Priscilla is in the way. She doesn’t belong in the London Season.

Priscilla isn’t a debutante. She had come at the behest of Dahlia, a well-off friend. Dahlia found a suitor at the first party and is now ignoring her.

Priscilla might have fit in. Modest, well-spoken, as beautiful as a heroine in an Arabian Nights fable, but her dowry is too small and her skin too dark.

So, her days pass uneventfully until, on a walk in Hyde Park, she comes across a little boy who is crying because the mast of his toy boat has broken. From her tomboyish childhood, she has experience in fixing toy boats.

As a result of that simple act of kindness, Priscilla will be swept into a world of unrequited love, unexpected passion, and terror.

Priscilla falls in love with Charles, the boy’s guardian. His fiancée, Emilia, is a beauty with a sharp tongue and a dreadful secret.

Emilia’s brother, Francis, is mad. He amuses himself by taking on different identities and is bankrupting her family.

Charles falls in love with Priscilla without falling out of love with Emilia. However, he would die rather than go back on a promise.

Priscilla’s story unfolds in the polite society of London, among the ruins half-forgotten in the English countryside, and in an isolated village whose inhabitants never stopped speaking the Old English of Anglo-Saxon times. It comes to a head on a terrible night at Emilia’s manor house, when evil is let loose in the passageways and the grounds, and a life-or-death decision must be made.