Johanna Ward
Setting out for the Saint Giles leper colony outside Shrewsbury, Brother Cadfael has more pressing matters on his mind than the grand wedding coming to his abbey. Yet as fate would have it, Cadfael arrives at Saint Giles just as the nuptial party passes the colony's gates. He sees the fragile bride, looking like a prisoner between her two stern guardians, and the bridegroom, an arrogant, fleshy aristocrat old enough to be her grandfather. And he
...Mary Lennox is born in India. She is a sickly, sallow child, whose parents hide her away with her Ayah. After her parents die in a cholera outbreak she is sent to live in Yorkshire with her uncle. She is, once more, left mostly to herself. Her uncle still mourns his beautiful wife ten years after her death, and seeks to escape his grief by traveling. When a chambermaid tells Mary about her mistress's garden, which her master locked up on her death,
...In the era of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyke, Spain had its own great painter—Diego Vel├ísquez. His assistant is Juan, an African slave who helps his master in his studio by preparing paints and stretching canvasses. Soon, by spending time in the studio and watching his master's technique, Juan begins to teach himself to paint too. But such work as the creation of art is forbidden to slaves. Delighted with his work but carefully guarding
...St. Peter's Fair was a grand event, attracting merchants from across England and beyond. With the pause in the Civil War during the summer of 1139, the fair would bring some much-needed gaiety to Shrewsbury.
But a wealthy merchant is found murdered in the river Severn. Brother Cadfael offers to help the merchant's niece, Emma; but while he searches for the killer, two more men are murdered—like her uncle, apparently for the valuables
...9) Outcast
When a Roman ship is wrecked on the coast of Britain, Beric, the infant son of a Roman soldier, is the only survivor. Beric grows up with a Briton tribe, but to his foster people he remains an alien—one of the Red Crests. So when bad times come, the tribe holds him responsible and casts him out.
Rejected by the only life he knows, the boy turns to his own people, but Rome too rejects him. Lost, bewildered, and a captive in his father's
...