The Lady's Slipper
Author : Deborah Swift
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
Release Date : 2011-06-03
ISBN : 144720512X
Pages : 296 pages
Rating : 4.7/5 (447 Download)
Download The Lady's Slipper in PDF by Deborah Swift Full Book and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1660. The King is back, memories of the Civil War still rankle. In rural Westmorland, artist Alice Ibbetson has become captivated by the rare Lady's Slipper orchid. She is determined to capture it's unique beauty for posterity, even if it means stealing the flower from the land of the recently converted Quaker, Richard Wheeler. Fired by his newfound faith, the former soldier Wheeler feels bound to track down the missing orchid. Meanwhile, others are eager to lay hands on the flower, and have their own powerful motives. Margaret Poulter, a local medicine woman, is seduced by the orchid's mysterious herbal powers, while Geoffrey Fisk, Alice's patron and former comrade-in-arms of Wheeler, sees the valuable plant as a way to repair his ailing fortunes and cure his own agonizing illness. Fearing that Wheeler and his friends are planning revolution, Fisk sends his son Stephen to spy on the Quakers, only for the young man to find his loyalties divided as he befriends the group he has been sent to investigate. Then, when Alice Ibbetson is implicated in a brutal murder, she is imprisoned along with the suspected anti-royalist Wheeler. As Fisk's sanity grows ever more precarious, and Wheeler and Alice plot their escape, a storm begins to brew, from which no party will escape unscathed. Vivid, gripping and intensely atmospheric, The Lady's Slipper is a novel about beauty, faith and loyalty. It marks the emergence of an exquisite new voice in historical fiction.