In the early 1980s an 80-year-old woman lived in poverty and obscurity near a Nairobi racetrack, convinced the world had forgotten her. At that same moment in California, a reader opened a book of Ernest Hemingway’s letters and found a passage raving about her. This is how legacy hangs by a thread.

This episode traces the extraordinary life of Beryl Markham, from an abandoned teenager running a colonial horse farm to a trailblazing bush pilot, a royal scandal, and the rightful author of a rediscovered literary masterpiece.

• Taking over her father’s farm alone at seventeen
• The affair with Prince Henry and the royal hush money it produced
• Flying solo east to west across the Atlantic against brutal headwinds
• The ice-choked fuel vents that forced her crash landing in Nova Scotia
• How forensic records disproved her ex-husband’s claim to her book