Title: The Price of Loyalty: Serving Adela of Blois

 Author: Malve von Hassell

 Genre: Historical Fiction

 

When a twist of fate takes seven-year-old Cerdic away from England and into the service of William the Conqueror in France, his friendship with the King’s daughter, Adela, eases his homesickness. Adela matures into a formidable woman and, despite his inner turmoil, Cerdic serves Adela and her husband, Count Stephen-Henry, with unswerving allegiance.

When he strategically marries the unconventional Giselle, Cerdic doubts his loyalties will change, but he underestimates his quietly tenacious wife and the depth of her love for him.

Von Hassell’s stunning book opens in the early 12^th century, where an elderly Adela is spending her remaining years in Marcigny Abbey. It’s a beautifully studied piece of writing, suspenseful and charged, and cleverly holds the essence of the novel within its four pages. Von Hassell’s prose is poised and elegant, wonderfully embroidered with medieval detail, diction, and insight, instantly carrying the reader into the Middle Ages.

Von Hassell’s considered construction of her narrative is one of the strengths of The Price of Loyalty. The story unfolds in three parts, through close third-person perspectives that often utilize flashbacks or forward shifts in time to layer or drive the plot forward.

Tentative strands of symbolism and foreboding connect through all three sections, not only in respect of the fictional story but also linking the political landscape with its alliances and conflicts. Von Hassell’s research is impeccable, and her blending of history and fiction, compelling.

The story begins in 1077 when Cerdic sets sail for Caen. Cerdic is a mesmerizing protagonist, possessing an elusive quality and a deep vulnerability, which he is always searching to overcome. His unshakeable fealty to Adela, leading to years away and involvement in kingship and conspiracies, is both self-punishment and reward.

Nonetheless, it can be argued that The Price of Loyalty is Adela’s novel. Strong-willed, manipulative yet compassionate, von Hassell brings her to life with depth and vibrancy.

Adela evokes admiration in the reader, but also frustrates and angers, intentionally so. The scenes between her and Cerdic are achingly calibrated, weighted by the unspoken and unacted upon. The delicacy with which von Hassell portrays the complex intimacies of the relationship between them is another of the novel’s assets, as is the subtle yet masterful way she pivots the triangular dynamic between Cerdic, Adela, and Giselle.

If the novel’s structure is alive with integrity, then its main characters, factual and imagined, are even more so. They are depicted with individual dignity and interest. Count Stephen-Henry is rendered with particular richness, and the reader wonders whether his bonhomie belies a sharper perception than Adela and Cerdic realize.

Giselle, by contrast, takes a while to develop fully, paling too much into insignificance beside Adela in her initial chapters. Additionally, a touch more fire between her and Cerdic would have fully ignited a couple of their early exchanges.

Notwithstanding, Giselle comes into her own in the third section of the novel when she secretly joins the crusade to the Holy Land. The scenes involving this and the earlier pilgrimage are a departure from France, and von Hassell handles them expertly.

The last part of The Price of Loyalty moves the narrative from love and loyalty to longing and loss, and it is where the arc of the novel is brilliantly and movingly wrought. The fate of Orva, Cerdic and Giselle’s daughter, is a sharp, unexpected turn whose poignant consequences coincide with Cerdic’s emotional awakening.

The Price of Loyalty: Serving Adela of Blois is a spellbinding work of historical fiction. Finely written, wondrously absorbing, its beautifully nuanced and crafted story captivates from the first page and proves impossible to put down.

 

 

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