ABOUT THE BOOK
Thrilling time-slip historical fiction about
the enigmatic Lady Mary Seymour, daughter of Henry VIII’s
widow Katherine Parr.
“She had not told him a single thing
about her family. She had never spoken of them. But they were all there on the
pages of notes she had so painstakingly compiled. The Seymour family tree
linked them together, tangled as the roots of the old oaks of Savernake Forest.
They were all there: she, Edward, Mary, Arthur…”
Wiltshire, Autumn 2016. Deep in a small,
unassuming art shop, Alison Bannister stumbles upon a newly discovered Tudor
portrait, supposedly of Anne Boleyn. Except Alison knows better, the woman is
Mary Seymour, the daughter of Katherine Parr who was taken to Wolf Hall in 1557
as an unwanted orphan and presumed dead after going missing as a child.
Alison is not from the modern world. She
has travelled a long way, waited 500 years, to find a clue as valuable as this
portrait. For the painting holds the key to Mary Seymour’s mysterious
disappearance and Alison’s own unhappy quest.
Alison and Mary have made an agreement
which transcends time. Alison will help Mary escape Wolf Hall and Mary will find
Alison’s baby boy.
The Phantom Tree is a novel for fans of
mystery, drama and romance. Perfect for readers of Philippa Gregory and
Barbara Erskine.
READ A CHAPTER FROM THE BOOK
Chapter 2
Mary, Wiltshire, 1557
Alison Banestre and I were cousins of a kind. We were both orphans. There the bond between us began and ended: Alison, my enemy.
We made a bargain, she and I. She helped me to escape; I helped her to find her son. It is entirely possible to bargain with an enemy if there is something that you both want and
so it proved. Thus we were bound together through time.
We met at Wolf Hall. I came there in the summer of fifteen hundred and fifty-seven, in the fourth year of the reign of Mary the Queen. I was a Mary, too, cousin of the late king, Edward, daughter to one dead queen and niece to another, with a famous name and not a penny to pay my way. I was ten years old and I already had a reputation for witchcraft.
‘The child is possessed, your grace,’ the cook at Grimsthorpe told the Duchess of Suffolk when, at the age of five, I was found sitting under a table in the kitchens, holding a posset that had curdled. ‘That cream was as fresh as a daisy only a moment ago.’
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Nicola Cornick is an
international bestseller and has penned over 40 novels. She has been
shortlisted four times for the US Romance Writers of America RITA Award and
twice for the UK Romantic Novelists Association Romance Prize. She
studied History at the University of London and has a Masters in Public History
from Ruskin College Oxford. She acts as a history consultant for TV and radio
and gives talks on local history and creative writing. Nicola also volunteers
as a guide and historian for the National Trust at Ashdown House. She
lives in Oxfordshire.
INSPIRATION FOR THE PHANTOM TREE
Nicola has always been fascinated by the
mystery of Mary Seymour; how could the daughter of the widowed Queen and a man
as notorious as Thomas Seymour simply disappear from the records? However, the
initial inspiration for The Phantom Tree came from a small portrait
claiming to be of Anne Boleyn, belonging to one of Nicola’s relatives. There is
no way of knowing if the portrait is real or fake but the question
authentication got Nicola thinking about the stories behind the facts.
Nicola always works with historical
facts and shaped them through her own imaginative re-telling. For The Phantom Tree she visited the locations of Wolf Hall, Savernake Forest and
Littlecote House, researching local records and national document on the
stories surrounding each area. Several of the events in the book, including the
ghost of the headless woman in Savernake Forest, are based on existing myths
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