Normandy, 1067. England has been brought to its knees by the invasion of William the Conqueror and his Norman troops.
Lady Catheryn, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, is taken against her will to Normandy after the invasion. She arrives, a prisoner, at the castle of William FitzOsbern.
Her husband Selwyn is dead, slain in the Conquest, and her daughter Annis has been left behind in England at the mercy of the invaders.
She finds her hostess cold and embittered, but when her husband William FitzOsbern returns from the Conquest, Catheryn's heart is torn by unwanted emotions: entangled in the quarrels and heartbreaks of her jailers, even as she tries to remember her place among them.
Is she falling in love with the man who helped to destroy her homeland?
Can Catheryn betray her Anglo-Saxon roots, and her late husband?
Or will she break free, and find her way back to Annis?