Son of Dust
By H.F.M. Prescott

448 Pages • $13.95

Son of Dust
By H.F.M. Prescott

About the Author

Son of Dust won’t be shelved among the romance novels in your bookstore, but it nonetheless resembles contemporary bodice-rippers in several ways. It’s an against-all-odds love story with an ornate historical setting, treacherous villains, courageous knights, and a fast-moving plot propelled by a powerful current of sexual desire. There’s redemption at the end, but the couple at the center of the story pays a great price to achieve it.

Hilda Prescott is more than a great storyteller. She is a literary artist with a rare talent for dramatizing spiritual themes. Son of Dust, her third novel, is a profound reflection on the eternal battle between spirit and flesh that colors human relationships and drives much of human history. The story is set in eleventh-century Normandy and is narrated with precise attention to the historical details of the time. But its moral seriousness and mature artistry give it the timeless quality of a classic.

Son of Dust is the story of adulterous love and its consequences. The action takes place in the noble courts of Normandy in the years leading up to the Norman invasion of England in 1066. In fact, an important character in the book is Guillelm of Normandy, the future William the Conqueror. Fulcun Geroy, a minor noble, is smitten by Alde, the wife of a knight at Guillelm’s court. “Smitten” is an understatement—Fulcun becomes obsessed with Alde. She responds with encouragement, and when Fulcun gets the chance, he carries her off.

The act has terrible consequences. It brings death and devastation to the entire Geroy clan. Indeed, it upsets the delicate balance of feudal, familial, and marital loyalties that moderates the harsh world of eleventh-century France.

The mayhem in Fulcun’s society is matched by the turmoil in his soul. Fulcun’s other passion is for God, and he is tormented by the thought that his love for Alde is both holy and sinful. Prescott elevates the story to a near-mythical level. Fulcun and Alde evoke Adam and Eve. Their adultery functions as a kind of original sin, bringing out the worst in other people and triggering ruin.

Fulcun and Alde eventually extricate themselves from this tangled web. Fulcun wanted true love, in contrast to the crude and brutal sexual relationships that were the norm around him. But he was misled by the clichés of courtly romance—that true love is forbidden, desperate, spontaneous. By God’s grace, he learns that true love is generous, sacrificial, and directed to the good of the other.

Fulcun learns one of these lessons about love from a wise abbot named Osbern. Fulcun tells him, “It was a monk that told me a man should care for nothing else but God only.” Osbern replies, “Well, he was wrong. The more creatures we love the better. They’re all his.”

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About the Author

Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott was born in Latchford, Cheshire, on February 22, 1896, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. A brilliant student, she studied modern history at Oxford University and medieval history at Manchester University, receiving master’s degrees from both institutions.

Prescott taught in private schools for a time but in 1923 gave up full-time teaching for writing, though she maintained a connection with Oxford University as a tutor in history. Her first novel, The Unhurrying Chase, was published in 1925, followed by The Lost Fight in 1928 and Son of Dust in 1932. Each of these historical novels set in medieval France is centered on a moral and sexual conflict in the midst of a harsh feudal world. All three novels were praised for their historical depth and their style, “a constant careful beauty which from the first page marks her work as both unusual and distinctive,” as the New Statesman put it.

Prescott’s most acclaimed work was The Man on a Donkey, a sprawling historical novel of early Reformation England published in two volumes in 1952. Set mainly in Yorkshire, the novel is a multifaceted historical panorama of the Roman Catholic reaction against the new religious policies of Henry VIII. Commonweal praised the book as “a profoundly moving chronicle, a beautifully executed piece of literature, and a massively impressive work of power, sensitivity and drama.” Prescott also received acclaim for Spanish Tudor: The Life of Bloody Mary,a biography of Mary Tudor, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

While many of her historical novels are engrossing epics of romance and adventure, H. F. M. Prescott lived a quiet life for many years in Charlbury, Oxfordshire. A committed member of the Church of England, she had a great fondness for travel and the English countryside. She died in 1972.

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