For Sarah Goodwill, still reeling in the aftershock of a disastrous marriage, the position of secretary-ghostwriter to Major Charles Storrington seems the ideal opportunity to exorcise a few demons of her own. Sarah will help Major Storrington, confined to a wheelchair by the tank accident that finished a promising military career, to research and write the family history of the Storringtons, an armaments dynasty. She will also serve as governess to his small son.

To her dismay, Sarah finds the ménage at Maidenshall, the great Victorian mansion built on the site of a nunnery, a decidedly uneasy one:

• Bored, diversion-starved Cressida increasingly seeks escape in her London fashion career and, perhaps, in the arms of other men;

• Adolphus Storrington is a lonely, distracted child who spends most of his waking hours in the company of a fantasy playmate;

• The Major, handsome, powerful and restive in his wheelchair prison, alternates between bursts of creative energy and outbursts of frustrated rage at his family, servants, and Sarah, who is falling in love with him;

• And Henrietta Galloway, the nonagenarian retainer who wanders about Maidenshall unsettling everyone she meets with ramblings about days long past.

When Sarah discovers two Edwardian-era diaries, she slowly unravels the mystery of a passionate betrayal of a previous governess and the master of Maidenshall