By 1322, Mathilde of Westminster was considered the finest physician in London. But in her years as lady-in-waiting to Princess Isabella, who married the feckless Edward II, she was drawn into the murky politics of the English court, where sudden, mysterious death was part of the tapestry of life.

Many years later, when the glory is gone and all that remains are bittersweet memories, Mathilde looks back and chronicles her turbulent life. She has a keen eye for symptoms and causes - and not just the medical kind. With her sharp, suspicious intellect ready to distinguish between a fatality and an unnatural death, Mathilde is confronted by a host of chilling murders, personal danger and the murky intrigue that lies at the heart of the English and French courts at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The source of these horrors is the fierce political rivalry between Philip of France and Edward of England that manifests itself in a series of gruesome killings, one of which actually takes place during Edward II's Coronation of January 1308, when a knight of the Royal Household, Sir John Baquelle was crushed to death.