Free Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull

girl. His face is framed by bushy sideburns and he sports a scrap of stained material knotted around his neck. His red coat hangs on the chair behind him, the pewter buttons glinting in the light from the fire. He smells of smoke, sweat and something else approximating roasted meat and bad eggs. Mr Applebee gives his son a good hard slap on the back, a manly way of showing his affection.
    ‘Dawnay, this is my son, Owen Applebee.’
    Applebee the younger laughs, as if this is a great joke, and in truth, before every statement he utters, he laughs the same, even when his words are in no way comical. ‘How do you do?’ says he and I say nothing. ‘Shy, is it?’
    ‘Not usually,’ says Susan, fussing about his shoulders with a cloth, brushing away invisible specks. ‘Speak up, child.’
    ‘Are you come from the battlefield?’ I ask.
    ‘Oh, let the boy rest, for heaven’s sake,’ says his mother, buttering bread for his plate. ‘No need to talk of battles.’
    ‘Now then, Mother. The child can ask. And I am no boy any more and can talk of what I please,’ says Owen with a broad grin. When he smiles, he is the picture of his mother – auburn hair and freckled skin – with little of his father about him at all. Perhaps in his eyes, that is all: wide, brown and expressive.
    ‘I have been fighting under the Duke of Cumberland and am come directly from defeat in battle near Fontenoy. Tomorrow I go to see off the Young Pretender up north. I am stopping one night only with my family.’
    Susan puts her hands on his shoulders. ‘One night will have to do,’ and then adds quietly, almost to herself, ‘ Thank you, Lord, for this one night .’
    ‘Enough of that, Mother. I am here, aren’t I?’
    Say I, ‘You speak of defeat. You lost the battle?’
    He laughs again and throws up his hands, revealing a rash of scars, a big red callus on his right hand and his fingers topped with a thick black line of dirt beneath the nails. ‘We did! The truth is we almost won the day. We smashed through the centre of the French lines, only to find we were forced to retreat as our enemies rained cannon and musketry fire down upon our heads. The French had more cavalry and we had more infantry. Lots of heat from the French drove us back. We fought in our withdrawal though, and many French died, as well as our own.’
    ‘Was it very exciting?’
    ‘You feel the very life pulse through you. You are playing cards with death and so you feel your most alive.’
    ‘I should like to feel like that.’
    ‘You are not alone. There was a woman discovered in our company, only recently.’
    ‘Surely not, son,’ says my tutor. ‘How can that be?’
    ‘A soldier injured in the arm found his way to the wife of General Cumberland and then revealed him self to be her self. She’d joined to be with her husband, and when he was injured too and invalided home, she disclosed her identity so she could go home with him. Quite the tale about the regiments. No one had noticed a thing. Remember that we don’t wash much. We don’t see what’s under our shirts too often. And mayhap she didn’t have much under there to show!’
    ‘Now, my boy,’ says my tutor. ‘There is a child present.’
    ‘Yes, Father, apologies. So you see, child, there have been women in the army. Though I wouldn’t recommend it. Must be a tricky thing to lie all the time, every day, and to live that lie. Any woman to try it would be a plaguy fool.’
    His mother cries, ‘Owen Applebee! Watch your words!’
    The thought of dressing as a boy and running away this very night to fight the Young Pretender alongside Owen and the Duke of Cumberland’s forces now seems to my childish fancy the only course my life can take. I worry it over in my mind, how I will find male clothes and how I will hide them. But my tutor must say something to Matron, for she keeps a close eye on me that evening and even sits outside our dormitory until I sleep. When I wake the next morning, I know