England, 1141
A mother’s love. A mother’s grief...
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| About Annie's story |
Courage can take many forms, but I think it is best defined by an over-used phrase: Feel the Fear and do it Anyway. Someone who doesn’t think of the consequences of their actions and doesn’t sense the danger, is not overcoming fear and they’re probably not that courageous.
Despite the different titles in all our anthologies, (Betrayal, Exile, Fate, and now Courage) my characters have all felt fear. In my story for Betrayal, the main character is caught up in the murderous goings-on in the tenth-century royal court and is desperate to avenge her husband and protect her daughter, even if that means betraying a man who had been a close friend.
In Exile, my tale was of Ealdgyth, queen of Wales and then queen of England, who is married against her will to Harold Godwineson. It takes courage for her to find her place at court in Wales and then in England where her new husband already has a family; yet more when he loses to William at Hastings.
In my tale for Fate, a young woman and her grandmother do whatever they have to in order to survive when the Norman army comes to their Sussex village.
Perhaps I didn’t realise it, but there is a theme, a thread that holds all the tales together, and it’s that of women with little power or agency doing whatever it takes to survive the messes that powerful men make.
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| Empress Matilda |
So too with Catelin, in Daisy Chain, my story for our new collection, Courage. Catelin is old, she’s raised three children, and now she’s being asked to bury her son, her youngest. Catelin’s grief is a pain that seems to want to consume her, a fire which will never burn itself out. But somewhere in the depths of this despair, a new feeling emerges, and Catelin wants to do the unthinkable. She decides to find the king who started the war which took her family from her, and tell him what she thinks of him.
Perhaps, according to my own definition, Catelin is not brave because she’s so angry and grief-stricken that she’s not frightened. Not at first, anyway. She learns to be frightened by her own audacity, yes, but along the way she also has to learn how to be brave enough to love again, to worry about people, to care what happens to them. Brave enough to make room in her shattered heart for folk not of her own kin, but who come to matter to her as they travel the road together. Brave enough to overcome real fear when faced with menacing danger, brave enough to be prepared to die so others might live.
She’s faced, too, with a decision at the end of the story, and that one takes courage, too.
The king in question is King Stephen, who took the throne after Henry I died, even though all the barons had sworn to accept Henry’s only surviving legitimate ‘child’, Matilda. Matilda’s problem was, of course, that she was a woman, and given a male claimant to rally behind, many of those barons forgot their oaths to her. England was plunged into civil war, a time known as ‘the Anarchy’, and one commentator famously said that during this time ‘Christ and all his Saints Slept.’
Did the people in charge of the kingdom ever think about those in the farms and villages who starved as a result of the war? Of the grieving kin of those who died in the fighting? Catelin’s son got mixed up in the battle of Lincoln in 1141, a battle which is now known as the first battle of Lincoln (the other being in 1217), but of course at the time they couldn’t know there’d be another seventy-six years later. If you don’t know the outcome of the battle, I’ll not say here, because what happened in the aftermath is crucial to the story.
In Daisy Chain, I’ve moved away from the Anglo-Saxon era, which is unusual for me. The only other time I’ve had a story published that wasn’t set in Anglo-Saxon times was my winning entry for the Dorothy Dunnett/Historical Writers’ Association competition. That story was called A Poppy against the Sky, so there’s something of a flower theme going on too. No matter the period, some experiences are universal, and that too was about a mother’s loss, but there was also a promise of redemption.
Perhaps if we ever do another anthology, the word could be ‘Hope’ (looking at you here, Helen Hollick!) for there is an element of that in all of my stories too – well, perhaps bar one, you’ll have to read them all to find out which one I mean – and I hope the fact that so many themes can be found among these stories means that they tell of the human existence. These tales of mine might have historical settings, but I think the same emotions are recognisable across the centuries.
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| read a snippet |
DAISY CHAIN by Annie Whitehead
England, 1141
A mother’s love. A mother’s grief
Her son
lay at her feet, so quiet and still. Instinct warned her not to touch him with
her foot for fear of waking him and making him start; knowledge told her that
he would never wake again. His clear blue eyes were open to the sky. He
appeared to be looking at the clouds as he always did when wanting to avoid
work. Could he see God from there? Why had no one thought to close his lids for
her? She bent her knees and what began as a slow descent ended as a tumble to
the ground. She steadied herself with one hand behind her, legs tucked under
her skirts. The other hand moved to place itself on his chest. Her touch, ever
gentle, was rewarded only with cold. The skin did not yield but was tight,
oddly, as if stretched.
‘Ma!
I’m away to me bed now.’
‘Then
hug your mother.’
He bends, and she reaches up. He radiates
warmth, the dimensions of his body so similar to his father’s, but with firmer
muscles, leaner.
The cold beneath her fingers pushed her hand away. She held it to her own breast, as the cry began to form. A cry that would bring her heart up with it as it made its way from somewhere deep in her entrails. It was as though she was being wrapped in her own winding cloth and it squeezed and pressed, robbing her of her breath and forcing that cry to her throat.
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| King Stephen |
Annie
Whitehead is a prize-winning writer, historian, and Fellow of the Royal
Historical Society, and has written four award-winning novels set in
‘Anglo-Saxon’ Mercia. She has contributed to fiction and nonfiction anthologies
and written for various magazines. She has twice been a prize winner in the
Mail on Sunday Novel Writing Competition, and won First Prize in the 2012 New
Writer Magazine's Prose and Poetry Competition, a finalist in the Tom Howard
Prize for nonfiction and shortlisted for the Exeter Story Prize and Trisha
Ashley Award 2021. She was the winner of the inaugural Historical Writers’
Association HWA/Dorothy Dunnett Prize 2017 and subsequently a judge for that
same competition. She has also been a judge for the HNS (Historical Novel
Society) Short Story Competition, and was a 2024 judge for the HWA Crown
Nonfiction Award and chaired the same panel in 2025.
Her nonfiction books are Mercia:
The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom (a #1 Amazon Best-seller, published by
Amberley books) and Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Pen &
Sword Books). In 2023 she contributed to a new history of English monarchs,
published by Hodder & Stoughton, and in 2025 Murder in Anglo-Saxon
England was published by Amberley Books.
In February 2026 she signed a
contract for a new nonfiction book about the Anglo-Saxons, to be published by
The History Press in 2027.
Website: https://anniewhiteheadauthor.co.uk/
Amazon author page: http://viewauthor.at/Annie-Whitehead
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more great anthologies featuring various authors |
Catelin's journey sounds especially powerful because it explores a, often overlooked form of courage , to keep loving and carrying on after devastating loss. I loved the thread Annie identified running through all the anthology stories: women with little power navigating the consequences of decisions made by powerful men! :)
ReplyDeleteWriting medieval women back into history is important! One of the things I love about Annie's work is that we meet medieval women who are as real as the historical context. I only wish their struggle was NOT so relevant!!
ReplyDelete