All the Sherbrooke clan are alive, well, and in rip-roaring spirits in August 1815. Two months after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Tysen Sherbrooke, the youngest of the three brothers, now thirty-one, a vicar, a widower, and a father of three, has just been told by the earl that he's become the new Baron Barthwick of Kildrummy Castle in Scotland. When Tysen visits his new holdings, his narrow, sober world explodes as he steps into a beehive of complications,...

When Ryder Sherbrooke finds a child nearly beaten to death in an alley in Eastbourne, he takes her home to Brandon House. She doesn't speak for six months. Her first words, oddly enough, are a haunting song. She names herself Rosalind de la Fontaine since she cannot remember who she is. In her first season in London in 1835, under the aegis of the Sherbrookes, she meets Nicholas Vail, the 7th Earl of Mountjoy, newly arrived from Macau. It is instant...