February 1212. Sir Josse d’Acquin and Helewise travel to Southfire Hall, where Josse’s elderly uncle Hugh is dying among a family already strained by the marriage of his heir Herbert to the widowed Lady Cyrille. Their arrival coincides with the discovery of an injured young man on the road, introducing another mystery into a household full of resentment.
As Josse and Helewise learn more about the stranger and the people gathered around Hugh’s deathbed, old family secrets begin to alter the meaning of present events. The novel uses inheritance, remarriage and kinship obligations to build a closed-house medieval mystery in which the threat comes as much from the past as from the immediate crime.
