The cup of ghosts - Paul Doherty

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 which manifests itself in a series of gruesome killings, one of which actually takes place during Edward II's Coronation in January 1308, when a knight of the Royal Household, Sir John Baquelle, is crushed to death.

Paul Doherty was born in Middlesbrough. He studied History at Liverpool and Oxford Universities and obtained a doctorate for his thesis on Edward II and Queen Isabella. He is now headmaster of a school in north-east London and lives with his family in Essex.