In the spring of 1585, seven English ships sailed around Cape Feare and up the windswept coast of Florida. Their mission: to gain a foothold in the Americas, a gateway to riches, an island fortress against the Spanish. But within ten years, the vibrant new colony had vanished without a trace.… In Hampton Court, Elizabeth is under siege—surrounded by sycophants, spies, and assassins who stalk her every move. Among those charged with protecting her is a tall, charismatic spy named Gabriel North…and when the queen’s advisers persuade her to send ships to the Americas, North is given a job for which he is perfectly suited: to seduce Roanoke’s Secota princess and gain information about a fabled treasure hidden in the wilderness. In Princess Naia, North meets a woman who bewitches him utterly—and he soon sees the dangerous deceptions from which his mission was born. As war and calamity crash down on Roanoke Island, Gabriel North becomes a wanted man in a desperate hunt that will lead back across the Atlantic—into a trap set by his enemies, and into a shocking act of treachery that swirls around Elizabeth herself…. With the grace of a master storyteller, Margaret Lawrence brings to life a cast of brave hearts and blackguards, petty criminals and grand schemers, who play their roles in a searing drama of conquest, rule, and rebellion. Recruited from Cambridge along with his overseer, Rob Mowbray, who, looking back, recounts the sordid truth of their adventures, Gabriel, the son of a butcher, saves Queen Elizabeth I’s life. His reward? He is sent out to colonial Roanoke with the military in search of treasure. Gabriel is soon captured by the wild country’s beauty as well as the beautiful queen of the Roanokes. The rest of the English are brutal toward the local people, while Gabriel tries to help them as he falls in love with their queen. When the mission ends, all Gabriel can think about once back in England is returning. He does, with a group of settlers, only to find that the mission is doomed from the start. Who sabotaged the colony and why? Lawrence presents a page-turning historical mystery filled with the treacherous court politics and intrigue of the time and offers an original view of the mystery that is the lost Roanoke colony. --Patty Engelmann “Well researched.”— Publishers Weekly "A page-turning historical mystery filled with the treacherous court politics and intrigue.”— Booklist Margaret Lawrence is the author of Hearts and Bones, which was nominated for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for best novel, and three other novels. She has also written for film and theater. Chapter One Blood and Pearls, or How It Began The last day of Shrovetide, a damp February in the year 1585, great Elizabeth's twenty-seventh year upon the throne. A small rain falling. A tender rain, veiling London's scars. The streets and lanes round St. Paul's throbbed with stiltwalkers and fire-swallowers and pancake sellers and herb women and ratcatchers, all frantic to snatch the last bit of pleasure and meat pie they'd get until Lent was over. A delirium of smells—roast goose, Shrove buns, early flowers brought in from the country, cinnamon and cloves in the spice merchants' barrels. Chimney smoke. Sour piss in the gutters. Sounds, too—damp silk banners flapping from diamond-paned casements, chickens gaggling, dogs barking, a bookseller beating a thief. Street cries, high and low, overlapping each other in a sharp staccato. "Pails! Any pails to mend?" "Buy new broom, buy new broom, sweep and clean!" "Today's broadsides, master! Penny each, latest Irish atrocities!" And music, of course. There was always music—fragile, rowdy, bawdy, tender. Lute players and flute players and little boys with tin whistles. Whores young and old. Beggars. Dwarves. Gypsies. Giants. Players in fusty wigs and cast-off velvets. Mummers in animal masks and bells on their shoes. In the middle of everything, a gang of apprentices pelting a huge wicker Jack o' Lent with squidgy handfuls of mud. I scanned the revellers and the market stalls, but aside from a long-faced Puritan or two, nobody looked like an assassin. Nobody ever does. A gingerbread seller dropped his tray with a curse and a clatter and I spun round, dagger drawn. Gabriel's hand touched my arm. "Robbie? What?" "Nothing." The Angel of Panic passing over my house. "Bluddy holy war. 'Kill the heretic queen and earn a thousand extra years in bluddy heaven.' The pope's turned them all loose on us now." In half a dozen cities of France, Catholic seminarians were trained in the latest Italian poisons and the best way to lay an undetectable trail of gunpowder into a queen's bedchamber. Not counting the wax dolls with pins in them and the horoscopes with her birth hour smeared in blood, there had been, by my count, twenty-three serious attempts on Elizabeth's life since her excommunication. Our master, Lord Secretary Burghley, had sent us out that day to prevent a twenty