A cursed Elizabethan manuscript holds the secret to untold wealth; a love affair blossoms between the wife of a psychopathic paraplegic and a young schoolmaster; teachers scheme in shadowy cloisters; an Anglican cleric leans towards Popery. These are the ingredients of Jeremy Simpson's pleasant new novel; and he has got the mixture almost right.

Luke Howard is asked to edit a sixteenth-century text set down by a renegade Catholic bishop called de Witte in order to further the Anglican cause of Melbury College, where Howard is an ambitious deputy headmaster. Evil forces – the local Evangelist priest, masters who want to take girls in