A gothic Christmas ghost story
The House of Ashes and Echoes — forty years after a bride vanished on Christmas Eve, Ashbridge Hall has chosen again.
A gothic Christmas ghost story
The House of Ashes and Echoes — forty years after a bride vanished on Christmas Eve, Ashbridge Hall has chosen again.
The house has waited forty years. Now it has chosen her.
Christmas Eve, 1835. A ball. A fire. And Eleanor Ashbridge, the bride who was to be married the next morning, vanished without a trace. No body was ever found.
Forty years later, restoration architect Maggie Lockhart arrives at Ashbridge Hall with an anonymous contract, a generous fee, and no patience for ghost stories. The villagers won't set foot near the place. Maggie should have listened.
Because Ashbridge isn't empty. It's waiting. A wedding gown lies on her bed at night and is gone by dawn. Footsteps echo through corridors no one has walked in decades. Eleanor's diary keeps writing itself, in a hand that grows more frightened with every page. Behind a padlocked door, something whispers a single word: Bride.
And in an old seamstress's ledger, beneath the names of brides long dead, Maggie finds a name that shouldn't be there. Her own. Beside it, three words:
Her only ally is Dr James Thorne, a historian who spent years studying Ashbridge – until, one day, he simply stopped. He knows more about the house than anyone alive, and he has his own reasons to fear it. As Christmas draws near and the walls begin to breathe, Maggie must uncover what the house truly wants before the chandeliers are lit once more.
Some houses remember. This one is ready to choose again.
Dear reader,
All my life, people have told me I have a vivid imagination. They are right. I have just never found a way to switch it off.
My love for the past began when I was a child, with costume dramas on television and a British children's series called Come Back, Lucy, about a girl who moves into an old Victorian house and keeps slipping into its past. I still love it today.
Years later I bought my first original 1950s dress. The first time I wore it, I felt two times touch. I was wearing something from another era, with a story I would never know. That feeling never left me. I began to collect the things that still carry people's voices: letters, diaries, photographs, a Victorian necklace that another woman wore around her neck a hundred and fifty years ago, in a completely different world.
Sometimes these things let me follow them home. A scrapbook led me to the classmates of the girl who had made it. A stack of diaries led me to the friends who filled their pages, and to the writer's high school sweetheart. And once, a bundle of old letters led me to a family on the other side of the ocean, and to a story even they had never heard.
Today I can't look at an old house without seeing it as it was. A worn staircase makes me wonder who climbed it two hundred years ago. A ruined kitchen fills up again with heat and noise and people working shoulder to shoulder. Behind a beautiful window I see a hand opening it, long before I was born. Every room once held ordinary days. People loved there, wept, hoped and grieved, just as we do now.
That is where my stories come from. When I write, I want you to hear the creak of the stairs and the wind against the glass, to smell candle smoke and cold stone, to feel the weight of an old key in your hand. I want you to stand in those rooms with me.
The House of Ashes and Echoes is my first novel, a gothic Christmas ghost story set in the Scottish Highlands. Some houses remember. I hope you'll come inside.
Coming soon
An occasional letter with news of new books, early chapters and the true histories behind the stories. Until the first letter is sealed, you can find me on Instagram.
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