Book
The Rebel’s Mark
First published 2022
1598. Nicholas Shelby returns from Padua with Bianca and their child to find an England exhausted by its long war with Spain and increasingly conscious that Elizabeth I’s reign cannot last forever. Nicholas is now welcome at court, but Robert Cecil’s service again proves difficult to escape. When the poet and colonial official Edmund Spenser sends Cecil an enigmatic plea from Ireland, Nicholas is dispatched to investigate and Bianca goes with him into a country already convulsed by rebellion.
The mission places them inside the Nine Years’ War, where English authority, Irish resistance and the prospect of Spanish intervention turn private loyalties into political risks. Perry brings Nicholas between Cecil and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose rivalry over influence and the Irish war would soon become one of the defining conflicts of Elizabeth’s final years. The Rebel’s Mark broadens the series into wartime political fiction while retaining the medical observation, investigation and personal danger that shape Nicholas and Bianca’s partnership.
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