Clare Mallory has a Victorian mourning locket with the photograph of a girl and a curl of her hair. When Clare loses the locket in a fortune-teller's tent her quest to find it draws her into a dark episode of the family's past and the true circumstances of the girl's untimely death at Danby Hall, her Norfolk home. The locket has been taken by the fortune-teller herself, sensing a troubled history and danger ahead. But her attempts to understand the warning signs release forces long held at bay. Events of the past seep into the present until the reappearance of a man who vanished from Danby Hall in 1887 threatens not only her life but Clare's too. 'It was lying on the rug with the chain curled round. It must have come off when the girl had grabbed her hat and basket and marched off with barely a word. As soon as she picked the thing up she had felt it and once she had prised it open there was no doubt at all.'