Catherine is an appealing character - intelligent, curious, intuitive, and unabashedly in love with her new husband, that odd foreigner from a wild place called Scotland. She is also incurably clumsy - at least in part because when she is thinking out a problem, she forgets to watch where she steps.
The Le Vendeur family is complex. Hubert, Catherine's father, is the son of a Jewish merchant who was orphaned in one of the excesses of the Crusaders, who decided to start their killing before they got to the Holy Land. He was raised a Christian by a family that rescued him. He has never lost his connection with the surviving members of his birth family, in fact, he is in business with them. Catherine as a child was her father's pet and traveled with him and played with her Jewish cousins without knowing that they were relatives. Madeleine, Catherine's mother, discovered the truth of Hubert's birth and after that devoted her life to penance. When Catherine learns the truth, her reaction is very matter of fact - she is only surprised that she had not already realized it. Her sister, on the other hand, becomes hysterical and refuses to have anything further to do with either Catherine or her father. Accepting Newman's research as accurate (she does, after all, have a doctorate in Medieval Studies specializing in twelfth-century France), the level of interaction is certainly higher than I would have expected in the time and place.
In a way, reading these is like reading the better fantasy novels. Since I don't have a ready-made context for the story, it's necessary to just read and accept and let the context grow from and around the story. Somebody called it "suspending disbelief."
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