Betty Barnes has been largely brought up by her older sister, Kate, in a small West Country village. Betty, however, dreams of the bright lights of Hollywood and becoming a movie star. Day-dreaming is one way for her to escape the realities of school life where she is creuelly bullied because her sister is living in sin with a married man and is rumoured to have used healing skills to help more than one local girl out of trouble.

Betty has also inherited psychic and healing gifts from her forebears. Like her sister, she also experiences memories of an earlier time when she was the...