The Echoes of Love
by Hannah Fielding
Synopsis
Seduction, passion and the chance for new love.
A terrible truth that will change two lives forever.
Venetia
Aston-Montagu has escaped to Italy’s most captivating city to work in her
godmother’s architectural practice, putting a lost love behind her. For the
past ten years she has built a fortress around her heart, only to find the
walls tumbling down one night of the carnival when she is rescued from masked
assailants by an enigmatic stranger, Paolo Barone.
Drawn to the
powerfully seductive Paolo, despite warnings of his Don Juan reputation and
rumours that he keeps a mistress, Venetia can’t help being caught up in the
smouldering passion that ignites between them.
When she finds
herself assigned to a project at his magnificent home deep in the Tuscan
countryside, Venetia must not only contend with a beautiful young rival, but
also come face to face with the dark shadows of Paolo’s past that threaten to
come between them.
Can Venetia
trust that love will triumph, even over her own demons? Or will Paolo’s
carefully guarded, devastating secret tear them apart forever?
Excerpt
It was nearly seven-thirty and the shops were
beginning to shut down for the night. The wind that had blown all day had
dropped, and a slight haze veiled the trees, as if gauze had been hung in front
of everything that was more than a few feet away. The damp air was soaked with
silence.
Venetia tightened the belt of her coat around her
slim waist and lifted the fur collar snugly about her neck. The sound of her
footsteps echoed off the pavement as she hurried towards the Rialto Bridge from
Piazza San Marco, a solitary figure in an almost deserted street. She was on
her way to catch the vaporetto water bus, which would drop her off
at Palazzo Mendicoli where she had an apartment. A few huddled pedestrians
could be seen on the opposite pavement, and there was not much traffic on the
great inky stretch of water of the Grand Canal.
Suddenly Venetia saw two figures spring out in
front of her from the surrounding darkness. They were enveloped in carnevale cloaks,
with no visible faces, only a spooky blackness where they should have been. A
hand materialised from under the all-encompassing wrap of one of the sinister
creatures and grabbed at her bag. Chilled to the bone, Venetia tried to scream
but the sound froze in her throat. Struggling, she hung onto the leather pouch
which was looped over her shoulder and across her front as she tried to lift
her knee to kick him in the groin, but her aggressors were prepared. An arm was
thrown around her throat from the back and the second figure produced a knife.
Just as he was going to slash at the strap of her
bag, an imposing silhouette emerged from nowhere and with startling speed its
owner swung at Venetia’s attacker with his fist, knocking him off balance. With
a grunt of pain the man fell backwards, tripping over his accomplice who gave a
curse, and they both tumbled to the ground. Then, picking themselves up in a
flash, they took to their heels and fled into the hazy gloom.
‘Va tutto bene, are you alright?’ The
stranger’s light baritone voice broke through Venetia’s disoriented awareness,
and he looked down anxiously into her large amber eyes.
‘Yes, yes, I think so,’ she panted, her hands going
to her throat.
‘Are you hurt at all?’
‘No, no just a little shaken, thank you.’
‘You’re shivering. You’ve had a bad shock and you
need a warm drink. Come. There’s a caffeteria that serves the
best hot chocolate in Venice, just a few steps from here. It’ll do you good.’
Without waiting for a response, he took Venetia’s arm and led the way down the
narrow street.
Guest Post
The Echoes of Love
‘Legendary’ Blog Tour: The Chianti rooster
For the love of legends
For me, researching a book is just as enjoyable as writing
it. I set each of my novels in a passionate,
romantic country, and so that I can really transport my readers there, I
immerse myself in the setting: its history, its scenery, its cuisine, its
culture. Top of my research list are local legends – I love colourful, age-old
stories; the more fantastical, the better!
Since I was a young girl, tucked up in bed and listening
avidly to my governess weaving bedtime tales, I have loved legends. Fairytales
too, of course – they sowed the seeds for my romantic nature – but legends
fascinated me most: those that have stood the test of time, that offer
intriguing explanations for the modern world, that are at once fantastical and
yet, somehow, believable.
