In the novel -- as in history -- Radegunda is the wife of Clotair, King of Gaul, seized by him as a prize of war. When she suspects Clotair of murdering her brother, she retreats from the blood-lust of the Dark Ages. Taking the young, innocent Agnes with her, she establishes a religious order whe...
1878: Pope Pius IX dies, after a misguided papacy that has stamped out liberalism, centralized papal power and witnessed the Pope's declaration of Infallibility. The Judas Cloth is told from the standpoint of Pius's son Nicola Santi, an orphan unaware of his scandalous paternity, who becomes a pr...
Even in the 1890s, when it had been a mental hospital for fifty years, its grounds could reclaim a radiance which was often at its most beguiling when one of the figures in the foreground happened to be that of Monseigneur de Belcastel. Though an inmate, he wore well-cut cassocks and moved with a...
How could the thought not occur to me when I had seen, plucked and tasted my first peach and apricot on their terrace, not to speak of my first muscat grapes and mirabelle plums? In the evenings we sat outside enjoying the cool air and watching fireflies swoop. Sometimes a storm on distant mounta...
They were hard to flush out, because the park was dotted with gazebos – ‘follies’ built in the Famine days to provide work – and if you hid in one you could always get out later by climbing the tall iron gates. There were places too, where footholes had been gouged in the perimeter wall. &n...