Mary Roberts Rinehart 
THE TRUCE OF GOD – A Christmas Story 

A Classic Christmas short story set in medieval times with a courageous young girl who affects the peace the world so badly needs. This book was written during the era of Rinehart’s serious writing. It is a medieval Christmas fairy tale about Lord Charles the Fair and his young daughter, Clotilde, who longs for something more than her gender allows at that period in time.This is not such an unusual wish as between the 5th C. and the 15th C. there are no less than 105 women recorded as taking up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts. However this was not as easily achieved as one might think, if only because of the differences in a women’s upper-body shape to men which made the shaping of armour more difficult, not to mention more cumbersome in battle.===============Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876-September 22, 1958) was a prolific author often called the American Agatha Christie. She is considered the source of the phrase ‘The butler did it’, although she did not actually use the phrase herself, and also considered to have invented the ‘Had-I-But-Known’ school of mystery writing.Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues and special articles. Many of her books and plays were adapted for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). While many of her books were best-sellers, critics were most appreciative of her murder mysteries.