Leonie Harcourt, nearly eighteen, has turned her back on England - she's in love with Parisian life, and with the young painter met there at her god mother's house. But it's the summer of 1939; she's sent home, reluctantly, to a London preparing for war. After a brief, ecstatic reunion with Luc, come to join de Gaulle's Free French, she is dispatched to an unknown aunt's farm in Somerset. Luc doesn't return after the war, but throughout her eventual marriage to another man and all the years ahead she keeps what he gave her to take care of - a small locked suitcase - and it is this that will reconnect her at last with the Gosselin family. It reopens festering wounds and terrible secrets of life in wartime Paris, and threatens the happiness of them all--Publisher's description.