Search - The Fourth Queen

Beautiful Helen Gloag is determined to escape the cycle of poverty and early death that has destroyed so many women in her native
Scotland. Barely out of her teens, she flees her hometown and sets sail for the Colonies on a ship bound for Boston. But the ship falls prety to a band of corsairs--pirates from the Barbary coast of Africa. Helen is taken captive and sent to a procuress in Morocco, where women are sold into the slave markets of the nobility. In the procuress house, she is discovered by the witty, sof-hearted dwarf Mecrophilus, who oversees the Harem of the Emperor himself. Knowing her red hair and milky skin will enthrall his master, he takes her to Marrakech, and the imperial palace.

The Harem of the Emperor is a mysterious and forbidding place, a hive of dangerous political tensions and unlikely friendships. Microphilus, himself a Scot captured by pirates as young man, has found his fortune in the Emperor's Harem, where he serves the Queens, including the charismatic, amzonian African empress Batoom, who is his lover. Helen is terrified of the god-like emperor, but eventually becomes his favorite out of all the women of his harem. She is chosen to become his fourth wife, the greatest of honors. An emperor may have hundreds of concubines, but only four official wives. One of the other wives is poisoned and is wasting away to nothing. Microphilus knows that Helen may be the next victim.