Alathea
- 597 pages
- 21 hours of reading
"One day when I'm in London and rich and famous, then you can come to me with this and ask me to do it again and I will, because you were the very first person to ask me to draw ..." As Alathea reflected upon her changed fortune son that fateful day in the glorious summer of the Restoration, the future for the eleven-year-old daughter of Francis and Thomazine Heron looked bleak indeed. Only a month before they had been forced to leave their beloved Goldhayes when her uncle, Simon Heron, returned with the King to claim what was rightly his. Now this chance encounter with young John Wilmot uncovered her secret passion for drawing and changed her life for ever. Nine years passed before Alathea was able to realised her promise to the Earl of Rochester, by which time, having survived a family tragedy, the threatening attentions of her jealous half-brother, the devastation of both the Plague and the Great Fire, and forsaken marriage for her career, the beautiful, headstrong, gifted child had grown up into fame, fortune, and now the mistress of this notorioius rake. But the destiny of the fiercely independent artist was as yet unfulfilled, and in time the wheel would come full circle for Alathea, child of dreams and truths and Unicorns.
