The Moorhouse family have risen from the obscurity of an Ayrshire farm to a position of great prosperity in Victorian Glasgow. They are finally 'somebodies', which just makes Bel even more distressed by the behaviour of Phoebe and Henry - they don't seem to understand propriety. Phoebe's beginnings were as the half-sister of the Moorhouses, the daughter of a Highland tinker. She has grown up into a beautiful and elusive creature of the world, and is drawn away from Glasgow. Destiny sweeps her and her husband to Vienna, the romantic and enchanting capital of the Hapsburgs in its heyday of the 1880s...