The Great Mogul

Book Excerpt: ...hey noted the dastardly murder of their chivalrous leader. The galleon became a slaughterhouse. The monk, frenzied as a beast in the shambles, sprang overboard and was carried past another ship, the Vera Cruz, which rescued him. This vessel was one of the few stormwracked and feverladen survivors of the Armada which reached Corunna. The Englishmen learnt from wounded Spaniards that the fanatical ecclesiastic was a certain Fra Geronimo from the great Jesuit seminary at Toledo. They remembered the name so that they might curse it. They cried in their rage because Fra Geronimo had escaped them. A black snake in the plain of Herat, a glittering crucifix on board the San Jose in the Channel off Gravelines--these were queer links, savoring of necromancy, whereby the lives of gallant men and fair women should be bound indissolubly. Yet it was so, as those who follow this strange and true history shall learn, for many a blow was struck and many a heart ached because Nur Mahal lived and Sir Robert...