When Sarah Varley, an antiques dealer, meets Roswell Clark, an inventor of unusual crash-test dummies, on the steps of the Victoria & Albert Museum, it is the beginning of a strange and surprising romance. Roswell, lonely and recently widowed, has decided that he needs a tattoo. He has an image in mind - a bat from an eighteenth-century bowl in the museum. And Sarah, he discovers, is fascinated by the very same bat. Could it be a coincidence, or even divine intervention?