Showing results by author "Norah Lofts" in All Categories

When Daisy Holt was dismissed from her post as a nursemaid she set off cheerfully into the jungle of mid-Victorian London. When Kitty Hammond, proprietress of the “select establishment” off Leicester Square discovered her she was quick to realise that Daisy has a rare talent and would make a successful entertainer. And there it was that she met the impoverished artist John Skelton. To him Daisy represented the perfect model – the one to inspire his work.

Julia Ashley was born to a life of dramatic twists and tragedy. Her future and any possible lasting happiness depended entirely on a "glove marriage" to a man who was no more than a name. The Dutch East Indies, in the 17th century, were the lands of legendary riches; of "nutmeg princes"; of fortunes built on barbaric plantations and slavery. And amid the extravagance, the cruelty, the bizarre customs, perhaps the strangest events of all were the curious weddings that sent girls halfway around the world.

Forced to flee Revolutionary France after the brutal guillotining of her beloved father, Isabella de Savigny arrives at Nethergate, the Suffolk house of her cousin, hoping for sympathy and succour. Instead, as a poor relation, she is forced to live the life of a servant and suffer the casual cruelty of lady’s maid Martha Pratt. When she is seduced and abandoned by the son of the house, Isabella is forced to marry Martha’s brother, and her struggle to survive truly begins. However, her misery is lessened when her daughter is born....

When William the Conqueror wished to reward his armourer, he made him a grant of land - land worked by freemen and already belonging to a Saxon lord. But the men of the Conquest had no time for the niceties of land tenure and legal possession. Rolf, the armourer, hacked his way through the Saxon defiance and savagely claimed his royal bequest.

For the Spender family, the ancient, beautifully kept house had seemed a godsend, an incredible bargain, almost a gift from its owner - a kindly man who merely wanted someone to protect the family homestead, to make Gad’s come alive again. And it did. Soon a strong-willed, sensible woman would be overtaken by irrational feelings she could not control, all because of the unspeakable secret kept by the women who had lived at Gad’s Hall more than a century ago.…

His name was Colin Lowrie. A tall, red-haired Scot; a man at 16, whose pride was the ancient clan pride of the Lowries. And when the clans were broken - massacred in a brutal revenge at Culloden Field - Colin Lowrie was forced to take flight on a journey half-way round the world.

Ataxerxes, king of Persia, needed a wife. This powerful warrior lord picked the one girl who would have given anything to have been passed over - a Jewish scholar, Esther, from the back streets of his capital, Shushan. To a king bored by the chattering of women wreathed in musky scents, this changeling was a breath of fresh air. But the new queen of Persia was lost in a world of protocol and soon lost her husband;s favour.

Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the brightest stars in the Elizabethan firmament. Born into relative obscurity in rural Devon, he grew up in the company of smugglers and fishermen. His lust for adventure was to take him from the bloody battlefields of Europe to the colonies of the New World and on the dazzling court of Good Queen Bess. This is the story of his relationship with the two women who dominated his life: Elizabeth, his queen, and Bess, her lady-in-waiting and his secret wife.

Hortense Beauharnais finds herself rubbing shoulders with royalty as her mother remarries to become Napoleon Bonaparte's wife. As Napoleon struggles for power on the battlefields of Europe, so Hortense charts her way through the French court - a chessboard world where the motives are jealousy and greed and the prizes are thrones of conquered countries.