Forbidden passion

Historical romance by Gloria Frost

It is a dark age in which the gypsy girl Isabella is born into. Violence, famine and epidemics mark the 17th century as a time of terror. Witch mania, superstition and bizarre rituals lead to devastating consequences. This proves a fertile ground for the fierce battles that result from the Defenestration of Prague in 1618. They will go down in history as the Thirty Year’s War.
Power-obsessed, the German emperor Ferdinand II wants to prohibit Protestantism and force all of Germany under the sovereignty of the Catholic Church. Relentlessly pursued by her foes as the “Heath Witch”, Isabella would rather give up her young life than her faith.

Her belief in the righteousness of the task she is faced with gives the beautiful young heroine the necessary strength, courage and confidence she needs to go through her ordeals.

Her hope for success enables the girl to rise above herself. Filled with confidence, she takes up the struggle against the superior Catholic forces alongside Christian, the youngest son of the nobility of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel who shies away from no battle. His fearlessness and audacity leads the local people to respectfully call him “The Mad Christian”, whereas his opponents use this name to belittle someone whom they consider to be mad or crazy for risking his life against such great odds. Isabella proves his equal and nurses the wounded soldiers at the front line who are crying out in pain. With home-brewed tinctures and lotions she eases the worst pains of the injured and with the juices she makes from opium poppy she allays their overwhelming fear.

Love is the strongest feeling resting in the soul of this pagan girl. She gives herself passionately to the count’s son Victor von Grimmshagen, clinging to him with every fibre of her heart. Isabella tears down the walls of hypocrisy, prudery and double standards erected by the Church and the state, whose rulers take part in orgies behind the scenes while the clergy preaches water and intoxicates itself with wine. All the same: With good reason the rulers put their hands over their ears when being told that their lecherous soldiers are doing the same with their sweethearts in the trenches.
Yet how should heroes and warriors bear the extreme suffering and the chaos and slaughter of the war if it were not for love? Eroticism, lust and passion are the driving forces that give meaning to the wretched existence of the marauding soldiery, something that is not mentioned in history books.

The author also does not leave out the amours of the starving soldiers. The reader gets to come close to the battles, the fear and the suffering as well as the wild passions of the doomed people. In her usual confident manner and using the style characteristic of the era, the author has vividly portrayed life under the prevailing circumstances in an electric atmosphere which could not be more colourful and lively. Gloria Frost has mixed the fiction and the reality of a bloody war and the great feelings of the protagonists with a dash of eroticism and a touch of mystic fantasy into a powerful cocktail that is best taken in piping hot.

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