On her deathbed, Jessica Mulligan gives her daughter a warning But it is one that Phoebe Mulligan cannot heed she has no choice but to throw herself on the very man her mother urged her to distrust, a man whose house, far from Phoebe's beloved home in London's East End, is as forbidding and cold as its owner her uncle Banished to a bare attic, she cannot understand why he treats her so badly But she is not to know the guilty secret that lies in his past and that casts its sinister shadow over his feelings for his lovely niece