My Father's Child

About the Book

The hundred Years War took 117 years from start to finish.  Our libraries are full of accounts of this war and its surprisingly few battles written from the English point of view.  And then there is Shakespeare’s Henry V, that breathtaking if not entirely accurate account of the Battle of Agincourt.  Yet every story has two sides.  Here’s the other side.

Emma Llewellyn of Magherafelt, Ireland, begins her tale with: “I doubt that anyone passing would have recognized one of the raggedy-looking peasants walking along the road from Rouen to Calais as the mistress of the Dauphin, or would have realized that she was also the gentle wife of one of the Scottish delegates to the royal court of the Dauphin´s father, King Charles the Sixth.  Nevertheless, I can promise you that it was she, walking along the road on that late December day in 1415.  How do I know this with such certainty?  The woman was none other than myself.”

Emma had been a very reluctant visitor to France.  All of her young life she had been taught that the French were THE ENEMY, and it was only at her Scottish husband’s insistence that she accompanied him to that despised country and to the court of Charles VI.  And 1414 was a dangerous year to be traveling in France, especially for anyone as stubbornly loyal to the English cause as was Emma.  All the same, once her traveling party arrived in Rouen, she quickly fell in love with this beautiful and lively city and forgave it for being in France.  But there was soon to be another love to enter her life.  On the night the Scottish delegation was presented at court, there for the first time, Emma saw the Dauphin Louis, the eldest son of the French king.

The attraction between these two young people was immediate and undeniable.  Both fortunately and unfortunately for Emma as well as for her prince, this was just the sort of attraction the French court had been hoping to find for their Dauphin and a scheme was set in motion to keep Emma in France.  In the pages of this book we will follow Emma as she first tries to deny her growing attraction to the prince, but how both his and her will are overcome by the French court and by their feelings for each other.  For her, this would be a time of great happiness and almost unbearable loss.  She learns to look beyond the politics of two nations at war and to look instead into the eyes of the man who is both her county’s greatest enemy as well her own sweet love.  And she is at his side as he faces the rebellion of the John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, the constant threats from the English King, Henry V, the French king’s madness, and the shattering loss at Agincourt.  They are separated only by Louis’ departure for Paris, where he promises that as soon as possible, they will meet again on “their” bridge across the Seine.

The book is all this and more set in historical fiction.  It’s in part a love story, in part a war story, and in part eavesdropping into the life of people who lived in a time when Europe as we know it was being born.  This is the story of Emma Llewellyn, a woman who was, indeed, her father’s child.

About the Author

Although third generation Californian, Mrs. Thompson has lived in several parts of the US as a military wife. In the process of tracking down her medieval prince, Mrs. Thompson has attended college twice, first at California State University at Long Beach then later at the University of Maine, Orono, where she earned degrees in foreign languages, music, and, of course, Medieval Studies. Over the years, she’s worked at Disneyland, in the Smithsonian, in several bookstores and taught school. Today she and her husband Albert live in the southwest, dreaming of the day when they can visit her ancestral home in Magherafelt, Northern Ireland, then retire to a cottage as close to the ocean as possible.