, as everyone in the magical community does when they become an adult, but many healers and nurses do have some sort of religious connection they choose to honour instead. (As you can see from Elen’s comments on her own oaths, there’s a variety, some more common than others.)
Albion itself is, in some ways, more fundamentally Roman influenced than our modern civilisation. When the fundamental shift in the country happened, at the time of the Pact in 1484, many people began to return to family traditions of magic that had been passed down, but not prominent. And in the Great Families, many of these had Roman roots, at least if you went back far enough.
That also affects religion, obviously. The various religious upheavals of the Tudors and Stuarts (and the English Civil War) meant that many families who were religious looked at their options, and chose what worked for them in private whatever public gestures they needed to make for political or legal reasons. (For a long time, church attendance was mandatory in the United Kingdom, with significant fines or penalties if you didn’t show up on Sunday.)
By the 18th century, things had settled into a wide range of religious practice, including people devoted to a wide range o different deities based on their interests, professions, families, or whatever else seemed relevant. Most of these are not true continuations of Roman practice, but they have kept the tendency of the Roman empire to include whatever interesting bits they found as the empire expanded.
In practice, much of how this works is similar to those groups reconstructing historical religions in the modern Pagan communities, in broad terms.
One of the things I’ve wanted to do in this series is show a diverse religious community, not just in terms of the types of religions, but the range of personal involvement. Roland is - until this book - not religious at all, nor is he particularly privately spiritual (as we’d put it these days.)
Elen, on the other hand, is actua
lly devout, but not at all public about it, and she comes from a family that is equally religious, if in different ways.
(If you’re not familiar with the Welsh Chapel movement her father prefers, it’s a nonconformist Protestant movement, intertwined with labour and Welsh political concerns.)
Christianity is certainly in the mix here - Fidelius, in this book, as mentioned. I’m fairly sure several of my other characters in previous books are Christian, it just didn’t come up in text. (It may yet in some future shorter works I’m hoping to write.)
Now we come to the War and its battles. Figuring out where Roland was injured took a bit of research - especially since I was hoping for him to have been in more than one battle, so that he had a sense of the way the War was rapidly changing everything everyone knew about warfare. I was delighted when I stumbled on the fact that the 2nd Dragoon Guards fought both at the Battle of Mons, and at the first Battle of Ypres.
Also known as the King’s Bays (these days, the Queen’s Bays) because all of them ride bay horses, the 2nd Dragoon Guards have a long history dating back to 1746. Dragoons were highly mobile infantry who rode fast and nimble horses, and used firearms in battle, often dismounting to shoot and fight once they were in the midst.
The Battle of Mons has a mention in one of my other books (Outcrossing) because of folklore. It was, legitimately, a fight against overwhelming odds, and there were resonances with the Battle of Agincourt. (If you’ve watched the Kenneth Branagh Henry V, you know the battle).
Not long after the battle, there was a fictional piece in the papers, describing an angelic warrior or warriors, the ghostly archers who died at Agincourt, coming to save their countrymen with their arrows. It didn’t happen in our world, but in the world of Albion, there was definitely something magical going on.
After that, though, the Western Front turned into a long, muddy, awful slog. The First Battle of Ypres began in August 1914 and ran through the 22nd of November 1914. Roland was injured badly in early November, so he’d been at the Temple of Healing for about three and a half months when Elen arrives.
As Roland makes clear, this is a horrible way to fight for everyone, and particularly awful for cavalry. Over eight million horses and mules were killed during the War, many early on before everyone realised how futile and awful it was. (I found one statistic which said that Britain lost nearly 500,000 horses, one horse for every two men.)
Roland’s concerns about continuing to do the awful thing the worst possible way unfortunately came true. While many people in 1914 though the war would be over by Christmas, it turned into four years of misery, loss, and destruction.
Last in our war-related topics, before we turn to more cheerful subjects, shellshock was truly beginning to be recognised as a significant issue at about this point, though many of the necessary advances in supporting and treating people with what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome were yet to come. Unfortunately, many people with lingering symptoms (like Roland’s depression and other issues) were accused of malingering, trying to get out of going back to the Front.
Healing baths and waters have, historically, been key to many places throughout the British Isles and continental Europe. The most famous of these, likely, is Bath itself, but Baden-Baden in Germany is also well known, as are other sites in Europe.
The Trellech in our world actually does have a healing spring associated with it, including that fascinating tidbit about the water bubbling in different ways to indicate a diagnosis.
There are some theories these days that the healing baths did actually help with physical healing. Not simply through getting people away from often unhealthily crowded cities and smoggy air, or eating too many rich foods - but because the mineral-rich waters helped with a number of circulation and deficiency issues in the diet.
The baths at Trellech have two parts, as Rhoe explains. The shared public baths, in the centre of the temple, but then the smaller bathing rooms, each dedicated to different deities, depending on need and interest.
