Bert & Bertha, King & Queen of Kent

About the Book

Young Ethelbert, King of Kent, goes to Paris to collect a substantial debt. Old Charibert, King of the Franks, greets him, stalls him a hundred times, then promises his daughter’s weight in gold. On second thought he gives her away instead. Bertha is large, but she’s beauteous, bounteous, bumptious. Ethelbert is small, but he’s a fierce warrior who bows to no one. But she nearly kills him by opening a door just as he was about to knock on it. She tends to his splattered nose and his wounded pride. He likes her jolly jokes, but she grows sad, thinking that Bert, like all the other young men she’s met, will run away from a big fat blob like herself. She won’t be sad ever again, promises Bert, not while he’s alive. Having met their match, then, they decide to make a match, even though her parents and the bishop don’t think it’s a good match. Ethelbert, you see, is a pagan, and Bertha, a Christian. A beautiful marriage and a wild wedding reception take place, complete with pop-up cake, dwarf-tossing, competitive dancing, and truly horrid foods that only a young reader can like. By the way, it’s A.D. 562 for anyone who wants to know.

About the Author

WILLIAM GRIFFIN was a senior editor at Harcourt and Macmillan in New York for 20 years. For the next 30 years he has been a free lance writer and editor. He’s done major biographical work on C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Billy Graham. He’s translated Latin spiritual classics by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas a Kempis. He’s written, directed, and acted in plays; he’s a former president of Spectral Sisters, a community theater. Bert and Bertha is his sixth novel. He’s composed and self-published one poem. Over the years he has been a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs, Chrysostom Society, Prytania Street Irregulars, Anglo-American Fusiliers 1812 (Clio’s Own), Warm Jam Club. He lives in Alexandria, Louisiana, with his wife Emilie; she too is an author but more luminous and voluminous than her husband.