The Prowl of Unrest

During the dark years of Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War, Blythe Brown, together with her brother Barnaby (children of a wealthy ship-owning Mercer) run wild during their childhood around the shipping port of King’s Lynn with their Wolfhounds as protectors. Blythe, dressed in her brother’s cast-off clothing, learns to sail, swim and swear, together with other useful abilities not normal for a girl of the 1600’s.

It is clear to the local Wise Woman that Blythe is a natural psychic and clairvoyant, so teaches her the arts of healing and herbalism. When Blythe is eighteen, the Witch Finder General gallops into King’s Lynn searching for witches. The son of a Bible-thumping Preacher, he despises women and seeks their undoing. When he spies the beautiful Blythe, he becomes obsessed – his desire is to get her into his clutches and to see her, ultimately, hanged.

Valerie began her literary career by writing pieces for national magazines and newspapers, including some for Punch magazine before its close-down.

On the instruction of a Native American Chief named Medicine Crow, who manifested at the foot of her bed, she wrote a book, The Magician’s Daughter, a Modern Mystic’s Journey of Discovery, under the name of Valerie Gordon. This was a journal of her extraordinary supernatural experiences, precognitive dreams and visions. After having some fascinating past life regressions, she took a year’s course in hypnotherapy in order to become a Past Life Regressionist herself.

Valerie has also studied astrology and palmistry and is a Reiki practitioner, master and tutor.

For fifteen years, in the shrine village of Walsingham, Valerie made and sold candles from her own shop into which, to her surprise, many a witch wandered. One day, driving by some pilgrims on foot, who were singing psalms and bearing a huge crucifix, she became overcome with fear and had to stop the car to recover. Believing this to be a past life reaction, she wondered if she had been accused of witchcraft in a previous life. A local woman later told her that there used to be a ‘hanging’ field in Walsingham… Valerie began to research and discovered that in 1645 the Witch Finder General once lived in nearby King’s Lynn when he was hunting down witches, which prompted the seeds of The Prowl of Unrest to grow in her mind.

Valerie has always enjoyed animals at her home, having owned many dogs and cats, a telepathic horse, a matriarchal goat and a sheep with ambition, though currently she has only four hens, two parrots and four cats. She has two children and two grandchildren and lives near Sandringham in Norfolk with her partner.