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Yet for all that splendour, it was the eyes which held you. Her face, no. It was painted and powdered till it became a mask. And I realised now that her whole body was encased, wired and boned and caged within those magnificent garments, until the only parts free to move were the long fine hands gripping the arms of her throne and those remarkable eyes. Suddenly a terrible sense of pity overwhelmed me. This woman had been trapped from childhood into a role she must play or die. And she had played it magnificently. A woman, ruling England better than any monarch before her, yet a woman declared a heretic and a bastard by the ruler of the all-powerful Catholic Church. A woman dressed in gowns and jewels worth a city’s ransom, yet a woman playing a man’s part. A woman who had loved a man, but could not marry him, and his loss gleamed in those eyes which, despite all the efforts of her tiring-women, bore the unmistakably traces of much weeping.
We were not so different, this great monarch and I.
She was speaking now, thanking me for exposing the treason of Parker and van Leyden.
‘And we understand,’ the Queen said, and there was a faint tremor in her voice, though she strove valiantly to conceal it, ‘we understand that it was you who saved a dear friend from an evil plan to poison him. We shall not forget that you gave him a few more weeks of life.’
‘Your Majesty,’ I said, bowing again and moving backwards toward the door.
I raised my eyes a final time and something flashed between us, across that jewel casket of a room.
Her eyes widened. And I thought: She knows.
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Praise for A
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendi
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Ma
'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller A
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star
The Author
A
Her first three novels, The A
Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez and the second is The Enterprise of England.
She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.
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