Prophecies — Helena Soister

Rich, evocative, suspenseful, and with an authentic sensibility that is at the same time strikingly contemporary, Prophecies is sophisticated historical fiction that will appeal to readers of novels as diverse as those of Umberto Eco and Ellis Peters.

Prophecies is a powerful, deeply involving novel of a time and place when women were men's equals in matters of business and the heart, a time haunted by religious torment and doubt, and a time of mystery-laden forces that inspired fear and exultation.

The place is the teeming merchant city of Antwerp. The time is the sixteenth century. The women are two English widows, Sara Lathbury and Bess Marwick, aunt and niece: one middle-aged, kind-hearted, capable, and staid; and the other tempestuous, impulsive, strikingly beautiful, and young. Their late husbands were both prosperous Merchant Adventurers, and if the women are to continue their trading businesses, they need an agent to act for them on the Continent. It is to Antwerp that they come to seek him, and the man they choose, the respected Bartholomew Catlin, is capable indeed.

But Catlin is also a man tortured by ghosts and a past that still haunts him, and the more they come to know him, the more uneasy Sara becomes. She has good reason to do so. Catlin is smuggling pamphlets that invite the terrible charge of heresy from a powerful, unforgiving church. A watchful and dangerous friar is too often on the scene, clearly suspicious of Catlin and hostile toward Sara and Bess. And then there is Catlin's too-frequent companion, a crafty doctor who practices astrology and the blacker arts, and who takes salacious pleasure in reading Bess's astrological chart and prophesying an ominous future for her.

All this spells danger--danger arising from Catlin's own actions, from those of others who watch him so relentlessly, and from supernatural forces. Above all, to Sara, this spells danger for Bess. Helplessly she witnesses the charged intimacy surging between her niece and Catlin; yet try as she will, there is no stopping the younger woman's headstrong passion.

Three lives--now irrevocably entwined.

When Catlin becomes the victim of treachery, it is Bess and Sara who must try to save him--and themselves--as they flee for their lives to escape the Inquisitors of Rome, to bring Catlin surcease, and to free Bess from the fate laid upon her by the doctor's prophecies.