Time travel is impossible. It calls into question everything that governess Avice Palsham knows about the natural world and believes about the mystical universe.

Nevertheless, when she and her young orphaned charge, Jacob Milden, experience a profound change in their circumstances in the Red Tower of Kenning Old Manor, time travel is the only explanation. They were somehow undeniably transported from their Victorian world of 1865 to the Regency era, fifty years earlier.

The first person they encounter in their changed world is Kendall Marbury, an unsympathetic and suspicious economist accustomed to dealing in facts and figures, who is staying at his cousin’s Manor. At first he scoffs at the idea of time travel, but Kendall is nothing if not pragmatic. What is, is, and if they must all accept the fact of time travel, then they must.

For Avice, the idea of being transplanted into the world of the Regency, which 1865 calls decadent and immoral, is repugnant. Though her life in Victorian London is less than ideal, she mourns the loss of gaslight, photography, steam travel, telegraphy and lawfulness. She feels she is out of place and she tries everything to return to her own era. Her sense of duty to the little boy in her care is part of her desire to return to 1865. He cannot understand their strange journey, and he cannot make for himself the momentous decision to stay in 1815.

Together Avice and Kendall must come to terms with the transference in time of Avice and her charge, and their growing attraction to each other. If Avice succeeds in engineering a return to 1865, she–and Jacob–will be where they belong. But will they be happy?