Queen Mary’s Daughter by Emily-Jane Hills Orford Emily-Jane Hills Orford’s new novel, “Queen Mary’s Daughter” is a highly original, fast-paced, skillfully written alternate history set in the sixteenth, seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. The central character, a young Canadian editor named Mary Elizabeth, journeys to Kinross, home of Loch Leven Castle, to trace her roots. Raised by her grandmother after her parents’ accidental death, she has grown up on stories about Scotland, and is fulfilling her grandma’s last wish in making this journey. The first hint of time travel in “Queen Mary’s Daughter” occurs when Mary Elizabeth feels strangely drawn toward the loch. Just as someone is pulling her back to dry land, she hears, from far away and from within herself, a scream. Then she blacks out. A scream occurs in the next chapter, which flashes back to Loch Leven Castle in 1567 where a woman has just given birth to twins. When one…