The Bone Lace

London, 1666. The plague has barely loosened its grip, the Dutch guns can be heard from the rooftops, and Lilias Pell is keeping her dead husband’s goldsmith’s shop in Cheapside by her own hand.

His will lets her keep it on one condition: that she never marries again and never takes a lover. And she has a second secret, one that could hang her. Jewels sing to her. Gold, pearls, a scrap of lace: each one hums with what the people who held it felt.

So when a bone-lace collar for a lady of the Queen’s household arrives from a Lombard Street bank, Lilias hears what nobody else can. Something has been pushed into it, and it rings like a cracked bell. The banker’s name is Rutherford. Her mother wrote that name in a book of warnings forty years ago.

Tobias Hale reads other people’s letters for the King’s Secretary of State. He is careful, dry, and a Catholic in a city that hunts them, and he has been hiding letters to a priest abroad in the parcels of her shop. Lilias has known what he is since the first time he put one in her hand. She cannot tell him how without telling him what she is.

Someone is using forged letters and haunted jewels to send innocent courtiers to the Tower, and the trail runs through both their doors. By September they have the proof. Then the wind turns east, a bakery in Pudding Lane catches fire, and the burning city wants someone to blame.

Forbidden love. A widow’s second chance. Secrets on both sides. Slow burn. The Great Fire of London.

The Bone Lace is the third book of The Thornfield Inheritance, a saga following one family of gifted women across four centuries. It is a complete romance with a happy ending and can be read on its own.