The Ford of Sorrows
A Time-Slip Novel of the Anglo-Scottish Border

About this book:

The damp archives of Netherby Estate yield more than waterlogged ledgers when historian Daniel Knox uncovers a leather-bound record from 1592—the private log of a Deputy Warden at a crossing that exists on no modern map. The Ford of Sorrows was never meant for ordinary travel; it was a threshold the Grahams swore to hold against something older than the reivers who rode the Border night. As the ink on the page begins to shift beneath his lamp, and a sixteenth-century horse-nail turns up wet in his pocket, Daniel realizes the ledger isn't just recording history. It's waiting for him.

The Liddel Water runs black and fast through a gorge where basalt stones hum beneath the flood, and the boundary between England and Scotland has never been a line on parchment. It's a wound in the land, tended by three generations of men who buried iron where three streams meet and swore the ford would not open until the rivers ran dry. Now the water is rising again, the old smoke drifts straight from peat-fires four centuries dead, and a voice from the dark asks the question every keeper has dreaded: *Who keeps the ford?*

In the tradition of Susanna Kearsley and Daphne du Maurier, *The Ford of Sorrows* blends meticulous Border history with a time-slip mystery that seeps through the stone like rising damp. From the debris of a ruined peel tower to the gravel spit where a silver sixpence lies beside a strand of gray horsehair, every clue pulls Daniel deeper into a covenant forged in blood and cold water—one that has never been broken, and never will be, until the last Warden answers the call.