Roddy Greenbank was brought by his father to the remote Northumberland community of langley in the autumn of 1807. Within hours of their arrival, however, the father had met with a violent death and the boy left with all memory gone of his past life. Hal Roystan was without a family, his father missing and believed to have robbed his employers. It was a belief Hal bitterly rejected and he became filled with a growing determination to make his way in life and to bring retribution where the real guilt lay. Mary Ellen Lee, even as a girl, was said to have 'a tongue that would clip clouts' and already displated all the spirit and forthrightness that would stamp her as a woman. These three stand at the heart of a richly eventful narrative that spans the first half of the nineteenth century, their lives lastingly intertwined by the inexorable demands of a strange and sometimes cruel destiny.