Worcester, 1651: the King's cause is finished, and a drunken cavalier called Crispin Galliard — who has spent eighteen years looking for the man who burned his house and killed his wife — finds himself saddled with a priggish young Royalist who turns out to be the suitor of his enemy's daughter. Sabatini spoke five languages and wrote in English because, he said, all the best stories are told in it; the Civil War here is dirty, and the hero is genuinely unpleasant. Sixty plates of cavalry, sieges and tournament fields by Rubens and Wouwerman carry the seventeenth-century war right through the text.
