Nine Moons Wasted

by Anne Rundle, Marianne Lamont (Pseudonym)

Barbary Graham at fifteen envisions a life of horseback riding at her father's side as being far preferable to sewing in the company of her mother and sisters. Then Gray Drummond appears. When they meet on a hill outside her home, when he appears over the horizons, he seems to her to be authoritative, intelligent, yet coarse. To him, she is not a girl at all, but rather, a boy. When he discovers she is in fact a young woman, a woman dressed as a boy, a tomboy, of fifteen, her brash tone convinces him she is a woman of spirit, a woman to match his own energies. He asks her father for her hand in marriage.

349 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Anne Lamb Rundle
aka Anne Rundle, Joanne Marshall, Marianne Lamont, Alexandra Manners, Jeanne Sanders, Georgianna Bell

Anne Lamb was born on 1920 in Berwick-on-Tweed, Northumberland, England, UK, daughter of Annie Sanderson and George Manners Lamb, a soldier. She was educated at Army Schools, and attended Berwick High School for Girls. She worked as civil servant on Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1942 to 1950. On 1th October 1949, she married Edwin Charles Rundle, and had one daughter, Anne, and two sons, James and Iain.

When she published her first novel in 1967, she won the Netta Muskett Award for new writers. She won twice the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association for her novels Cat on a Broomstick (1970) and Flower of Silence (1971). In 1974, she was named Daughter of Mark Twain. On 1937, she married Richard Maddocks, who died in 1970. Anne Rundle died on 1989.

Reviews

[Arthur Chappell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a romantic historic novel set in the English Civil War in Scotland in 1644 and 1645. As a re-enactor of events in the period covered I feel it is better than some reviewers give it credit for.

Unusually, the author sets her action amidst the Irish Camp followers who accompanied Alastair MacColla’s forces to Scotland to assist Montrose in his doomed campaigns there on behalf of King Charles 1st.

It is the story of the fictitious Grey Drummond, a kinsman to Montrose, and the two women who love him, Barbary, his wife, and Bridget, an Irish girl. Barbary follows her cold, distant husband to war, disguising herself as a man, in the tradition of the real Mrs. Pierson (who makes a cameo appearance in the book).

Barbary’s ruse is quickly discovered, and she is cast among the gypsy like Irish women, Most recognize her as a woman, but Bridget is one of the few who assumes she is male. Only when Barbary is left for dead in Aberdeen, where she is heavily pregnant and taken in by a family she has saved from a massacre by the Irishry does Barbary leave the story for a while.

Now the same events are covered from Bridget’s point of view, as her own affair with Drummond intensifies. As she learns that Barbary is alive, and watches Drummond depart to meet his errant wife, Bridget discovers that she too is pregnant. Feeling abandoned, she becomes suicidal. Drummond meets his son, but then returns to battle, and saves Bridget from taking her own life. However, at Tippermuir, Bridget is slaughtered, and her unborn child dragged from her womb.

Drummond, captured, pledges to stop fighting the Royalist cause, and he is allowed to return home to his wife and son.

The Civil war makes an interesting backdrop and the historic accuracy behind the story is well presented, (though the Gordon Clan are introduced too soon). However, the story coming from the eyes of the women puts the main battle sequences in the distance for much of the story. At one point, Drummond is left in a coma for several months, conveniently allowing the author to bi-pass important events at Auldearn and Alford.

There are good descriptions of the Irish women on nomadic movements across the Scottish Highlands, and taking boots and clothes from the corpses on the field of battle.

The story is far from Mills and Boon Mush, but its repetition of many events from alternating points of view slows things down a great deal. Characters spend too much time apart, rather than in direct conflict. The major historic events are often summarized by those who witnessed them, though the march on Inverlochy and the battle of Philipaugh are given full attention. An unusual and worthy Bronte-esque study of the Scottish battles, but hardly a literary classic.

Arthur Chappell

[Naksed · Rating 1 out of 5]

The better version of this story with a true happy ending and a love that is believable for the long run between the protagonists is Bitter Bride-Bed under this author’s other pen name Anne Rundle.