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Overview
A mother who cannot face her future.
A daughter who cannot escape her past.
Lady Elisabeth Kerr is a keeper of secrets. A Highlander by birth and a Lowlander by marriage, she honors the auld ways, even as doubts and fears stir deep within her.
Her husband, Lord Donald, has secrets of his own, well hidden from the household, yet whispered among the town gossips.
His mother, the dowager Lady Marjory, hides gold beneath her floor and guilt inside her heart. Though her two abiding passions are maintaining her place in society and coddling her grown sons, Marjory’s many regrets, buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, continue to plague her.
One by one the Kerr family secrets begin to surface, even as bonny Prince Charlie and his rebel army ride into Edinburgh in September 1745, intent on capturing the crown.
A timeless story of love and betrayal, loss and redemption, flickering against the vivid backdrop of eighteenth-century Scotland, Here Burns My Candle illumines the dark side of human nature, even as hope, the brightest of tapers, lights the way home.
Synopsis
A mother who cannot face her future.
A daughter who cannot escape her past.
Lady Elisabeth Kerr is a keeper of secrets. A Highlander by birth and a Lowlander by marriage, she turns to the auld ways, desperate to conceal a generations-old scandal that taints her family's name.
Her husband, Lord Donald, has secrets of his own, well hidden from the household, yet whispered among the town gossips. Elisabeth cannot--must not--discover the truth, or all will be ruined.
His mother, the dowager Lady Marjory, hides gold beneath her floor and guilt inside her heart. Though her two abiding passions are maintaining her place in society and coddling her grown sons, Marjory's many regrets, buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, continue to plague her.
One by one the Kerr family secrets begin to surface, even as bonny Prince Charlie and his rebel army ride into Edinburgh in September 1745, intent on capturing the crown.
A timeless...
Publishers Weekly
Prolific and popular Christy winner Higgs (Whence Came a Prince) returns to Scotland with this historical tale set in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion led by Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of the deposed King James. In Edinburgh, Lady Elisabeth Kerr brings beauty, modest origins, and Highland-born sympathy for Bonnie Prince Charlie to her marriage to the handsome royalist Lord Donald Kerr, who loves his wife and has an eye for beautiful women. She secretly follows the auld ways, pagan worship of the moon. Donald, too, has his secret affairs; his widowed mother, Dowager Lady Marjory Kerr, has bags of gold hidden away. The story begins slowly, picking up speed after characters and tensions are introduced and rebellious forces take Edinburgh. The characters are remarkably flawed—the better to be redeemed in an evangelical Christian novel—though Donald's flaws and Elisabeth's notable patience may try some readers' patience. Higgs is a stickler for period authenticity and has done her homework on history and dialect. Fans have been waiting five years for this novel and will not be disappointed. (Mar.)