The Laughing Cavalier

Haarlem, in the winter of 1623–24. A penniless English soldier of fortune — high-spirited, irreverent, and ready to sell his sword to whoever can pay — is hired by a conspiracy to carry off Gilda Beresteyn, the beautiful and strong-willed daughter of a prominent Dutch burgher, whose knowledge threatens a plot against the House of Orange. He takes the commission as he would take any other, a job of work for a fee. He has not reckoned on the woman herself.

What begins as an abduction becomes a battle of wills, and then something neither captor nor captive expects. Thrown together on the road and in danger, the laughing mercenary and his outraged prisoner take each other's measure, until the man who sold his blade for money discovers the one thing he will not sell — his honour, once he has staked it on protecting the very woman he was paid to seize. Around them the conspiracy grinds on, with treachery, pursuit, and reversal; but the real story is the turning of a rogue's heart.

Baroness Orczy, creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, built this novel on an audacious conceit: that her hero, the soldier she calls Diogenes, is the very man Frans Hals painted in his celebrated 1624 portrait The Laughing Cavalier — and a seventeenth-century ancestor of Sir Percy Blakeney himself. It is an origin-myth for the Blakeney bloodline, a swashbuckling romance that runs at full tilt toward a face the whole world already knows.

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