Lady Tremaine

I`ve been warned to be wary of strangers in the woods since I was a little girl. But just as shadows serve to hide and disguise, they also provide privacy and solitude, and, if you look carefully, beauty.` Widow twice-over, Etheldreda has learned that marriage can be violent - even if her husbands were not. Saddled with the care of two children, a priggish stepdaughter, and a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, her whole life has become a ruse like the slumping manor hall they live in: grand and ornate on the exterior, and crumbling, brick by brick, inside. Fierce in the face of her misfortune, Etheldreda clings to her family`s respectability, the lifeboat that will float her daughters along the gentle tides of stability, straight into the secure banks of marriage. When a royal ball offers the chance to secure the future she desperately desires, Etheldreda must risk her secrets, pride, and coffers in pursuit of an invitation for her daughters - only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement unfolds with unnerving speed, she unearths a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing a choice between the security she`s sought for so many years and the wellbeing of a feckless stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.