The cup of ghosts

By 1322, Mathilde of Westminster was considered the finest physician in London. But in her years as a 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.