Maud Bailey, a brilliant English academic, is currently researching the life and work of poet Christabel La Motte. Roland Michell is an American scholar in London to study Randolph Henry Ash, today best-known for a collection of poems dedicated to his wife. When Maud and Roland discover a cache of love letters that seem to be from Ash to La Motte, they follow a trail of clues across England, echoing the journey of the bunch above a hundred years earlier in the day.