Doran Fairweather and her husband, ex-vicar Rodney Chelmarsh, are both secretly relieved when she decides to sublet a friend's London apartment for a while. Maybe the separation will put the spice back into their relationship.

But the flat is depressing, her maid is strangely intimidating, and the flat's owner is horribly murdered beside the Thames. Then, in a pre-Tudor house with a curse upon it--owned by a wonderful man who might have stepped out of Shakespeare--Doran discovers another world. There, an unbroken connection with the past is so...