Wanton Troopers
Hugh Malahide arrives at his nonagenarian uncle’s house having deserted the Royalist cause following the battle of Naseby. Why his uncle’s house? Because he cannot stand his Puritan wife. Instead, he falls for Isabella, daughter of one of the local Puritan gentry, after her estranged brother turns up wounded on the doorstep. Isabella’s father is set on marrying her to a man who cares nothing for her, and on buying out Hugh’s uncle. Isabella’s brother, declared dead by his father for supporting the king, manages to aggravate matters by stealing the family heirloom pearls. The course of true love has Hugh taking a white-water ride over these obstacles and more, knowing he can’t offer Isabella his hand even if they are all overcome.
Like most romances set in the English Civil War, a jaded Cavalier is drawn to a trapped Puritan maiden, but the adventure charting the course of this particular romance is engaging and has some highly unusual and unexpected twists and turns.
The writing style is one that some readers will delight in and others balk at. Ornate, full of metaphor, written in third person, but deeply in the head of each character, which means a sudden jump for a paragraph or two into another perspective can be confusing. I did feel a lot of the assumptions made by the characters, while clear from a historical perspective, were not at all obvious at the time. Fortunately for the peace of mind of the characters, foreknowledge of the inevitable sequestration of Royalist lands was not one such.
But the characters themselves are definitely the stars of this show: fully realised and very human. The reader is drawn into Hugh’s desperation from the first, and rides with him every step of the way in hope of the fulfilment of his impossible dream.
