The Last Stone of Ashford Hall
A Medieval Adventure in Two Timelines

About this book:

**The Last Stone of Ashford Hall** unfolds a secret buried for eight centuries—and the two lives risking everything to uncover it.

In 1292, kitchen scullion Hugh witnesses the Bishop's clerk sealing a wax-bound bundle behind a foundation stone in the dead of night. Caught watching, Hugh flees into the lethal fens with a dirk at his back and a hangman's noose waiting at the manor gate. Eight hundred years later, archaeologist Dr. Clara Reis excavates the same cellar, her trowel striking not pottery but a dark, greasy mortar sealing a stone that was never meant to move. Behind it lies a pigskin-wrapped bundle and a shattered green seal—exactly where a terrified boy left them.

As Clara races the rising floodwaters and a county archaeologist's bureaucracy to document the find, Hugh's flight through the medieval marsh converges with her modern dig in a narrative that braids forensic precision with breathless pursuit. The de Claires built Ashford on bedrock and blood; what they buried in its foundations was meant to stay forgotten. Now the mortar has cracked, the past is leaking through, and the only way out is to read the Latin inscription before the hall claims its next victim.