Excerpt from The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue

Tyburn, 1534

Elizabeth was at first unafraid at the Tree. Even through her exhausted, muddled mind, the searing pain in her shoulders and head, she believed that God would save her. When they first placed the chafing rope around her neck, she welcomed it.

Death would not yet come for her like it had for others. It may at last be her hour, but her bridegroom was waiting for her in heaven.

There were already corpses swinging and awaiting company, hanged earlier that day. Birds voraciously picked at the flesh despite the roar of the crowd.

The people gathered there were shouting and cheering for this ceremony of death. Her eyes fixed on a family up front, a small child on the shoulders of a man. A day out. To watch them hang.

She moved her gaze, for her head would no longer move as she willed it, to the hangmen who climbed onto the cart, making sure the nooses around their necks were secure. There were six of them waiting to die, but the crowd was there only for her.

"The Mad Maid of Kent! Did you foresee this?"

"Do the Tyburn jig for us, Holy Maid!" the man with the child spat out, laughing. The child clapped.

"What good are your prophecies now?" shouted another spectator.

And the chorus: "Liar! False prophet!"

Was she? Elizabeth no longer knew, with her weakened body and confused thoughts, what was real and what was not, what had been true and what was false. She closed her eyes tightly and tried to remember the voice of God. She had heard it once. She knew she had. But here, there was only the sound of the people demanding her death.

The horses took some steps ahead, frightened by the noise, and she felt the noose tighten. Through the fog in her head, she heard the cart driver shout to stop. It was not yet time.

She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. It tasted like fear.

Then the executioner nodded to the cart driver, who whipped the horses to move. They followed their command, and as the horses galloped away, taking the cart with them, the six bodies stayed tethered firmly to the Tree.

As she felt her toes leave the cart, she was immediately desperate for breath, her body in its jerky dance under the Tyburn Tree. She tried to will her arms to pull the rope away, but they continued to hang useless at her side.

Some fell heavy, their necks breaking almost instantly.

The rest convulsed, kicked, clawed at their necks. Their feet were mere inches from the ground, taunting them.

But she was as light as air. No quick death for her. She felt her legs running as if they could escape her body.

She was gripped with terror, until the very last moment when it all went black.

Kent, 2023

I am not dead.

Someone will find me. Right?

Breathe. Calm.

I have never been a phobic—not afraid of flying or blood or heights or spiders or open spaces or public speaking. I can breathe myself calm, relax, slow my own pulse.

But now, as I sit in this dark and tight space for what must be the third hour (time is so blurry without a watch or a window that I can't judge how much has passed), claustrophobia is settling in to stay. I don't know if it's the smell of that dead animal, still lingering in the heavy air inside this place, the dust that I can feel crusting on my nostrils, or that my body is touching all four walls of this small, dark container at once.

I am so thirsty. The air is stifling and my mouth is sandpaper-dry. If I ever get out of here, I will never take a glass of water for granted again.

The researcher in me wants to think of all the others who have hidden here, holding their breath, hoping that they are not discovered and that their secrets are safe. But the practical me, the me whose throat is raw from screaming and whose hands are chafed and bloody from pounding on the door to this hole—that version of me doesn't care about the past. I care only about the future. As in, will there be one?

Excerpted from The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown. Copyright © 2026 by Jennifer N. Brown. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.