The real heiress:
While Hadley and Mary are both fictional characters, I did model Mary very closely after a woman of the same name who, like my Mary, was a commoner and one of the wealthiest women in England. In her middle twenties, she wed a Lord Anne Hamilton (Yes, he was named Anne, after his godmother the queen!) a younger son of the Duke of Hamilton. When Lord Anne proved a profligate, Mary took extreme measures by choosing the stigma of illegitimacy in order to protect the inheritance of their infant son. Because the couple had been wed in an “irregular” Fleet wedding, it was no great difficulty for her to have their marriage records destroyed. She then baptized her son under her maiden name, claiming that she was only the mistress and not the wife of her noble husband. Her scheme worked and Mary never re-wed.
The Cornbury Jacobite Plot:
From the abdication of James II in 1688 to the death of his grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last direct Stuart heir in 1788, there were numerous attempts by various Jacobite groups and foreign sympathizers to restore the Stuarts to the throne. In my story, while working as a Hanoverian spy, Hadley had assisted to quash a plot by Bishop Atterbury, but then out of remorse, later assisted the young Henry Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, in his plot to gain French backing for a Stuart restoration. The attempt by Cornbury was real, although I took some license with the dates for the purpose of my story. The French backed down and Cornbury gave up political intrigues and no other significant attempt was made again until Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland in 1745.
Acknowledgments
I am immensely grateful to all of my Goodreads friends, particularly Jill and Jerelyn, who have been such pillars of support and encouragement. Thank you for believing in me.
I also wish to thank my wonderful editor, Erin Molta, and the rest of the staff at Entangled Publishing who were instrumental in bringing my story to digital life.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgments