Young lawyer Nigellus Cobmartin is restoring an inherited manor for himself and his companion John Rykener when workmen uncover a skeleton bound inside a wall. The bones are accompanied by a valuable relic that disappeared from the Cobmartin estate almost twenty years earlier, suggesting that an old theft ended in murder. Nigellus calls on Crispin Guest, and Crispin and Jack begin reconstructing family secrets, grudges and hidden relationships that have survived long after the victim’s death.
The presence of John/Eleanor Rykener gives the novel a particularly unusual link to the surviving records of medieval London. Rykener is known from a 1394–95 legal examination describing work as a sex worker and seamstress while presenting as a woman, one of the most discussed sources for gender and sexuality in medieval England. Westerson places that documented person within a domestic murder story under Richard II, using the manor-house restoration to expose how property, inheritance and reputation could preserve secrets across generations.
