Venetia Lanyon, beautiful, intelligent and indie, lives in comfortable seclusion in rural Yorkshire with her precocious brother Aubrey. Her potential seems safe and predictable: either relationship to the respectable but dull Edward Yardley, or a life of peaceful spinsterhood. But when she meets the dashing, harmful rake Lord Damerel, her well-ordered life is turned ugly, and she embarks upon a relationship with him that scandalises and horrifies the whole community. Offers she found her soul-mate, or is normally she playing with fire?