A Noble Queen: A Romance of Indian History (volume 1 of 3)

In the sweltering Deccan plains of the 17th century, a queen mounts her defense against an empire. Chand Beebee of Bijapur has become legend not for the crown she wore, but for the sword she wielded against the first great Mughal wave rolling south into Indian territory. Meadows Taylor, writing from decades of lived experience in India, reconstructs her defiant last stand at Ahmednagar with the eye of both historian and romantic. The narrative follows Abbas Khan, a young cavalier bleeding and riding hard through mirage-scorched terrain, his band of horsemen dwindling as Mughal patrols close in. This is adventure filtered through Victorian sentiment: honorable enemies, noble savages, empire rendered as tragedy rather than conquest. The prose has the sprawling sweep of a vanished era, complete with the colonial blind spots and genuine admiration that characterized how late-Victorian Britain sometimes imagined India's past. For readers who want historical epic with all its complexities intact.