This brings me to another thing I’ve wanted to explore. I’ve been writing a world where characters have agency, the ability to make their own choices. Just as people in Albion have a range of magical skills and abilities (and levels of raw power to work with), I want the range of religious experiences to vary. Because, after all, plenty of people have widely different views on religion and what it means for them in our world.
Sometimes what we need is a light in the dark, showing us the way forward, and that helps far more than a miracle would, in the long run.
There are prayers in this book, formal ones. There are also the informal needs, offered up in hope of some small gift. But there’s also the moments of going into the dark, and making space for a change, and finding some new path to explore. I wanted a book that has all of those, not in competition with them, but as part of a larger tapestry of what religion and belief might mean - but also what advocating for yourself or the ones you love can look like.
Of course, then we have things like the corsned, which is a historical form of ordeal. The term dates to before 1100, and it was originally done with barley and cheese, but it can be done with any food or drink. Other trials by ordeal include trial by combat, by fire, by water, by the cross, or by poison, among others. Many of those end up entirely fatal for the accused, even if they’re innocent.
The trick for Elen was figuring out something that would be meaningful proof, without being able to invoke the oaths and mechanisms of justice used by the legal courts (since she has done nothing legally wrong, those don’t apply.) Rhoe, of course, is both clever and well-read.
I was delighted when I read the Official Secrets Act of the time and realised it easily covered being told that magic existed. The version in this book is the 1911 Act, and basically, so long as you consider “magic exists and as real” as covered, then you can swear by the Official Secrets Act, be sufficiently bound by the Pact (the magical oath that allows the survival of magical society in Great Britain), and get on with the conversation.
Finally, we come to the knitting - and much thanks for my early readers who improved this. I am the sort of knitter who loves double-sided knitting, and does not have the patience for complicated lace work. (I’m also lousy at socks, though I can do a good scarf or non-lacework shawl.)
Knitting for the war effort was a huge focus of many women (and not a few men). Keep an eye on my blog for posts with some patterns and history (they’ll be in the Carry On category.)
It was expected that you’d be busy working on practical items for men in the trenches any time your hands were idle. Besides the smaller more portable items Elen usually knits for this purpose, gloves designed to allow for shooting a gun or caps to be worn under helmets were both common, as well as larger items like warm vests.
By 1916 or 1917, there were a number of patterns released for knitting, and many women’s groups, invalids homes, or other organisations would run knitting gatherings, with the results boxed up and sent overseas as they were done.
They were much appreciated - but as Elen notes, for a skilled knitter, they don’t offer a lot of challenge or variety. Items always had to be in an approved colour that wouldn’t attract attention.
Her lacework shawl is indeed a Shetland pattern - these started to be published in the early 1900s. While they were traditionally pure white or cream, her love of colour got the better of her.
Many of our modern knitting techniques are, well, modern. Circular needles hadn’t been invented yet - and the terms ‘tink’ or ‘frog’ for undoing stitches are both much more recent. Figuring out exactly what Elen might reasonably know about knitting and how she’d describe it took a fair bit of research!
Thank you so much for reading Carry On. You’ll be seeing more of Rhoe (and more of her mysterious brother Cyrus) in future books. The next book in the series is The Fossil Door, exploring a misbehaving portal in the Scottish Highlands in 1922.
Excerpt of The Fossil Door
&nbs
p; Spring 1922, London
Rathna knew the bell would ring, a moment before she heard it. She always knew. It gave her enough time to set down whatever she was doing, take a breath, and go see what Morah Avigail needed. This time, she had been sitting in the downstairs office, at her desk. She grabbed the book she'd planned to bring upstairs, and prepared to go up.
Of course, she'd been expecting this. Someone had come from the Ministry just after lunch, asking for her mistress. Whatever else his business had involved, it had included one of the formal letters with the seals that indicated some official communication. She didn't think it was an assignment, Morah Avigail was unlikely to leave the house again for any length of time. It could have been something about a pension, perhaps.
Whatever it was, Sarah, their maid, had shown the man out twenty minutes later, and it had been quiet for the two hours since. Rathna suspected her mistress had had a nap, and would refuse to admit it. That was no bother, Rathna had plenty to keep her busy. She was a fully trained portal keeper, but there was always more to read, and the second stone on the Southwark portal had a resonance that had bothered her when she ran the usual checks this week. A year ago, she'd have asked Morah Avigail to come have a listen and a look. She supposed she'd have to see about getting someone else to come look.
But they were spread thin, these days, the portal keepers. It wasn't just the War, though that hadn't helped. A number of their company had been elderly even before the War, a generation older than Morah Avigail, who was now past ninety. And while tending the portals wasn't a physically strenuous job, it was magically quite challenging. It not only needed a knack for the stones and the waters and the plants, depending on the portal itself, but rather a lot of ability to direct the magic properly. Or coax it, depending on your theory and preference in doing the work.
