His birth was quiet. The panic was not.
In the winter of 1571, Isobel Kerr ? midwife, herbalist, and long-suffering witness to the incompetence of her betters ? is dragged through a blizzard to Harden Keep for a birth she already knows will be trouble. She does not yet know it will take over her life.
The boy she delivers is small, silent, and marked ? and his mother's quiet bloodline runs straight back to the line Henry VIII named to inherit England. On paper this newborn outranks Elizabeth, whom her enemies still call a bastard, and Mary, Queen of Scots, whom old King Henry barred outright. Which makes him the most dangerous thing in the realm: an heir nobody chose and everybody wants.
For sixteen years, as the Queen's spies and the Scots queen's plotters hunt the length of England, Isobel must keep one growing boy invisible ? through conspiracies, betrayals, and the slow closing of a net that ends at the scaffold of a queen.
Two queens fought for a crown. Neither of them was the rightful heir.
For readers of Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel ? a darkly comic Tudor tale told from below stairs, where history remembers the queens, but it was the midwife who decided how the story ended.
Book One of the Isobel Kerr novels.
