While out on a walk, Eleanor Trewynn, her niece Megan, and her neighbor Nick spot a young, half-drowned Indian man floating in the water. Delerious and concussed, he utters a cryptic message about his family being trapped in a cave and his mother dying. The young man, unconscious and unable to help, is whisked away to a hospital while a desperate effort is mounted find the missing family in time. The local police inspector presumes that they are refugees...

Edie Burchill travels to Middlehurst Castle, the longtime residence of the Blythe spinsters, to seek out information about her mother, who was billeted there as a thirteen-year-old during World War II, and winds up finding out more than she imagined.