Ralph Dacre came to the rich valley of Thorsdale from the remote, isolated fells: a boy who was gay and open and courageous - but flawed, as his benefactor Edmund Armstrong well knew, by a bitter childhood. It was into Edmund's house that the young Ralph was taken when his mother died, and it was there he met the two people whose lives were to be irrevocably entwined with his own. Against the background of the haunting beauty of Westmorland countryside and the crowded dynamic life of the mushrooming industrial towns of the early nineteenth century, the story is told of Ralph Dacre's search for his identity, his love for gentle Sarah Armstrong, and his long conflict with an enemy determined to destroy him.