The year is 1678 AD. Simon Maddox, a graduate student at Christ’s College Cambridge, receives from his tutor a subject for his thesis in History: “A Century through the Eyes of One Unusual Man.” That man, his uncle Thomas, is also a graduate. He has disappeared but may still be alive, and has left Simon with his research material in a cottage in Grantchester. He must make sense of a Phoenician Symbol described by Ptolemy a thousand years earlier and its connection to the Welsh Prince Madoc who sailed to America three hundred years before Columbus in his ship ‘Gwennan Gorn’. His legacy was a colony of Welsh-speaking ‘Indians’. Thomas aims to prove that the Maddox family, now living in London, are Madoc’s descendants. Throughout his lifelong quest, providing encouragement and guidance, a mysterious and timeless ‘grey lady’ offers advice and encouragement. She needs answers that only Thomas can provide.

To complete Thomas’s ‘Century’ Simon reaches back to his grandparents in 1578 AD, long before Thomas was born. His grandmother Katherine, part of the Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Virgin Court’, flees to Wales following a pregnancy and an assassination attempt on the Queen. Meanwhile his grandfather Kevynn captures a Spanish treasure ship during a sea battle. Surviving a harrowing confinement in the Tower of London he marries Katherine. Her dowry is a small estate in Wales under which lies a forgotten Roman gold mine. Book one, which ends with Thomas’s birth, traces the family’s early lives in Wales.