Sacked as a Thief, She Was Left a Shut Paper Mill Whose Every Sheet Was Dated After It Closed

In 1857 Buckinghamshire, a rag-loft worker named Esther Lyde is accused of theft in front of the whole counting house and turned out of the paper works where she has spent eleven years. All she inherits from her great-aunt is Pightle Mill: a shut hand paper mill with a chained waterwheel, a silted leat, a roof open to the rain, and forty-one shillings owing in rates. This Victorian historical mystery begins the night she climbs to the drying loft and holds a sheet of the old stock up to the window. The watermark shows a crown, a hand, and a year two full years after the mill was closed. Somebody worked a vat in that dead building, and Esther was trained from childhood to sew watermark wire and read what a mould leaves in a sheet. Restoring the ruin means learning what her disgraced great-aunt was really making, and why it frightened powerful men. Settle in for the full story. #VictorianMystery #HistoricalFiction #PapermakingHistory #AbandonedMill #HiddenLegacy