Set in Cornwall at the turn of the twentieth-century, Madeleine Brent's first novel follows the fortunes of Cadi Tregaron, a sixteen year-old fisherman's daughter. Happy in the small community of the coastal village where she has spent her life, the only hint of disquiet has been a recurring dream - of a great house standing in water and of a faceless man who awaits her there - a dream which is sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrifying. By a cruel blow Cadi is left alone in the world, but she is taken into a wealthy family where she lives like a lady with servants to wait upon her and is treated as one of the family. Too self-reliant to be spoilt by this change in her fortunes, she is perhaps too self-reliant for her own good, for at Meadhaven she finds mystery, danger and a hidden enemy. Is it the wayward young Richard Morton? Or the grey-eyed stranger who is forever watching her? Or is it Lucian Farrel, her benefactor's maverick nephew, whose face now becomes the one to haunt her dream. But the dream turns to nightmare, for she finds that the house standing in water is a reality and that she is bound to it by a freak of ancestry. Here, in the house of her dream and far from her own country, Cadi comes to know heartbreak and grief, and learns the frightening truth about herself and the hidden enemy who threatens her life.
