I grew up in Farnham, a small market town in Surrey, but only when there was a year commemorating the siege of Farnham Castle did my historian nose become excited about its history. Characters sprung up, some based on the actual people who lived in Farnham in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the hop grower whose forebears introduced hops to the town where conditions particularly favoured their growth. Farnham was full of tanneries - was it perhaps a rather smelly place? - and became full of troops at one stage of the English Civil War. The title comes from a contemporary madrigal which I had sung in the past - "Love me not for comely grace, for my pleasing eye or face..." - a theme as Abigail learns to distrust good looks and finds the unreasonableness of real love. Her brother witnesses battles, she repeatedly fears that the man and his horse boy she loves have been killed. It is a turbulent time, and each person has to find their own freedom from control by others. People who read it tell me they can't put it down. One man said he kept being late for meals because he wanted to read the next episode. I'm encouraged that men like the book as much as women do. So now I've done a follow-up, when the war was meant to be over but kept on erupting, the King was shown to be devious and unreliable, demands for justice and democracy struggle against vested interests and were only met a couple of hundred years later; a novel full of interesting people. Called Charity’s Choice, it is not yet published.
