To the young Lady Margaret Dacre, raised in the rich security of Queen Elizabeth's court, the Scottish border was a land of blood and brutal violence, where raid and murder were commonplace, and her broad inheritance lay at the mercy of the outlaw riders and feuding tribes of England's last frontier. Beyond the law's protection, alone but for her house servants and an elderly priest, she could wait helpless in her lonely manor, or somehow find the means to fight the terror approaching from the northern night - and hope for that "knock on the nether door".
From two forgotten incidents in the State Papers, the author has woven a tale which presents the vivid reality of life and sudden death on the reiver's frontier of four hundred years ago, when lawlessness was "the custom of the country", and the only safety lay in the lance and the sword and the will to use them.