Servants know everything. Never trust them. Never fall in love.

Ellen, a young maid in the 1840s, enters service at the declining Markham Thorpe: a house where the relationship between masters and servants is not quite as it should be. There's one clear reason for this, sitting bang in the middle of this mess of sex, power, money and intrigue: the charismatic housekeeper, Mrs Rundell, whose agendas are complex and whose enemies are growing...