Pam tapped in, smart and conventional in her blue linen suit. Caitlin followed, less precise in her movements, dreamier. She was wearing flower-patterned slacks and a white blouse.
“They’ve been clever with this room, haven’t they?” said Pam. “They haven’t meddled too much. My God, look at those chandeliers! I wonder how long it took to clean them?”
My father’s eyes shone with tears. He was beyond speech again; but as I watched he drifted like a man in a dream towards the piano at the end of the room.
Pam opened her mouth to make another of her casual remarks but nothing happened. It was the first time I had ever seen her at a loss for words. She seemed to be holding her breath as she watched my father, and as Caitlin halted at my side I knew we were both holding our breath too.
My father sat down at the piano, opened the lid and stared at the keys. Pam at once moved to the side of the room and pretended to examine one of the curtains, but Caitlin and I remained transfixed in the middle of the floor.
My father said suddenly: “I can hear.” He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “I can hear!” he called dazed. “I can hear all the notes again, every one of them. …” And he raised his shaking hands above the keyboard.
Pam was still unable to speak but I said laughing to Caitlin, “Shall we dance?” and Caitlin, her eyes shining, said, “Why not!”
The piano began to play but in my mind I heard the violins of the nineteenth century and saw the final gap closing in the great circle of time. Caitlin’s hand touched my shoulder, my arm slipped around her waist and then we danced at last beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon as the orchestra played “The Blue Danube.”
Author’s Note
THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE is a re-creation in a modern dimension of a true story in which the following people played leading parts:
EDWARD OF WOODSTOCK (1330-1376), known to history as The Black Prince; His wife and cousin, JOAN OF KENT, whom he called Jeanette;
His brother JOHN OF GAUNT;
His younger son, RICHARD OF BORDEAUX, later King Richard II;
John of Gaunt’s legitimate son HENRY OF BOLINGBROKE. later King Henry IV, and
Henry of Bolingbroke’s eldest son, later KING HENRY V, who restored England to her former military glory and completed the full circle of the Plantagenet family’s wheel of fortune.
While paying tribute to the National Trust, which saved the Yorkes’ home of Erddig in North Wales during the 1970s, I should nevertheless make it clear that Oxmoon is not Erddig—or indeed any other house in the British Isles. The Gower Peninsula does exist in South Wales beyond Swansea and any visitor can cross the Shipway to the Worm’s Head, but there is no parish of Penhale and no Oxmoon in the valley between Cefh Bryn, Harding’s Down and Rhossili Bay.
A Biography of Susan Howatch
Susan Howatch is a bestselling British novelist who has published twenty books ranging from murder mysteries to family sagas. Her work deals with complex relationships in a range of settings and explores themes revolving around sex, power, ambition, forgiveness, redemption, and love.
Howatch was born in a small town in Surrey, England, on July 14, 1940. Her father was a stockbroker who was killed in World War II. She grew up an only child in an era of post-war austerity, but had a happy childhood, particularly enjoying her time at Sutton High School in the London suburbs. In 1961, she obtained a law degree from King’s College London, then a part of London University, but dropped out of a law career in order to write. She had started writing novels when she was twelve and had been submitting manuscripts since the age of seventeen.
Eventually Howatch despaired of being published in England, and in 1963 she emigrated to New York, where—almost at once—her novel The Dark Shore was accepted for publication. In 1964, she met and married Joseph Howatch, an American artist and writer. (He passed away in 2011.) They had one daughter, Antonia, who was born in 1970.
The Dark Shore was followed by five other short novels, which, with one exception, were all twentieth-century whodunits or suspense stories. Then, in 1971, Howatch published Pennmaric, a family saga that became her first international bestseller. Using multiple narrators, Howatch follows the fortunes of the Castallack family from 1890 to 1945 and shows what happens when a grand passion leads to dire results for all concerned. This novel was based on the true story of the early Plantagenet kings of England, a story that Howatch updates to modern times.
She took another Plantagenet slice of history for her second family saga, Cashelmara (updated to the mid-nineteenth century). This novel was followed by The Wheel of Fortune, based on the last Plantagenets and updated to the twentieth century. However, although the Plantagenet history concerns only one family, the three novels are not interrelated and describe different families in different settings and eras.
In contrast to these stories, Howatch’s novel The Rich Are Different is not a family saga. It tells a topical story about freewheeling cutthroat bankers in New York and London during the 1920s and 1930s, and is based on the life of Cleopatra, her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her final battle with Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. The sequel, Sins of the Fathers, describes what has happened to the survivors.
By the 1980s Howatch’s novels had sold millions of copies and had been translated into many languages. She had also returned to Europe. In 1975, she and her husband separated (they were never divorced) and she and Antonia lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before moving to England in 1980. Eventually, they spent three years in Salisbury and then settled in London, where Howatch lived from 1987 until 2010.
While in Salisbury, the cathedral inspired Howatch to write the Starbridge series, six related novels about three very different Church of England clergymen and their families. The novels explored many ideas—religious, mystical, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and psychological—and focused with a new intensity on the subjects of obsessive love, addiction to power, the evil of violence, and the redemptive nature of forgiveness and love. One of the books, Scandalous Risks, won a literary prize, and the launch of the final novel took place at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Howatch used money from the Starbridge series to set up a lectureship at Cambridge University in theology and natural science, and is now a member of the Cambridge Guild of Benefactors as well as the Salisbury Cathedral Confraternity.
Her last three books, the St. Benet’s trilogy, form a spin-off from the Starbridge series and are set in London in the late twentieth century. They explore the borderlands where Christianity meets medicine, psychology, and the paranormal.
Howatch retired after publishing the final St. Benet’s novel, The Heartbreaker (2004), and now helps out with her family in Surrey.
Susan Howatch, age four, with a friend in 1944.
The first page of the penultimate draft of The Dark Shore, Howatch’s first published novel (printed in the United States in 1965). The final draft was typed. The Dark Shore was written in England, and Howatch sent for it after she immigrated to America in 1964.
Howatch in 1971, at the time of publication of her first international bestseller, Penmarric.
Howatch in 1977, around the time of publication of her bestseller The Rich Are Different. This photo was taken in Ireland, where she was living then.
Howatch in 1978 with her eight-year-old daughter, Antonia.
Howatch in the mid-1980s, at the time of publication of The Wheel of Fortune.
During a 1992 publicity tour, Howatch’s Mystical Paths took over the windows of a paperback shop in Oxford.
Howatch at a 1993 dinner party for fifty people at the Ritz Hotel London, given by Eddie Bell, then CEO and chairman of HarperCollins, to celebrate Howatch’s Starbridge novels. Bell is on the right; on the left is the Very Reverend Michael Mayne, who was then Dean of Westminster Abbey.
In 1999, Howatch was elected Fellow of King’s College London, from which she graduated with a law degree in 1961.
Four g
enerations of Howatch’s family in 2006: Susan (standing, third from left), with her daughter Antonia (second from left), her mother (holding baby), and her three grandchildren.
Howatch in 2007 with her three best friends from high school—“the three sisters I never had,” says Howatch. They are celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of their first meeting. From left to right: Hazel, Susan, Gay, and Jan.
Certificate recording the Honorary Doctorate of letters conferred on Howatch in 2012 by Hope College, Holland, Michigan.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Leaftree Limited
cover design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-6345-7
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The Wheel of Fortune Page 150