Kitty Quarm is seventeen and utterly alone in her own home. Her father Jason, a charmingly hopeless dreamer, perpetually roams the Devon countryside in his donkey cart chasing impossible fortunes, leaving Kitty to drift unnoticed through the cluttered rooms of Coombe Cellars, the family farmhouse and inn perched on the Teign estuary. Her aunt and uncle see her only as another pair of hands. But Kitty's mind reaches far beyond the soot and samovar of the kitchen: she dreams of stars, studies the tides, and finds in the new schoolmaster the only person who seems to recognize she has a thinking soul. When John, the son of the wealthiest farmer in the neighborhood, literally falls into her life ferrying across the river, his attention sparks a quiet revolution. Yet rural Devon is not kind to romantic idealism. Rose Ash has marked John as hers, and Kitty's father, ever scheming, may prove her greatest obstacle to happiness. Baring-Gould, that keen anatomist of English country life, renders with sharp affection and wry humor a world where the ambitious fail, the loving are ignored, and a young woman must learn that survival requires more than dreams.
