Barbara Blomberg — Volume 09
In 16th-century Brussels, a woman lives with the secret that haunts empires. Barbara Blomberg once caught the eye of the most powerful man in Christendom, and the encounter left her with a son she was never allowed to keep. Now, three years into a marriage of convenience to a minor noble, she inhabits a modest home while her child, John, grows up hidden away from her, raised by strangers in the shadow of the Habsburg court. The emperor who fathered the boy carries his own private torment, bound by politics and reputation to deny his own blood. Ebers constructs his novel around a devastating premise: what happens to a mother when society, religion, and power conspire to steal her child and call it propriety? Barbara's visits to her son are measured in hours, supervised and sparse, each goodbye a small death. Her memories of the brief, dazzling happiness she shared with Charles V contrast sharply with the quiet loneliness of her present existence. The court spins its intrigues above her, but Barbara's battle is fought in silence, in the space between what she feels and what she is permitted to be. This is historical fiction concerned with the human cost of royal secrets, the particular cruelty of Renaissance gender politics, and the way love persists even when everything demands it should not.
