Following the confirmation of the rather mysterious death of her husband fighting in France, "she had emerged from seclusion (seven years as an anchoress) in her hermitage at the Derwent Crossing determined to get on with life." She had inherited a substantial fortune and had decided to set up her own house of nuns where "she could teach the young and tend the sick". She seems far from the conventional idea of a medieval nun, and to be inspired not so much by religious fervour as by a feeling that "Only by joining forces with other like-minded women in our own houses can we garner the power to change anything". But first she has to seek permission from the Abbot of Meaux. This is what she sets out to do in the first book.

She has two grown-up children, but does not seem to give them a thought, and they do not appear in the story. She is essentially a woman of action, and not one for profound religious experiences. As she explains, "We take the veil for reasons that are often more secular than not," out of a "need to do good on the world". God does not seem to come into it. She is nothing if not self-sufficient (she has no difficilty in skinning and cooking a rabbit caught by one of her hounds), and is skilled in the "physick arts", so not only knows about herbs, but does not mind examining dead bodies even when "blood, congealed and sticky, had flowed over the stone floor".

Cassandra Clark is reticent about providing biographical information, but says she has been writing plays and genre fiction for years, although none of this seems in print. She lives and works in London, and explains that her childhood in the East Riding of Yorkshire was her inspiration for the stories. One of her daughters, Candida Clark, who is also an author, says that she was inspired by the memory of how her mother spent so much time writing.
The plot of the first book came to her in a dream, but required much historical research as she says she is really a philosopher and not a historian.
I would welcome more information about her, including her date of birth and a photo (please use my Guest Book to get in touch with me).

Her agent arranged a two-book deal with John Murray for a medieval crime series. Hangman Blind is the first of the two books. She does not seem to have yet found a publisher for the third book in the series, The Law of Angels.

Hangman Blind (2008)
Hangman Blind starts in November 1382 in the 5th year of King Richard's reign, but he is only a boy. Hildegard, still a nun but no longer an anchoress, sets off for York and the Abbey of Meaux. It is at a time when there are rival popes in Rome and Avignon, and in England there is an uneasy peace in the savage aftermath of Wat Tyler's peasants' revolt. Hildegard encounters a gibbet with five bloodied, crow-stripped corpses, and in the next clearing, the body of a young man, brutally butchered. Who is he? And what is his connection with the murdered men?

Other violent deaths are to follow as Hildegard revisits her childhood home, Castle Hutton, which, she discovers, is riven by treachery. She needs all her skills and bravery to face up to the dangers when an attempt is made to poison Lord Roger de Hutton. Could his beautiful new (fifth) wife Melisen have anything to do with it? Roger describes her as "a silly, vain little creature", but later on we are told, "She did not seem stupid in the least".

There is no attempt to capture medieval vocabulary. Indeed the very opening sentence reads: "From the gates of the papal palace in Avignon issued a rider at a pace to make the sparks fly". But Hildegard is an adventurous lively character, even if she does not make an altogether convincing medieval nun.

By the end of the book even the initially hostile Abbot of Meaux, Hubert de Courcy, seems to succomb to Hildegard's charms: "Inhabitants of the real world with the ever-present threat of damnation in the next, they strolled together under the stippled shadows of the pear-tree walk. .... Hubert gazed into the darkening woodland, 'Hildegard - ' he began. It was the first time he had used her name. But then inexplicably his voice fell away to silence." Well, well. Then the book comes to a sudden end, leaving parts of the plot unresolved, with even the arch-villain still alive. All we are told is that "Whatever might happen, and whatever stood between them (Hildegard and Hubert), all fear fell away in the certainty that they would meet again." This is all very well for the author and publisher who have a contract for the second book, but it does not seem altogether fair on the reader. And even by the end of the book, Hildegard still isn't the Abbess of Meaux, as promised on the cover.

