Stepping Into the Story’s Opening Moments
Some stories arrive slowly, like a memory rising from deep water. Others come as a quiet urging you can’t ignore. A Thread in Time grew out of both—ancestry I hadn’t yet understood and a question that lingered long after I first asked it. In the end, it led me back to this: how far can a single choice reach?
Set in 16th-century Scotland, the novel opens with Lady Elspeth Forbes at the threshold of her life. Her heart pulls toward the future she hopes to claim. She longs for a life shaped by her own choosing—love, purpose, a place where her voice matters. Yet the world around her is shifting, narrowing, and every path before her carries consequences she isn’t ready to face.
Meeting Lady Elspeth Forbes
If you meet Elspeth in the prologue or in the first chapter, you’ll see only a narrow slice of her world. She is a young woman at sixteen or seventeen, trying to move quietly within the boundaries set for her. And in the chapters that follow, she appears as a little girl at her grandfather’s feet—laughing with the boys, scuffing her hems, being reminded of what a “proper” young lady ought to be. In those moments, you start to glimpse the truth.
Beneath the obedience is a restless mind, a spirited heart, and a longing she doesn’t yet know how to tame. The woman she will become is already there, waiting for the world to press just hard enough for her true self to break through.
The Themes at the Heart of the Novel
The heart of the book isn’t simply one woman’s journey. It is also the way our decisions—quiet, brave, reluctant, or aching—echo far beyond us. Elspeth’s choices become threads that bind her to the generations who will follow. Even so, she cannot see the shape of that future from where she stands.
As I wrote, I kept returning to the same themes: longing, agency, faith, and that quiet place where love asks something of us—the thin line between giving of oneself and giving oneself away. It’s a tension women have lived with for centuries, and it shapes every turn of Elspeth’s story.
Where History and Imagination Meet
A Thread in Time is fiction, but its roots reach deep into real soil: the Skene and Forbes lines in my family tree, the old stones of Skene House and the lives of people whose choices—small or seismic—shaped the world their descendants inherited. They aren’t just characters to me. They remind me that none of us live in isolation. Someone came before us. Someone will come after us. And what we choose matters.
Who Is Lady Elspeth Forbes?
When you first meet Elspeth, she’s doing her best to move within the lines drawn for her—dutiful daughter, bargaining chip, future wife. Still, she was once a girl who scraped her knees in the glen, dreamed of slaying wolves with a bow, and sat at her grandfather’s feet listening to tales of courage and loyalty. Somewhere between those two selves is the woman she will become.
Start the Journey
You can read the prologue on my website, and the first chapter is available through my email list. So if you’re curious, I’d love to share more of Elspeth’s journey with you.
