A Misfit Knight

This is a story that history never got around to telling. It begins as it began 200 years ago in the city of Santiago, Chile, as a nurse readies a boy of five for his portrait. The boy, however, soon turns the project upside down by requesting something that the artist and parents are opposed to. The youngster gets his way, then departs with his father on a 9000-mile voyage to Spain, a journey that ended badly for the father and tragically, mysteriously, for the child in Spain. Oddly the boy disappeared after crossing the disease-ridden Isthmus of Panama and two more oceans before reaching the Iberian Peninsula. Strangely, both the boy and his parents were eventually erased from the family's esteemed genealogy as if they had never existed at all. But the portrait survived and became, albeit two centuries later, a smoking gun in the disappearance whose detailed canvas held multiple clues. What enfolds in this book is an epic tale of a voyage on which both magic and madness sail. Three people surround the boy on the ship - a father whose demons follow him out to sea and put him on trial for taking his son on a dangerous journey; the child's mixed-blood nurse whose savage past can no longer be silenced; and an ex-slave who knows his life will end if he becomes involved in the child's destiny. Everything moves inexorably to the night when a story from Don Quixote is read to the boy and a stranger unexpectedly steps into the mess the father has created and changes the ending of the Cervantes tale.