It is 1862, and two seventeen-year-old girls, one brought up in a London slum, the other in a rambling country house called Briar, are about to meet for the first time. Sue has been sent to Briar to work as a lady's maid to Maud, the luckier by far of these two orphans, or so it seems for the first third of this extraordinary novel. But Sue is not really a servant, having grown up in a thieves' kitchen just south of the Thames: she is in fact the central figure in a cruel plot to defraud Maud of her inheritance.