Lady Philippa, wife of the knight Sir Aymer, is travelling with her maid in an enclosed wagon towards Bampton while her husband and his men ride alongside. When the party reaches Bampton Castle, both women have vanished from the vehicle. Because the disappearance may have occurred on Lord Gilbert Talbot’s lands, Hugh de Singleton is ordered to discover what happened. The circumstances seem impossible: there is no obvious moment at which two women could have left the guarded wagon without being seen.
Hugh’s enquiry turns on movement through the medieval countryside—roads, estates, servants, escorts and the limited security available even to a knight’s household. The missing woman’s marriage also raises questions that a simple abduction theory cannot answer: whether Philippa was taken, whether she chose to flee, and what pressures might make disappearance preferable to returning home. Set within Edward III’s England, the mystery uses Hugh’s bailiff authority to explore the legal and social constraints surrounding noblewomen as well as the practical problem of reconstructing a journey without modern records.
