Left a young window by the Great War, the resourceful Pamela Griffe goes to work for the Jarvises, a charmingly eccentric couple whose Highgate house is a mecca for artists. She is particularly drawn to the work of waiflike Suzannah Murchie, and to the subject of one of her portraits, John Ashe.
Ashe is a man of contradictions--handsome but horribly disfigured; philanthropic but ruthless; influential but secretive. When Pemela accepts employment with him, she becomes aware that she has entered into a pact with the devil--a pact which she gradually determines to turn to her own advatage...
Against a background of 'twenties London, Sarah Harrison's rich and engrossing new novel charts an independent-minded woman's discovery of the nature of power, and the price of peace.