The First Sir Percy

The early-seventeenth-century Netherlands, three months after the events of The Laughing Cavalier. Diogenes — the laughing English soldier of fortune who was once hired to abduct the Dutch beauty Gilda and came instead to love her — is at last to wed her, in a double wedding shared with her brother and his own bride. But the joy of the ceremony is cut short. Bad news arrives, and Diogenes is charged with a desperate errand: to carry urgent warning to two of the Stadtholder's divisions, caught in peril from the enemy and unaware of their danger.

He sets out at once, leaving his new bride behind, and rides into the darkest hours and direst threats of his young life. This time Baroness Orczy turns her attention to the antagonist and his henchmen, building the menace from the enemy's side and placing her hero in an all but untenable position — with the life of the nation at stake as well as his own. The result is graver than its predecessor: the stakes are higher, the threats nearer, and the famous laugh, when it comes, is the laughter of a man with the shadows closing around him.

A direct sequel to the 1913 Laughing Cavalier, this novel takes Orczy's invented seventeenth-century ancestor of Sir Percy Blakeney and carries him into the role his title names: the first Sir Percy, founder of the Blakeney line that will run, more than a century and a half later, to the Scarlet Pimpernel himself. It is a swashbuckling romance of honour and love under pressure, and the saga of a name being born.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book's place in the Pimpernel saga, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.