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On the day that Maria Beresford celebrated her eighteenth birthday in Bombay, in faraway Burma the formidable and unpredictable Queen had ordered eighty members of the royal family to be clubbed to death. On that day in 1879 Maria knew nothing of Mandalay, the fairy-tale City of Gems. The selfish, difficult but beautiful daughter of a failed tea-planter devoted herself only to pleasure and social advancement. But when her father was sent to Burma, and she had to accompany him, she became embroiled in an exotic world of political intrigue. Her friendship with the Queen - a dangerous and mercurial figure - and her growing closeness to Archie Tennant, a young man who had come east to seek his fortune after the ruin of his family business, brought her both power and menace, and the key to her destiny.