Lady Of The Ascendant
Today is my launch day. I sent publicity material to Professor Bernard Capp of Warwick University who is one of the UK’s leading authorities on 17th century history. It was partly due to his encouragement for my project that I began the novel some years ago. I hope he’ll like it and will give me a good response which I can send in to the SICA Britain website. I still have many other PR people to contact re this novel but will do this over the next few days as advised by my daughter Hani the marketing expert. – Rohana
Rohana Darlington lives in Cheshire where her novel Lady of the Ascendant is set. She is currently working on a sequel: A Heart Besieged, a novel set during the Great Siege of Chester at a later stage of the English Civil War. She loves the 17th century and Cheshire and is planning other novels set in this fascinating period featuring the lives of the characters introduced in Lady of the Ascendant and A Heart Besieged.
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The Background to the novel:
September 1642 and King Charles I has declared war on his rebellious Parliamentarian subjects. In Chester to raise arms for his royalist cause he finds the ancient city a magnet for Protestant refugees fleeing massacres in Ireland, spies, mercenaries and religious fanatics.
Matthias Astbury, a celebrated court physician in Chester to establish a medical practice far from insurgent London, has disappeared. His mutilated body is discovered in a stinking tanning pit as the city is threatened by an outbreak of pestilence. Sarah, his widow, a midwife and herbalist, imprisoned and unjustly accused of his murder by witchcraft must escape a death sentence by proving who really killed him.
She soon learns her marriage has been a sham, a façade hiding Matthias’s adultery with Lady Blanche Delamere, a protégé of Queen Henrietta Maria, the king’s hated Catholic wife, and that she has unwittingly been a gullible dupe in his activities as a royalist spymaster.
She establishes his death is linked to the murder of a mysterious visitor to the Astburys’ home and to the theft of a jewelled talisman believed to have magical curative powers. She stumbles upon a secret letter written by the king and hidden by Matthias, a document offering religious freedom to his disenfranchised Catholic subjects in return for their support in the Civil War. If discovered, it could provoke a counter-reformation blood bath. Suspected of possessing it she becomes the target for intelligencers, plotters and religious bigots.
Her quest leads her into the murky underworld power struggles between rival gangs of skinners fighting for dominance in Chester’s lucrative leather industry. She becomes a pawn to the political ambitions of Blanche and the schemes of wealthy leather magnate Alderman Robert Parnell as he conspires to abduct the king. Pursued by Parliamentarian secret agent and Puritan zealot Zachariah Prynne and his accomplice prophetic Welsh fishwife Nesta Williams she is attacked in an attempt to steal the letter.
In desperation she turns to the divinatory art of horary astrology, said to be able to answer ‘all manner of questions’ to try to find out who murdered Matthias. Surrounded by such dangerous and powerful enemies will Sarah find a way to survive?
Here is a sample page from the book:
He flung his cape round his shoulders then picked up his gauntlets and hat. He was about to depart when Sarah’s voice exploded into an extraordinary outpouring of rage that clearly astounded him, and shocked her to the core. ‘You speak as if you’re the only one with burdens, Matthias,’ she spat, springing to her feet. ‘But everyone in the city’s living in fear of misfortune! Fear of the effect the contagion will have on trade. Terrified of the soldiers and the commissioners of array, terrified their houses will be sequestered and their plate melted into coin to buy guns. Especially the women, with the streets full of ale-sozzled louts and thieves. I’m terrified too!’
Even when she saw his lip curl in contempt she could not stop. ‘How do you think Darity and Alice feel, petrified you’ll bring this foul pestilence home? They’re distraught now the king’s coming to Chester tomorrow to drum up support for this ill-conceived war. They dread Jed being forced to enlist and being dragged off to Shrewsbury when his old mother relies on him.’
She paused for a moment, trembling, but still he said nothing. ‘I’m afraid, Matthias. Afraid of the strangers who come and go at all hours,’ she gasped. Her voice rose shrilly even though she knew he would despise her vulgar lack of self-control. ‘I’m frightened of the company you keep. None are your patients and they never stay long. Why do they come here? I’m your wife! I’ve a right to know what’s going on in my own home!’ She hesitated when she saw his threatening expression but made herself finish. ‘You’re never here when I need you, and everything I do seems wrong to you. What more can I do to please you?’
The look of angry incredulity on his face turned to one of disgust. ‘You’re unfit to be my wife! Your arrogance in imagining I need to explain my activities to you reveals how little you understand what I expect from you. There’s nothing you do that could ever please me. You’ve done nothing to deserve my trust, nothing at all.’
