THE SERPENT GARDEN

A new and enchanting Riley period masque, featuring an innocent heroine who escapes the snares of the 16th-century Mighty: royal heavies; their beady-eyed minions; lethal conquistadors; even a released demon, dank, smelly, smoking from the ears, and a bibulous angel. As in the delightful The Oracle Glass (1994), the real personages here—from Henry VIII's Thomas Wolsey through a brace of French kings, their courts, and jumpy kin—simmer in Riley's amused regard while History stirs the action. The story opens in 1514 when narrator Susanna Dallet, whose late father, a brilliant Flemish artist, taught her his painterly secrets, discovers that her husband is a philandering lout—and one soon murdered, presumably by an enraged husband. Unbeknownst to Susanna, Master Dallet's demise was engineered as part of a scheme by a freelance necromancer to rule the world—while another group, a secret society pledged to unseat the ruling family of France, holds torchlit meetings to plot its dirty doings. Meanwhile, back at the castles of the Great: Wolsey, who's been running England for King Henry and who's been watching enemy France ``like a cat at a mousehole,'' arranges the marriage of Henry's young sister, flighty Mary, to the dying Louis XII. It's Susanna's superb copy of Mary's portrait that alerts Wolsey to her fiction of being merely her husband's agent, and so, as a full-fledged painter and a real curiosity—a woman artist!—she's sent to France for, perhaps, a bit of spying. The royal marriage and muddy festivities go forward as French and English nobles mine the landscape with plots; a demon, gorged on all the free-floating greed and malice, has a wonderful time; and a cheerful angel and his cherubs lever Susanna from very tight spots—before she finds True Love at last. Spooky, riotous, headlong action; ivory-clear satires of power-players; a spot of comic grue, enticing period ambiance, and prose alluringly luminous: a top-notch re-creation.