[The Queen of Scots Suite 03] • The Midwife's Secret · the Mystery of the Hidden Princess (Book Three of Th E Queen of Scots Suite)

One afternoon in December 1570, the celebrated knight Kirkcaldy of Grange rides up Castle Hill Street with a little girl named Daisy strapped in a basket riding pillion behind him. He springs from his horse and raises her high above his head for all to see. When his wife and daughter ask whose child she is, he declares that she is his, and when Lady Grange asks him why he is saying such a thing, he emphatically declares, “She is because I say she is.”

For Kirkcaldy, that settles the question. But two years later when the castle is about to fall, the knight sends his adult daughter Janet to deliver Daisy to France into the care of a most unlikely set of guardians. Daisy arrives at the castle of the House of Guise in Joinville speaking only one French sentence, “Je m'appelle Daisy.” The Dowager Duchess of Guise shakes her head from side to side: ‘Mais non! Votre nom est Marguerite, mon cher!" It appears that even the child's name has been taken from her by the Guises.

For delivering her purported sister to their care, Janet Kirkcaldy, Lady Ferniehirst, is rewarded with a overdose of slow acting pennyroyal that kills her on her inbound journey, the first in a parade of victims of warring factions, one wishing to keep the child’s identity a secret, and the other, wishing her dead.

Given to the custody of Renee de Guise, the formidable abbess of Saint Pierre les Dames in Rheims, Marguerite de Kircaldie grows into a legendary beauty the nuns call “La Belle Ecossaise”. She is an unusually tall girl with amber flecked eyes reminiscent of those in Clouet's famous sketches of the youthful Queen of Scots. In response, the Guise are quick to counter that she has the spirited nature and red-gold hair of the Knight Kirkcaldy.

Meanwhile in Scotland Kirkcaldy’s bitter enemy, the mighty Earl of Morton, sifts the pebbles on the beach below Loch Leven Castle, searching for human remains of twins the Queen of Scots is reported to have miscarried while a prisoner there. There are alarming rumors that one of the fetuses survives.

At the same time, to the south in England, a tall forlorn woman looks out upon the lawns of Chatsworth, watching other women’s children cavorting on the lawn. The son she has not seen since he was ten month's old is now king of Scotland, and all that remains of the swaddled newborn she handed to the care of a midwife is a void she carries in her heart.

At Saint Pierre les Dames, Marguerite is kept in cloister as if she were ordained, hidden from male citizens of Rheims who have heard of her beauty and seek to scale the abbey wall just to get a look at her. Yet, less impetuous but far more sinister men have other plans, and it is up to Marguerite's growing self-awareness and the unequaled cunning of Renee de Guise to stop them.