The Key

The Key is a historical romance by the Canadian writer Lynsay Sands, published by Leisure Books in 1999. It is set in the medieval period, partly in the English borders and partly in the Scottish Highlands.

Iliana Wildwood's inheritance has made her the object of a neighbouring baron's ambitions, and the novel opens with her decision to escape the arrangement by marrying someone else entirely. Duncan, the laird of Dunbar Castle, is a fighting man with a keep to run and a suspicion of the English that a new wife from the south does not immediately improve. The book follows the two of them in the early months of the marriage, with the household politics, the neighbouring clans, and the baron Iliana left behind all contributing to the difficulties, and it is told with a good deal of comedy about the clash of customs between a young woman raised in an English household and a Highland hall full of men.

Sands wrote a long series of medieval romances, and this one includes the author's characteristic interest in the physical arrangements of a medieval castle, from the kitchens to the bedchamber, as the ground on which its characters have to learn to live together.