The Beauty of the Mist

In March of 1528, John Macpherson, Lord of the King’s Navy, sits off the coast of the Netherlands in Scotland’s flagship, the Great Michael, and paces the deck, impatiently awaiting a treacherous fog to lift before taking his vessel closer to the bustling merchant port of Antwerp. Cannonfire, muffled and far off, had been heard earlier, but for the past hour silence and the lapping of small waves against the ship’s hull had replaced the warlike sounds. As he curses the mist, a cry rings out from above, and out of the mist comes a solitary longboat containing a dead Spanish sailor and two women.Unknown to the Scottish nobleman, one of the women is Maria Hapsburg, sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Married at 17 to the boy king of Hungary, childless and widowed at 21, Maria is the newly pledged fiancé at 23 to another 16 year old king, James V, King of Scotland. With his special emissary expected any day, Maria--tired of being the marital pawn in Emperor Charles’ diplomatic machinations--secretly flees the palace of her brother at Antwerp, bound for her mother’s castle in Spain. What she had not expected was the enemy French warship that intercepted her ship en route. Escaping the burning vessel, she finds herself, to her utter dismay, in the hands of the very man she had hoped to avoid.