Book Details - The Lost Duchess
Emme Fifield has fallen about as far as a gentlewoman can.
Once a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, Emme Fifield’s only hope of surviving the scandal that threatens to engulf her is to escape England for a fresh start in the new America.
Emme joins Kit Doonan’s rag-tag band of idealists, desperados and misfits bound for Virginia, but such a voyage will be far from easy and Emme finds her attraction to the mysterious Doonan inconvenient to say the least.
As for Kit, the handsome mariner has spent years imprisoned by the Spanish, and living as an outlaw with a band of escaped slaves; he has his own inner demons to confront, and his own dark secrets to keep…
Ever since Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in Virginia was abandoned in 1587 its fate has remained a mystery; The Lost Duchess explores what might have happened to the ill-starred ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke.
The Journey Behind The Lost Duchess
For this journey, I became involved in investigating one of the most enduring mysteries behind the founding of modern America: the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Lost Colony’, the first attempt at founding a permanent English settlement in the New World.
Of course that meant a trip for me to the location of the doomed settlement on the Island of Roanoke in Virginia, as it was then (now North Carolina in the Outer Banks). In 1587 at least 113 men, women and children were left on Roanoke by the colony’s governor, John White, who returned to England for essential supplies, only to be thwarted by the preparations to meet the threat from the Spanish Armada. When he eventually returned three years later no trace of the colony could be found. Among those missing was his own grand-daughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent born on American soil.
Mistress of the Sea
Plymouth 1570; Ellyn Cooksley fears for her elderly father’s health when he declares his intention to sail with Drake on an expedition he has been backing. Already yearning for escape from the loveless marriage planned for her, Ellyn boards the expedition ship as a stowaway.
Also aboard the Swan is Will Doonan, Ellyn’s charming but socially inferior neighbour. Will has courted Ellyn playfully without any real hope of winning her, but when she is discovered aboard ship, dressed in the garb of a cabin boy, he is furious.
‘Fascinating… exotic, savage and altogether engrossing’
Diana Gabaldon
