From the bestselling author of Elizabeth & Elizabeth and The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress, comes a remarkable work of historical fiction based on the author's own family history.

She is a young maid in a stately home; he is a dashing British army officer trapped in an unhappy marriage. The pair strike up a close friendship and, just as he's departing for war, they surrender to their passion.

Years later, he returns triumphant from defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, to reunite not only with his wife and their two sons, but also with the maid Mary Ann and their illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth. They all have to find a way through the tangle of affairs and betrayals, especially now he's hailed as the hero of the free world with a new title: the Duke of Wellington.

Two hundred years on, in Australia, a woman meets with her long-lost father and is told the family legend that they're descendants of a maid who worked for the Iron Duke. She sets out to prove once and for all whether or not this story is true, and what she discovers shocks everyone.