By the sword divided

Reading Mary of Carisbrooke by Margaret Campbell-Barnes some time ago, my thoughts went back to a BBC series from long ago.

That was in the time when cable tv not yet existed, not to speak of digital tv! We had an antenna on our roof, that was it. One day, during a particular violent storm, the antenna came down and was completely destructed. So my dad bought another (stronger) one and put it back on the roof. Ever since we were able to pick up Dutch TV channels and on some good days even the BBC!

So sometimes we caught some minutes of this series about the English Civil War. Now looking it up on Google, I found out it was titled By The Sword Divided and told the story of a Lacey family. From what I saw it must have been a good plot, with a Romeo and Juliet theme mixed in.

Never saw this series on Belgian TV, though. Today, we broadcast a lot of English series, and some of ours are even broadcasted in the UK... (Think of Salamander, which was one of the best series made here ever.)

As I grew up and began to write longer stories (I started with my remake of the fairy tales) this series about the Civil War must have inspired me to write what is now The Gold Crucifix. My novel also begins during Civil War, when Rebecca Flint - daughter of a severe puritan vicar - allows a bunch of royalist fugitives to find refuge in the vicarage. She shares one romantic night with the youngest of them. When they depart the next morning, he gives her a small token of his affection: a beautiful gold crucifix on a golden chain.

When she is dying, Rebecca reveals to her eldest daughter she is not the child of Amos Jennings, but of an unknown noble. Since then, young Sarah can't find peace of mind anymore. She wants to find out the identity of her true father. But this journey proves a difficult undertaking. When she falls in love with Richard, who is the brother of an earl, the same faith as her mother threatens to befall her. So she escapes to London, where she will become one of the first female actresses at the Theatre Royal.

If you want to find out more, I suggest you buy the book! You can get it from my publisher, Rogue Phoenix Press, or from Amazon and other online booksellers.