Emmie Kelso is nine years old when she's rescued from a Gateshead tenement, taken into the vibrant, loving household of the MacRaes in Crawdene, a mining village on the fell, and brought up as one of their own. Blossoming into a spirited young woman, Emmie marries miner Tom Curran, but then discovers his violent, possessive nature. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Tom enlists, but Emmie joins the MacRaes in their cries for peace. Working alongside Rab MacRae, a conscientious objector, their childhood devotion sparks a love too strong to hide, and when a brutalised Tom returns home, there's trouble ahead...