Twenty-four-year old Marianne Lefevre is pleased to be taken on as a governess in the affluent Matlowe household. The young twins Emmie and Edie are bright and friendly, even if their grandmother, Georgina Matlowe, is a forbidding presence – and the whereabouts of the girls’ parents seems to be a closely-guarded secret. But Marianne soon grows concerned. Why are the children forbidden to go near the boat house at the end of the garden? Who is the ‘ghost’ they claim to have seen lurking there? And what really happened to their parents . . .?