The Miracle at St. Bruno's

About this book

"I was born in the September of 1523 nine months after the monks had discovered the child in the crib on that Christmas morning. My birth was my father used to say another He was not young at the time being forty years of age . . . My mother whose great pleasure was tending her gardens called me Damask after the rose which Dr. Linacre the Kings physician had brought into England that year."Thus begins the story narrated by Damask Farland daughter of a well-to-do lawyer whose considerable lands adjoin those of St. Brunos Abbey. It is a story of a life inextricably enmashed with that of Bruno the mysterious child found on the abbey altar that Christmas morning and raised by the monks to become a man at once handsome and saintly but also brooding and ominous tortured by the secret of his origin which looms ever more menacingly over the huge abbey he comes to dominate.This is also the story of an engaging family the Farlands. Of a fathr wise enough to understand "the happier our King is the happier I as a true subject must be " a wife twenty years his junior and a daughter whose intelligence is constantly to war with the strange hold Bruno has upon her destiny. What happens to the Farlands against the background of what is happening to King Henry and his court during this robust period provides a novel in which suspense and the highlights of history are wonderfully balanced.