I’m a Little Bit Medieval

My love affair with things Medieval seems to have started a long time ago, and began—as is not surprising to anyone who knows me—with music. My family loved Christmas. My sisters and I used to sing all the old carols, and some of the new ones, though I never thought much about the origins of those more ancient songs. Not until one magical Christmas Eve when I was about eight or nine years old.

The tree was all decorated per my older sister’s instructions—she was very particular about how the tinsel went on. My mom had been baking Christmas cookies for days and days. The presents were under the tree, and good food was promised for the big day. I’m pretty sure we were waiting to go to the midnight service at church.

There’s a magical feel about Christmas Eve. A little bit of I wonder, and some hope for snow, and a breathless sort of suspense of time as if all the years and all the Christmases blend together, and we feel just a little bit what our ancestors must have felt at the festive season. Like me, my dad loved music and usually had the radio or the stereo on. A particular song began to play, one unfamiliar to me…

I remember the moment precisely. I was standing in the dining room, adjacent to the living room where the stereo played. The rooms were dim. The world outside held its breath waiting for what would ensue. The song came on and captured me.

I didn’t know the name of it then. But voices rose and fell in an archaic tune that affected me on a level as deep as memory. I’ve thought years later, it might well have been memory. I stood transfixed, the rest of my family oblivious to the deep emotions seizing me, and listened to The Coventry Carol.

Since then, at other seasons but especially at Christmastide, I’ve had similar deep reactions to other Medieval music. As if I’ve been there and heard it before in some great hall with the troubadours playing, or the chorus of voices rising and falling in some far-off stone chapel. Seduced by Medieval music, I love it to this day.

My latest release, The Mistletoe Heart, takes place in Medieval England and is very much a story of its times. A young woman has sent her betrothed on a holy mission. She hopes he’ll return to help celebrate Christmas, but on that fateful Christmas Eve, it’s another young man who arrives. One who lays his heart at her feet.

Come spend part of your Christmas in Medieval times with me. Maybe you’ll feel just a little of the magic that touched me that day long ago, and turned me a little bit Medieval.

A happy Christmas to you all!

The Mistletoe Heart Blurb:

It’s the Christmas season at Clarendon, and Genevieve DeClare is determined to provide a joyful holiday for her mother and sister, despite the losses they’ve endured the past year. The castle is decked with greenery and she’s planned a lavish feast. Awaiting her guests, her heart longs for one more thing: the return of her betrothed, Maddox DeVille, who departed on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land a year ago.

But when an unexpected guest arrives, he’s a stranger. Tomas Monmercy, a knight newly returned from the Crusades, has traveled many weary miles to fulfill a promise and bring Genevieve the talisman she entrusted to Maddox—a mistletoe heart. Tomas considers it a sacred duty. He certainly never intends to fall in love with the beautiful maiden his friend loved so well.

Excerpt:

A check in his step had him pausing. She could feel the intensity of his gaze marking her every feature, even if she could not see his face.

Her mother and her sister both exclaimed, and got to their feet. Like Genevieve, Gilliane started forward. Genevieve barely noticed. She reached him first and grasped for his hands.

They felt cold, cold as the grave, and they gripped Genevieve’s with frantic strength. In one movement, he went down to his knee on the flagstone floor and tossed the hood back onto his shoulders.

She found herself staring into the face of a stranger.

Not Maddox. Not her friend at all. He could not be more unlike.

This man had dark hair, a profusion of curls that tumbled down his neck and over his brow. He had a narrow face bracketed by lines in the cheeks, though he could not be above a score and five. His eyes, too, were dark and burned with a kind of passion Genevieve had never before beheld.

“Lady Genevieve DeClare?”

Genevieve tried to recoil but he held the hands she’d offered so eagerly, held them tight. Behind her, Gilliane cried out. Uncle Gervase exclaimed and started forward, but she could look nowhere save into those liquid, dark eyes.