Hallowe’en night. 500 years ago.

Superstitions rule sixteenth-century Scotland, and Macpherson opens her sumptuously-detailed novel with a sly nod to the spirit of Macbeth (though the Bard won’t be born for another half century). Elizabeth Hepburn and her two teenage sisters are tossing nuts into a blazing fire, as their witch-cum-nursemaid Betsy divines their futures by the way the shells sputter and pop. Then, well-primed for ghosts and ghouls, the feardie trio slip out into the dark night clutching a neep lantern and rowan twigs to ward off evil spirits and thrice circle a sheaf of dead cornstalks, determined to see the specters of the men they will someday marry – per Betsy, carefully following the ritual will grant the girls visions of their future sweethearts. As bats swoop through the sky and a pease-bogle (scarecrow) shakes in the wind, they suddenly hear voices, see shadowy black figures approaching, and flee for their lives. Elizabeth tumbles down a hill, topples into a stream, and is dragged out half-drowned by David Lindsay, come to fetch her back to the castle. She falls head over heels in love. Tapsalteerie. Whigmaleerie.

And the turbulent affair between our two star-cross’d lovers is off and running.

John Knox plays a decided second fiddle to Elizabeth and David in The First Blast of the Trumpet, the initial book of Macpherson’s ambitious, three-volume, re-imagining the life of the Scottish Reformation’s founding father. Here she focuses on the violent, brutish, superstitious world into which Knox will be born. Larger forces capriciously play with the lives and dreams of our two lovers – a destructive war between England and Scotland; the intensifying confrontation between papists and protestants; infighting between avaricious clans; plague and starvation. Fate rules people’s lives. As Betsy warns Elizabeth in the opening line of the book, “There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Your destiny is already laid doon.”

Macpherson’s award-winning novel glows with a luminous sense of time and place, the writing ripe and heady with a wantonly rich Scottish vocabulary. You not only see the 16th century – you hear it. The author holds a Ph.D. in Russian and English; has taught language and literature throughout Europe; and her affection for her native tongue is infectious. She mines a proud literary vein. Burns, Scott and Stevenson globally popularized the Scots vernacular through their poems, songs, stories and novels, and “Auld Lang Syne” is sung around the world on New Year’s Eve. Scots-Irish immigrants like my mother’s forebears brought wisps of words and phrases with them to America in the 18th century. When someone teased me in grammar school in the late 1950s, I retorted with the words my mother (of the clan Boyd) taught me: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Imagine my delight to discover that Scottish children were spouting the same phrase in 1511. For fun, I started keeping a list of the poetic slurs Macpherson puts in the mouths of her backbiting Scottish women who fling them against their rivals – gilpie, cow-clink, clumsy kittok, skirling shrew, cankart carlin, dowdy dunnock, brazen besom, vauntie-flauntie, and skrinkie-faced with froggy eyes. And you feared First Trumpet would be some dull, pious, religious tract? You silly gowk!

First Trumpet is closer to bawdy, vulgar Shakespeare than Sir Walter Scott’s airy-fairy world of chivalric romance. Gluttonous Dame Janet, Elizabeth’s aunt and prioress of St. Mary’s Abbey, powders her face with white lead, plucks her eyebrows, and rouges her cheeks. Sucking on a marche de pain bonbon, she sets Elizabeth straight about love and marriage. Forget Lindsay and wedlock, she advises. “When you’re not bleeding you’re breeding.” Men aren’t to be trusted. “Every man is in thrall to his pistle.” Besides, what’s so great about fyking? “...a few spurts of pleasure for them mean untold grief and agony for us.” Better to be a nun than a wife. And if postulant Elizabeth gets the itch? No problem, just be cautious. “If you fancy a tumble in the hay with the stable lad, make sure you’re not bairnt.” After all, “…a quick fyke can be over in the wink of an eye, leaving a troutie in the well.” Like the well-fed prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Macpherson’s worldly Janet is a memorable literary creation. Drooling over the fare at a feast, the prioress smacks her lips at the stag testicles poached in honeyed sauce, declaring, “Just how I like them: soft, squidgy and sweet. Tastier than a strumpet’s teats.” Victorian prudery is still 350 years into the British future. We’ve got brides’ cherries being picked; crowds marching upstairs to oogle the newlyweds as they consummate their marriage; legions of bastards being born “on the other side of the blanket”; and even get a frank lesson in female pleasuring. Who says history has to be boring? Characters are nuanced. You feel a twinge of sympathy for Prioress Janet. She never wanted to become a nun, any more than her brother, Elizabeth’s uncle John, wanted to become a priest and Prior of St. Mary’s. But someone in the Hepburn clan needed to step up so the family could retain control of the abbey’s wealth, lands, granaries, mills, orchards and breweries. “You maun dree your weird,” as the Scots say – you accept your fate; you endure your destiny. Likewise, Elizabeth will eventually take her vows, and succeed Janet; David Lindsay will sacrifice Elizabeth to serve the King.

And John Knox, finally making his late bow in the tale?

Saved at birth by a puff of breath into his lungs from nun Elizabeth, he becomes her godson and gravitates towards his own fate. Raised in her protective shadow, he trains for the priesthood but, offended by whoring monks and painted Janets, by simony and religious superstition, the young Knox falls under the spell of the Lollardy heresy and embraces the Protestant cause, determined to tear down Elizabeth’s all too-human church. Tellingly, he embraces Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. No amount of prayers or papal indulgences can change your fate. Instead, an inscrutable God decides each man’s destiny – heaven or hell – before they’re born.

The First Blast of the Trumpet is rich intellectual fare, and Macpherson thoughtfully includes a handy map of Scotland, family trees, and a complete cast of characters for the history-challenged. But any reader bringing to the novel a basic familiarity with the Western canon will quickly pick up the thread.

First Trumpet is double-timely. 2014 marks the 500th anniversary of Knox’s birth. It’s also the year Scottish voters determine the fate of their country. Will she remain united with England (which she joined in 1707) or regain her sovereignty? When the next installment of Macpherson’s captivating Knox Trilogy appears in bookstores, bonnie Scotland may once again be independent.