Who is Alfred?

In 1906, a private journal is discovered in the old vaults of Kingston’s Bank of Montreal. Its author, Henry Collier, was a clerk there in 1875, with a clear view across King Street to Muckleston House—home to a powerful widow, her guarded daughters, and the servants who pass in and out of its shadowed carriageway.

Through Henry’s eyes, the reader is returned to nineteenth-century Kingston: a city of limestone institutions and private mansions, bound together by reputation, class, and silence. When Alfred Shaw, a twelve-year-old orphan placed in the household’s service, vanishes after witnessing something he was never meant to see, Henry is drawn into a web of murder, scandal, and civic respectability. A corrupt constable, a conflicted groom, a bereaved woman, and a family determined to preserve its good name all press against his silence.

And as Alfred’s name begins to return, impossibly, in the stone of the house itself, Henry must decide what kind of man he is: one who speaks for the dead, or one who helps the living keep their place.

Inspired by a real inscription still visible on Muckleston House in Kingston, The Name in the Stone is a Gothic historical novella about memory, complicity, and the things a city buries in order to remain respectable.