In the summer of 1716, as King George celebrates victory over the Jacobite rebels, waiting-woman Hester Kean is sent into Yorkshire to ready her cousin Mary for life at Court. She befriends a fellow passenger on the stage, a neighbor of her cousins, who turns out to be a Roman Catholic, coming home after receiving an illegal education in France. When they arrive to learn that his father has been murdered, Hester efforts to help are stymied by the secrecy under which Catholics are forced to live.