"Well, if I were still young, I suppose I could do as tradition dictates and attempt to lure some unfortunate soul into a hasty, doomed marriage of misery and financial convenience." Edith is unmarried and almost thirty years old when she is faced with her father's death and the imminent collapse of life as she understands it. After all, once the debts accumulated by her father's attempts to support her brother's extravagant lifestyle are paid, there will be nothing left from his estate for any of them to inherit. She immediately seeks out work as a governess and soon finds herself at White Stag Hall, a lonely edifice in the middle of the beautiful and isolated moors of northern England. There she meets James Rhys, the brother of her employer. Once a shameless hedonist, Rhys was nearly killed in a fire and subsequently abandoned by his friends during his agonizing recovery. His brush with death and resulting isolation has made him even more irreverent, with no use for society's intricate rules of social decorum. But Rhys does not frighten Edith and she fascinates him. "What does it say about our world that we'll cut off a bird's wings to make it more like a fish and then fault it when it drowns?" * Updates three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday )