Tag: Miss Charlotte Quartet

Another FREE short story for you…

Part two of The Miss Charlotte Quartet — The Last Night of the Witchfinder General — is now available completely free to anyone who subscribes to the Woodville Village Newsletter. Sign up and grab your copy here… https://witchesofwoodville.com/#library​

Manningtree, Summer, 1647

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, has come out of retirement for one last trial. And now Charlotte Southill is here to show him what a real witch can do…

Charlotte Southill vows revenge when one of her friends falls victim to the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. But someone doesn’t want him dead and Charlotte must confront some raw and painful memories.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello folks. I’m delighted to announce that the second story in the Miss Charlotte Quartet — The Last Night of the Witchfinder General — is available to download… completely and utterly FREE for all the lucky people who have signed up to the Woodville Village library newsletter.

If you’ve read The Crow Folk you will know that Miss Charlotte has something of a secret history and these stories will go some way to letting you into her dark past.

Yes, these stories are a little darker than the Witches of Woodville novels and this one in particular contains hanging, torture, vomiting, farting, drowning, poisoning, shooting, stabbing and al fresco urination.

What more could you ask for in a 5000 word short story? It’s available as an eBook and audiobook. Let’s have a quick listen…

ESSEX WAS no place to be a witch.
Charlotte stood in the shadow of the gallows, watching her friend Dorothy Marsh sway in the summer breeze. Flies buzzed around Dorothy’s gaping mouth. Her bloodshot eyes bulged as if in fright, her last terrified words left unsaid. Dorothy’s pepper hair was matted with blood and the mob had taken all but her stained smock and a single shoe.

A dark rage grew inside Charlotte, rising like bile. She had seen too many women like Dorothy hanging from a noose these past three years. Dorothy wasn’t even a witch, but a midwife. A woman of compassion and kindness who offered Charlotte shelter and food when she was last here.

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, had come out of retirement for one last trial.

And now Charlotte Southill was here to show him what a real witch could do.

I had great fun writing this one, but even a short story is not written is isolation. My thanks to Julian Barr for editorial wisdom, Andrew Bowden for another cracking cover design and the lovely new logo for Woodville Village (points)…

Thanks also to Dominic Currie for the music. Head Librarian Araminta Cranberry for her introduction and afterword, and Claire Burgess for the usual.

Part Three of The Miss Charlotte Quartet will be available on 4th May and will again be FREE to all newsletter subscribers, so if you haven’t already please click on the link below and sign up. You can also get a free recipe for Jam Roly Poly as featured in The Crow Folk and much more besides. It will also be the first place where you will soon be able to read an extract from book two of The Witches of Woodville BABES IN THE WOOD (which is available to pre-order). Thanks again to everyone who’s read The Crow Folk, and especially those delightful people who have left reviews online and such.

Until next time, happy reading!

Who wants a free short story? Or four?

Subscribers to my newsletter can get a free short story I’ll See You In My Dreams – the first part of The Miss Charlotte Quartet. Sign up to the Woodville Village Newsletter here to make sure you don’t miss out.

I explain what it’s all about here on one of my walks…

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello folks, how are you? Hey, who wants a free short story? You do! Definitely well, you can have one right now. Just sign up to my newsletter if you haven’t already. And it’s called I’ll See You in My Dreams. And it features Miss Charlotte, Southhill, who, if you’ve read The Crow Folk you’ll know, she’s one of the witches in the Witches of Woodville, and she has something of a mysterious past, maybe a bit older than she at first looks, which is why the story starts in 1593. And it asks the question, “Would you stop time to save someone you love?” Let’s have a listen to a quick bit right now…

Charlotte Southill first met Time when the plague came to London. Many thought the bitter winter would kill the summer’s pestilence, but it endured and the deaths only increased. The theatres and taverns closed. The streets were lousy with rats and handbells clanged as bodies were taken away on carts. Charlotte had never so much as caught a cold in her 38 years, but that was a reason for that. Lizzie was not so fortunate. She complained of aches and a fever two days ago. On the first day she kept vomiting. Then the swelling came. Charlotte had tried every apothecary trick she knew, but nothing would work. Lizzie’s breath rattled. Her body was riddled with buboes, and it was now only a matter of time.

OoOOOoooh! I have no idea what clip I was going to use, but I assume it’s going to be an “Oooh!”
bit, you know, for the sake of marketing. Well, I hope you enjoyed that, because there’s going to be four of them. Four short stories in the Miss Charlotte quartet. Four. Quartet. See what I did? And they’ll tell a much bigger story over the course of the four stories, one a month every month for the next four months. So, yeah, just sign up to the newsletter and hopefully enjoy them. There’ll be e-books and there’ll be audio versions as well every month. So yeah, sign up now, put a link below and do that sort of thing. But yeah, it was, it was, it was fun to write. Short stories are hard, they’re really hard. There’s no room for my usual waffle. I have to be very concise. I have to thank my editor, Julian Barr, for really cracking the whip on this one. He’s a tough taskmaster. And to Andy Bowden for the cover art, which is just splendid. And thank you to everyone who’s bought a copy of The Crow Folk, who’s put a review up. It’s always massively, massively appreciated. Four weeks in the Hive chart in the UK, that’s the chart for a lot of the independent bookshops in the UK. I thought I was going to be out after three weeks. I was at number 19. I got back up again to thirteen. So thank you. Thank you all. You’re all bloomin’ marvellous. Um, Book 2, uh, Babes in the Wood coming in October, October twenty seventh. I see preorder links for that pop up online because that’s what happens. Publishers put it on their database, push a button and (blows raspberry) it feeds out to the Internet. That’s the actual noise that it makes when they push the button. And so yeah, I’ll put a link on the website so you can find it on there: witchesofwoodvile.com and any pre-orders would be appreciated. Check out The Hive, check out Bookshop.org – that helps indie bookshops. And of course, as you know, Amazon, Waterstones and all those lovely people as well. Whatever way you want to do it, any pre-orders much appreciated. So, yeah, free short story. Get in, enjoy and happy reading.