Black prince - Elizabeth Gill

In 1877 a woman is raped while cleaning out a church in a small Durham mining village. When she gives birth to a child who looks like a gypsy, her husband persuades her to give the boy up to a childless couple. At the same time the local pit owner turns his wife out onto the bleak moors; when she dies, he tells their son she was evil.

Nearly two decades later both events, seemingly unrelated, have shaped the characters of two unloved boys, now men. And they in turn are to change the lives of two innocent young women, as the past reaches out and casts its shadow over the present.