Her Jailer’s Secrets

In 1786 Elizabeth Fitzgerald Fitzgerald, a 26-year-old woman, became involved in England's brutal justice system and found herself exiled from her homeland to Botany Bay in the antipodes, where she had to endure brutality, near starvation, love and a shipwreck off Norfolk Island with her friend Jane Fitzgerald. She bore twin girls to a marine, William Mitchell, while on the island and began her own family in this strange new land, as she never expected to see her family members or friends again.
On her return to Sydney, she began a new life with another soldier, Thomas Wright, with whom she had another child but was imprisoned again for selling her children's rations to purchase rum, where she met a strange cockney woman named Margaret, who was in charge of the prison and who changed her life.
William Mitchell, who returned to England, investigated who Margaret was as she had now died, and in doing so, came up against Irish rebels who threatened his life but finally gave him a sealed letter as to her true identity, that could not be opened by anyone other than one of the two Fitzgerald women.