The Boardroom Widow
A merchant's daughter from Portsmouth. A bride swept to the untamed shores of Van Diemen's Land by a husband whose charm concealed terrible secrets. When William Jeffries vanished one August morning in 1821, Madelyn was left with an infant son, a colonial empire built on lies, and knowledge no woman should have to carry alone. Suspected, scrutinised, and underestimated at every turn, she did what no one expected — she fought back.
Madelyn Bally was raised amongst the merchant ships and respectable drawing rooms of Portsmouth, taught to charm, to manage a household, and to marry well. She did all three. But nothing in her careful English upbringing prepared her for the truth about the man she married — or for the morning she would wake to find his side of the bed cold and untouched, a cryptic letter where her husband should have been.
William Jeffries left behind a colonial fortune steeped in rumour, an infant heir too young to understand, and a wife who knew far more than she could ever safely reveal. As suspicion turned towards her and colonial society sharpened its knives, Madelyn faced an impossible choice: crumble beneath the weight of scandal, or forge something extraordinary from the wreckage.
From the whispered corridors of Jeffries Manor to the boardrooms that had never welcomed a woman, from the orphaned children she gathered under her protection to the legacy she built with her own hands — Madelyn's life spans decades of resilience, reinvention, and the fierce determination of a woman who turned catastrophe into an empire. Some secrets, she learned, are best carried to the grave.
