Sometimes it is better to play the role you desire than the role you are given.
Pocket
January 2011
On Sale: January 18, 2011
Featuring: Rosamund; Will Creighton
464 pages ISBN: 1451613024 EAN: 9781451613025 Mass Market Paperback (reprint) Add to Wish List
At Queen Elizabethβs palace, intrigue abounds. And when a naive girl with a gift for keen observation enters the court, she can hardly imagine the role she will play in bringing Englandβindeed, the whole of Europeβto the brink of war. Nor can she foresee her own journey to the brink of ecstasy and beyond. . . .
When she becomes a junior lady of Queen Elizabethβs bedchamber, Rosamund is instructed by her cousin, the brilliant and devious secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, to record everything she observes. Her promised reward: a chance at a good marriage. But through her brother Thomas, Rosamund finds herself drawn to the forbidden, rough-and-tumble world of theatre, and to Thomasβs friend, the dramatic, impetuous playwright Christopher Marlowe. And then Rosamund meets Will Creightonβa persuasive courtier, poet, and would-be playwright who is the embodiment of an unsuitable match.
The unsanctioned relationship between Rosamund and Will draws the wrath of Elizabeth, who prides herself on being the Virgin Queen. Rosamund is sent in disgrace to a remote castle that holds Elizabethβs cousin Mary Stuart, the imprisoned Queen of Scots. Here, Walsingham expects Rosamund to uncover proof of a plot against Elizabeth. But surely, nothing good can come of putting an artless girl in such close proximity to so many seductive players and deceptive games. Unless, of course, Rosamund can discover an affinity for passion and intrigue herself. . . .
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jane Feather conspires with history to tell this dazzling story about two very real, very wily queensβ and one impassioned young woman whose life they change forever.
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