The Red Velvet Turnshoe starts in February 1383 when the nun Hildegard is improbably sent off across Europe to obtain a precious relic, the cross of Constantine. It is a long and dangerous journey, during which her life is often in danger. When she eventually returns home she finds that her old admirer, Hubert de Courcy, Abbot of Meaux, at first refuses to speak to her, and she also has a struggle on her hands to save the life of young minstrel Pierrekyn Haverel who had been accused of murdering his close friend (too close, it is rumoured), a man whose dead body is discovered at Bruges propped upright in a bale of wool. When she first helps him, she think he is probably only 14 or 15 and should be given a chance. But once their adventures begin, he seems to behave much more like a grown man - like someone quite different, in fact. As for the Abbot, his subsequent behaviour as warrior and besotted lover strains credibility more than a little. It is he who tells his loved one, "If angels exist anywhere but in our minds, then at this moment they are conjoined."

The author has explained that she began this medieval series because she "liked the clothes. And the music. The food sounds intriguing." So we are told that, before Hildegard set off on her long and arduous journey, "a new pair of buskins suitable for all terrain were cut and stitched in short order" and a pattern for some boots "was handed to a shoemaker .... and the finished boots appeared late the next day .... Hildegard pulled them on, then stamped about in them to soften the leather", and she packed a scrip "stuffed with foot balm, stomach powders, linen bandages .... With these necessities she rolled up in a small bundle a spare undershift, a light summer habit and a pair of much darned woollen leggings. On top of all that came her missal in its leather pouch." It's a pity she never seems to bother to read it - or to pray -- or for that matter, even to think of God. She is not the world's most convincing nun. And for a seasoned adventuress, she can be surprisingly naive, as, when confronted by a mob of drunken, aggressive mercenaries with "girls on offer .... as always, a sorry bunch, pock-marked, slatternly, resigned to an existence without hope or respite", she reflects, "How different it is to the priory at Swyne".

But back to trying on clothes. First she was offered a scarlet travelling cloak "lined with squirrel. It was a heavy woollen fabric died in a sumptious, eye-catching shade and was quite unsuitable for someone who wanted to travel unnoticed. Hildegard ran her fingers over it but said it was a colour her prioress would not allow." Never mind she could try "the green one with the cat-fur lining .... and there's that dark one of camlet with purple taffeta inside .... And I do believe there is a blue wool with a sheepskin lining ... Hildegard remembered liking blue in the past. It had been her husband Hugh's favourite colour." You can feel the author's enjoyment as she wrote all this.

There are some lengthy historical explanations, but unfortunately these are no substitute for an exciting plot. The author explains elsewhere that she dislikes writing about violence, and although there are some potentially exciting incidents, she seems to hurry through them with less reader involvement than you might expect. An example of this is Hildegard's crossing of the dangerous snow-covered Great St Bernard Pass when "sometimes there was nothing more than a few ropes to help them; at others there were frail cord bridges suspended over the ravines, which they could use only one at a time". But there is not all that much suspense, even when her guardian, Sir Talbot, makes the mistake of wearing her cloak and gets shot in the back by a crossbow, leaving Hildegard having to flee across the ice and snow, "leaving behind the body of a most chivalrous knight." Before that, he had kept Hildegard warm by putting "his arms around her to increase their natural heat and they huddled politely together in the snow house." All very charming, innocent, and somewhat unlikely?

The murderous Escrick Fitzjohn, arch-villain of the previous book, reappears and threatens her life once more. "Don't move, he snarled" at her. "You may as well die," he growled - and it is only the baddies in this book who snarl and growl.

At the end of the book, poor Hildegard is still not the abbess of Meaux as the cover describes her. But there are lots of loose ends and the main villains are left at large, so, assuming a publisher can be found, anything may yet happen - especially as (unfortunately) we can't even be absolutely certain that Hildegard's first husband really was killed in the war in France.

There is an informative article by the author on the Shotsmag site and an interesting if not entirely accurate review of Hangman Blind, drawing attention to some alleged inaccuracies, on the Tangled Web UK site. The author rebuts these charges on my guestbook page!

The book is available, new or used. A good source of used books is abebooks. They feature the stock of 13,000 booksellers from all over the world, and I have always found them to be very reliable.

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