It begins in the haunting loveliness of Stone Mill Hollow, amid the tumult and passion of the Civil War, where two lovers meet in ecstasy, then vanish into the brooding night, victims of an unspeakable horror. Now something terrible, quenchless, and unappeased moves like dark water in the white mists that cloak the somber, many-roomed Covington mansion. It is a figure of passionate vengeance, a lover of irresistible power, a lover defiant of the grave.

Five generations of women are drawn into his awesome world between shadow and substance, until they wish to God they had never come to Stone Mill Hollow...