My novel
The Echoes of Love, set in Venice, Tuscany and Sardinia, incorporates
various Italian legends – told by the hero, Paolo, who is a raconteur
extraordinaire, to my heroine, Venetia – and in my research files I collected
many more. What better way to share some of these most romantic, magical and atmospheric
tales but in this
Echoes of Love
‘Legendary’ Blog Tour!
Today, I’m taking you to Tuscany, that most beautiful
of regions whose landscapes I very much enjoyed describing in my book:
The Tyrrhenian coast glowed under the wide arc of a
burning, cloudless blue sky, the sea a shimmering golden mirror; the sweeping
coastline looked out over the distant islands of the Tuscan Archipelago,
echoing their beauty with its wild and mountainous landscape, the pale rock
densely interspersed with exotically green pine groves, and its almost
luminescent aquamarine waters lapping the shores.
The Chianti rooster
Baroness Victoria Sackville-West wrote of Tuscany:
‘Here the sweet legends of the world remain.’ Wherever one goes in Tuscany
there is the sense of legend, for this is the land of the mysterious and
ancient Etruscan civilisation, and many of the Tuscan tales have their roots in
‘the olden days’, having been told at the fireside from generation to
generation.
One such legend is that of the black rooster of
Chianti, which dates back to the 13th century. Then, Siena and Florence were
engaged in a power struggle over who ruled Chianti. They came up with an idea
to create a fair division of land: make the border between the two republics
the midpoint between Florence and Siena. But how to determine the midpoint?
Why, march a soldier from each city, of course, and where the two met draw the
border. But for such a plan to work the two soldiers would have to leave their
respective cities at exactly the same time. And in this era before synchronised clocks, the rooster would serve at the
cue to walk – in both cities these birds would surely crow at the same time.
Perhaps the two roosters would have been in time, but
for the Florentines, who hatched a cunning plan. They starved a black rooster
in a darkened box for several days, so that on the day of the march, it awoke early out of hunger. The soldier
marching for Florence set out in the dark as the rooster crowed, and he met his
counterpart close to Siena’s city walls! And so it was that Florence came to
dominate Chianti. Today, to commemorate this legend, the symbol of Chianti wine
is the black rooster.
On the subject of roosters, do beware when in Tuscany a
rooster lays an egg. Should this occur, legend tells that the egg will contain
not a chick, but a Basilisco: a
deadly serpent creature. Fans of Harry Potter will note that this Basilisco can kill through eye contact –
but in variance to JK Rowling’s Basilisk, the Tuscan one has the head of a
rooster. Supposedly, you’re most at risk of encountering one if the rooster
lays a black egg on Christmas Day. Unlikely? Indeed. But then as JK Rowling
wrote in The Order of the Phoenix,
‘Anything's possible…’
Buy links
About the Author
Hannah Fielding
is a novelist, a dreamer, a traveler, a mother, a wife and an incurable
romantic. The seeds for her writing career were sown in early childhood, spent
in Egypt, when she came to an agreement with her governess Zula: for each fairy
story Zula told, Hannah would invent and relate one of her own. Years later –
following a degree in French literature, several years of travelling in Europe,
falling in love with an Englishman, the arrival of two beautiful children and a
career in property development – Hannah decided after so many years of yearning
to write that the time was now. Today, she lives the dream: she writes full
time, splitting her time between her homes in Kent, England, and the South of
France, where she dreams up romances overlooking breathtaking views of the
Mediterranean.
Her first novel,
Burning Embers, is a vivid, evocative
love story set against the backdrop of tempestuous and wild Kenya of the 1970s,
reviewed by one newspaper as ‘romance like Hollywood used to make’. Her new
novel, The Echoes of Love, is a story
of passion, betrayal and intrigue set in the romantic and mysterious city of
Venice and the beautiful landscape of Tuscany. It was picked by The Sun newspaper as one of the most
romantic books ever written.
Social media links
See my review of her first novel here.
