Banners of Gold
A Novel
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The enchanting Alix of Wanthwaite returns in a suspenseful and richly textured adventure in which nothing less than the future of England is at stake.
Alix is home at her beloved estate on the Scottish border when King Richard’s soldiers march into her castle and demand to take her to the Continent with them. King Richard has been captured while on Crusade, and Alix is among the nobles whose lives will be collateral for the king’s ransom. But when she’s delivered to Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard’s mother, she is dumbfounded to learn that the queen has other plans for her.
King Richard needs an heir, Eleanor tells Alix. Repulsed by his queen, a homely religious fanatic, he has told his mother that the only woman he wants is the one he met on Crusade, when she was disguised as a boy. Richard wants Alix to be his mistress and the mother of the next Plantagenet king. Now a beguiling and irrepressible young woman, Alix faces more tribulations—and romance—on this trip to Europe, where affairs of the state and affairs of the heart are intricately intertwined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Home in England from the crusades (Shield of Three Lions, Lady Alix now is stranded and vulnerable at her Wanthwaite domain with husband Enoch off at war. Trouble brews when Bonel, one of the king's protected Jews, recruits Alix as a hostage to Germany where Richard the Lion Hearted is imprisoned. Homosexual King Richard finds himself once again attracted to Alix, the charming hoyden, and decides she must bear his needed heir to the throne. Alix's flight from this unwanted honor takes her to a nunnery that is a hotbed of erotic piety, then to a refuge with kindly, eccentric Sister Tiberga, who is both whore and healer. Richard's fanatic Spanish queen, Berengaria, persecutes Alix, but ultimately our heroine engages in a sporting interlude of courtly love with Richard before she discovers the perfidy of the Plantagenets. Details abound concerning the treatment of Jews, whose plight Alix seeks to alleviate. All told, this is another frothy, zany and irreverent medieval escapade that will delight readers who enjoyed Lady Alix's earlier misadventures. (October 24
