She came to Ashford Hall to find a manuscript that should not exist.
Mira Cole has spent seven years following a trail that every published account says leads nowhere. The Hartmann letters, a collection of fifteenth-century alchemical manuscripts describing a compound called Patient Ink, an ink that encodes hidden messages within ordinary text, were declared destroyed in a fire in 1891. Mira does not believe they were destroyed. She believes they were moved. She believes they are in the Restricted Archive of Ashford Hall. And she has spent seven years building the academic credentials to prove it.
What she does not expect is Professor Elias Vane.
Cold, precise and fiercely intelligent, Vane has not taken a student in three years. He knows about the Hartmann letters. He has been waiting, at the direction of a woman now dead, for exactly the right researcher to arrive. He did not expect her to be quite this difficult to manage. Or quite this hard to forget.
What neither of them expects is what they find when they finally open the archive together. The letters are real. The formula is real. The hidden text encoded in a five-hundred-year-old manuscript is real. And someone at Ashford Hall has been protecting it from being read for sixty years.
Some knowledge is kept hidden not because it is dangerous but because it is true. And truth, once found, cannot be unfound.
The Poison Letters of Ashford Hall is a dark academia romance featuring a slow burn enemies to colleagues love story, forbidden knowledge, gothic atmosphere, ancient manuscripts and secrets that have been waiting five hundred years to be read. Intended for mature readers eighteen and above.
