The story of one woman's obsession with saving the decaying 'Morfa mansion', a literary stand-in for Wales' Haford estate. Catherine Jones dreams of restoring Morfa to its original glory. The Joneses are a farming family, but Catherine herself moves uneasily between them and the local gentry wives, through which she meets Erasmus, an uncouth nobleman she goes on to marry to become mistress of Morfa. She uses her position to spend everything restoring the estate, not seeing the banking crisis that looms right around the corner that will leave her destitute.
