Seen through Robert’s star-struck eyes, Mary has arrived to rule a ‘cold people’ who are ‘starving for life, for a brief fierce moment of joy’. Robert glimpses that light in Mary’s ‘gunpowder flash’ smile. This is not especially surprising, except that Robert is soon revealed to be a sixteen-year-old girl, Alison Blackadder.

‘Names have a way of following you,’ Alison says. For the novel’s Byron Bay author, Jesse Blackadder, her family name inspired a return to her Scottish roots, leading to the discovery that her ancestor William Blackadder was implicated in the assassination of Lord Darnley, who was briefly and disastrously married to Mary. Darnley, depicted as a petulant ‘child of seventeen’, was rumoured to prefer the company of boys, while it was noted that Mary occasionally dressed herself and her ladies as men at court. Kitted up as a soldier, Mary led her army onto the battlefield.

For some researchers, these historical details may seem tenuous vis-à-vis the famous tumult of Mary’s life. For others, they will offer a fresh view of Mary’s royal court, where the heady proximity to power is convincingly drawn as dangerous, addictive, and stressful.

Working within the rich tradition of positioning the previously invisible or marginalised centre stage, The Raven’s Heart is foremost a complex political intrigue counterbalanced by the protagonist’s increasingly poetic sensibilities. In the opening chapters, the ‘costume drama’ element marks out its own territory with the blurring of sexualities and the strangely familiar learning and performing of gender. Disguise and the deliberate toying with identity are central to the plot.

We learn that the genesis of Alison’s masquerade lies at the crux of her family’s exile from its ancestral lands. After the ruthless Hume clan seized Blackadder castle, Alison’s father, William, was condemned to a life of hardship and comparative ignominy at sea. Obsessed by the loss of his ‘birthright’, William remains angry at his inability to reclaim it. As long as the Hume spies hover, it is deemed safer for his daughter to pass as a boy.

Sensing a change in fortune with the return of Mary, William persuades Alison to enter the protection of the court as a woman, where it is hoped that she will engineer a favourable royal intervention. Alison is torn between freedom and constraint, adventure and duty, gain and loss, tensions largely determined by her functioning in the world as both male and female. Agreeing to fulfil her father’s wish, she says, ‘to make me as a woman, I must be unmade as a man’. Tutored by her disapproving aunt in ‘womanly ways’, where frothy underthings, ‘voluminous skirts’, and fiddly buttons restrict and contain the otherwise exuberant form, Alison sets a slipper in the stirrup and rides to the palace.

From her lowly and crowded vantage point, Alison learns that the Catholic Mary is under siege. Mary must marry quickly and produce an heir. Her controversial claim to the English throne chafes with her Protestant cousin, Elizabeth I, who openly boasts about bearing ‘the heart of a man’. The bevy of perfidious lords must be kept amused while Mary woos her desperate and suspicious subjects. Reliant on the information of slippery advisers and on the support of her ladies-in-waiting, Mary must secure her hold on the Scottish throne.

In a possible nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Alison-as-woman is soon rendered a mute and passive ‘creature embroidered into one of the tapestries’. How can she gain Mary’s confidence? Alison’s heroic equestrianism presents an opportunity to flee the suffocating confines of the court with Mary, but it is when Alison is caught leaving the castle dressed as Robert that Mary’s gaze alights on her. Mary covets Alison’s masculine disguise and recognises the potential of adopting it herself.

So begins a queen’s transformation into a common man under the tremulous hand of her new cross-dressing confidante, Alison. Venturing into the perilous streets and raucous taverns of Edinburgh by night, Mary observes her subjects firsthand with Alison/Robert as her wary guide. When Alison is appointed as Mary’s ‘raven’, darting out to gauge the people’s fickle allegiance to their queen, Alison strikes a precarious deal. If she helps speed Mary towards the throne, Mary will expedite the return of Blackadder castle to Alison’s family. As the treacherous politicking escalates, Alison’s character is given greater nuance and depth when she opens herself to a tender affair with her only trustworthy companion, Angelique.

Following Jesse Blackadder’s more experimental first novel, After the Party (1995), The Raven’s Heart heralds a departure in style and subject matter, and is a welcome and audacious piece of work.