The Anchoress of Shere
A Novel of Silence and Survival

About this book:

In 1329 Surrey, Christine Carpenter walks into her own funeral and emerges into a cell twelve feet by eight, mortared into the north wall of St James' Church. The village believes she has chosen holy death—anchoress, bride of Christ, dead to the world. Only Christine knows the truth: she has not come to pray. She has come to hide the ledgers that prove the bailiff's theft, the curate's treason, and the names of every family bled dry for a king's war. The stone walls are not her coffin. They are her fortress.

Outside, the bailiff's men drink the ale bought with stolen tithes. The King's Assessor rides hard for the valley, hunting the missing silver. Father Thomas picks the parish chest locks by lantern light, desperate for the records Christine's father hid before fever took him. And in the churchyard, her mother drives their only cow into the misty woods before the bailiff can seize it. Christine hears it all through the squints—those narrow stone slits that let her witness Mass and receive bread—turning her enclosure into the most dangerous listening post in England.

Trapped between the Church's law and the King's justice, with a mouse for company and a memory that won't quiet, Christine Carpenter begins the long work of survival. She has vowed silence, stability, chastity. She never vowed obedience to the men who think stone walls can break a carpenter's daughter. The anchorhold is sealed. The game has just begun.