Synopsis: The
Midwife’s Secret: PART I – “The Mysteryof the Hidden Princess
The Queen of Scots had favored Loch Leven Castle as a retreat
ideal for falconry. After her surrender the rebel lairds choose it for her
prison. A story circulates that she miscarried twins while imprisoned on the lake, and that her jailors fed the remains to shorebirds. Reports that
one of the fetuses survives prompts the regent Morton to order fruitless
excavations, and to begin a search for bairns of the appropriate age. Like Herod before him, his effort yields no
results
.
The legend of Loch Leven might have died, but for two unlinked events. The morning after a young midwife named Mariel Fraser dies in her
lover Kirkcaldy’s arms, a victim of Morton’s rack, the knight Kirkcaldy of
Grange leaves Edinburgh Castle and returns with a child.
“Her name is Daisy,” he declares “and she is mine.”
Kirkcaldy’s long suffering wife Margaret asked why he thinks
the bairn is his.
“She is because I say she is.” The good Scotswoman
does not contradict her husband nor does she believe a word of it. Lady Grange suspected that an affaire de coeur
between Kirkcaldy and the midwife at the time Mariel arrived to deliver their
friend Maitland’s heir. But Margaret is her husband’s bursar and can tally
calendar months as well as coins. Daisy’s age does not match her husband’s
claim. At the time of her conception,
Kirkcaldy would have been occupied chasing the queen's husband Bothwell across the
North Sea.
Two years later when the castle falls to English siege guns
and Kirkcaldy faces a traitor’s death, Daisy is not among its refugees. She has been sent from Edinburgh Castle in
the care of Kirkcaldy’s daughter Janet, Lady Ferniehirst. Pursuant to her father's instructions, Janet delivers her
ward to Joinville to the custody of the House of Guise, and mysteriously dies
on her homeward bound journey.
Years later, a second strange tale reaches Morton’s ears
regarding a Scottish child at the abbey of Saint Pierre les Dames in Rheims.
For undisclosed reasons, she is shooed into a hole in the chapel floor when
strangers visit, and is fiercely guarded by the abbess Renee de Guise, Marie
Stuart’s aunt. Her name is Marguerite de’Kircaldie, but the nuns call her La Belle Ecossaise because of her
exceptional beauty. Morton and his
English cohort Sir Francis Walsingham find the report especially intriguing, since
Kirkcaldy was an ardent Calvinist and a personal enemy of the Duke of Guise.
When the rumors merge, battle lines are drawn pitting
Marguerite de Kircaldie and her mentor and guardian Abbess Renee de Guise
against a host of vicious men and ambitious women on both sides of the English
Channel, some who wished to exploit Marguerite’s suspected bloodline and others
who plot her death.
In a story told primarily from the point of view of the mysterious Marguerite and the abbess Renee,
but with vignettes of cardinals and kings, the legends surrounding the origin of La Belle Écossaise become less important than a young woman’s struggle to choose her destiny inspite of the challenges and dangers she faces.
Author’s note: The book is inappropriate for young readers due
to strong sexual content in the relationship between the Earl of Morton and Kirkcaldy’s
treacherous sister-in-law Helen Leslie, and scenes of torture, rape and murder which adult readers have found appropriately presented, but which may be too graphic for some. Most of the characters central to the story are actual
historical figures. The midwife Mariel
Fraser is a construct.
Midwife's Secret-The Mystery of the Hidden Princess is on sale at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/The-Midwifes-Secret-published-Ecossaise/dp/1482303620 and Kindlehttp://www.amazon.com/The-Midwifes-Secret-Princess-ebook/dp/B00BA0EI34. The second independent segment of the story--The Midwife's Secret - The Other Daughter-- is coming this summer.
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