The Night Warden's Key
A Medieval Hospital Heist

About this book:

In the frozen heart of 1374 London, St. Jude's Infirmary is a fortress of charity and greed, its sacristy coffer swollen with two hundred gold nobles—enough to buy a life, or end one. Brother Thomas, a lay brother with calloused hands and a sister rotting in a Lincolnshire debtors' prison, has one night to steal the Warden's keys before the Bishop's bailiff rides at dawn. But the shadows of the great hospital already hide a rival: Katherine of the Barbican, a thief as sharp as the dagger at her hip, scaling the clerestory for the same prize and a passage out of England.

When their paths collide in the reek of the long ward, hatred is a luxury neither can afford. Forced into a fragile pact, the pious laborer and the cynical cutpurse must navigate a labyrinth of locked doors, dying paupers, and a Night Warden who sleeps with the keys around his neck and a nose for treachery. Every creaking floorboard risks the gallows; every whispered bargain risks a blade in the back.

From the scriptorium to the undercroft, *The Night Warden's Key* is a masterclass in medieval tension—a heist where the vault is a holy hospital, the crew is two strangers bound by desperation, and the clock strikes midnight on a winter night that will leave blood on the flagstones and souls in the balance.