The Hat that Danced in the Wind: A Family (Volume 1)

When Frank McKenzie dies, in 1953, at only 47 his family is devastated. His widow, Charlotte, struggles with still very young children, Alex, Liana and Hannah. Seven years later, in 1960, a black man comes to their door and says he is a McKenzie too, that he is their cousin, even though he is black and the family white. He takes them on a shocking journey of discovery, through two hundred years of common ancestry, of incest, slavery and murder and shows them how he and the family are related by blood, albeit illegitimately, to the Royal House of Stuart. Horrible secrets are dragged into daylight when it turns out that the respected member of the Stuart clan, Sylvester Moncrieff Stuart, of Glanrig Hall, had, in youthful folly, fathered a child with a thirteen year old black virgin, after which she is discarded. Many years later he receives a letter saying he has a beautiful son who wants to know his father. By then Sylvester Moncrieff Stuart is a married man with five children of his own and deeply ashamed of his past. Trying to rectify matters he confesses to his son Edward who has himself had intimate relations with his own sister.