The Heart of Midlothian

Amid the peat-smoked hush of 1736 Edinburgh, Jeanie Deans—calloused-palmed daughter of a Pentland crofter—bears a clandestine child after a single moon-drenched tryst with Robertson, the city’s most wanted freebooter. Before her whispered prayers can dry on the chapel stone, the infant vanishes, snatched by Madge Wildfire, a midwife’s deranged offspring who croons psalms to the wind and trades babies like marbles. The town’s draconian magistrates, ever eager to cull scandal, pin the capital crime of infanticide on Jeanie; the gallows loom, splintered and impatient. Her odyssey to London’s corridors of power—on foot through frostbitten heather, guided only by filial devotion and the thrum of her own pulse—becomes an aria of endurance, a secular pilgrimage for mercy that will tilt the scales of both crown and conscience.