Wintercombe (Wintercombe Series Book 1)

Product Information

Remaining steadfast within challenging, difficult or even insurmountable situations, while modelling qualities such as faithfulness and building stability within one's household, (especially in front of young, impressionable children), would have made for me, a much more enjoyable story.

Wintercombe - Lume Books

I love to read novels that illustrate personality change and watch the characters mature through their life lessons and circumstances. Amidst the chaos of the Royalist occupation, Silence finds a kindred spirit in the Royalist Captain, Nick Hellier, and gradually begins to fall in love with him. Neither am I a religious person so the word "godly" and talk of "godliness" got a bit tiresome at times.The garrison may be withdrawn to Bath or Bristol, if Fairfax comes too close - and then we will all be spared. I completely enjoyed this book (and I am going to be very honest here) - until I came to the last sixty pages or so. When the young captain tries to stem some of the violence instigated and or condoned by his colonel, Silence isn’t sure at first if she can trust him. It is possible that this character (like Silence's father), was created solely to garner sympathy for Silence's plight (having escaped the rigors of her childhood only to be plunged into a joyless, harsh religious atmosphere).

Pamela Belle - Fantastic Fiction Pamela Belle - Fantastic Fiction

By the time we meet her, she's become a model Puritan, resigned to never getting her wishes or be as she wants to be, and has found a measure of contentment, if not happiness, in rearing her children and managing Wintercombe. Even tho it shelters a traitor's wife and children, the evil mother and widow was wife to a loyal man.

Wintercombe is ultimately a story of bittersweet love and of two people who have found their soulmate and who know that it won’t last. Can he ignore the daily reminders that the war isn’t going in the King’s favor and that probably soon he’ll have to leave this household and its mistress who has turned from a harmless dalliance into something much deeper? Married at twenty to an older widower, London raised Silence struggles to fit in with his children and tyrannical mother.

Wintercombe by Pamela Belle | Goodreads Wintercombe by Pamela Belle | Goodreads

Lines become blurred when the lady of the house, Silence, is protected, on many occasions, by Captain Nick Hellier. The novel covers difficulties arising from all these soldiers in a home of Puritan women, their drinking, cavorting, raiding of the ale, their seducing of the milkmaid, their turning the chimney sweeper's daughter into a lady of ill repute, the lack of food, back weather, disagreements, arguments, and even a shooting and an explosion! The writing was excellent and really pulled me in and the author did a wonderful job of keeping the story interesting with not only great development of the characters but with a roller coaster of ups and downs throughout the story. Written in the grand storytelling tradition of sweeping sagas like Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber, and Beulah Land, if I could rate this higher than 5 stars I would do it.I had read the Mask of Duplicity novel series that showed the other side of the Jacobites war If this series continues as well as that series did, I will be reading one a month. When a company of Cavaliers arrives and installs themselves in the house, Silence must fight to keep Wintercombe and her family safe, with the unexpected assistance of one of the Cavalier captains, Nick Hellier.