Eighteen year old Beth Darney is spending her first season in Restoration London. She wants to see the sights of the great city, but her parents hope she will ensnare a rich nobleman for a husband.
On an outing to Newgate market with her cousins, she becomes separated from them and is lured into an alley by a gang of ruffians. She is saved by a tall, gallant stranger who escorts her safely home. Handsome, heroic and aristocratic, Henry Kingsman seems the ideal match for her.
But then she learns that Henry is in fact the Fourth Earl of Berwick, a notorious rake from a dark and dissolute family. He is rumored to deal with smugglers, and his ancestry riddled with incest, insanity and murder. Beth’s father forbids her from seeing him again.
However, Beth refuses to believe that Henry is as bad as his forebears, and starts seeing him in secret. When her father finds out he gives her such a beating, that she feels her only choice is to elope with Henry to his forbidding castle in Northumberland – the same bleak fortress where his family committed their loathsome deeds…
Eighteen year old Beth Darney is spending her first season in Restoration London. She wants to see the sights of the great city, but her parents hope she will ensnare a rich nobleman for a husband.
On an outing to Newgate market with her cousins, she becomes separated from them and is lured into an alley by a gang of ruffians. She is saved by a tall, gallant stranger who escorts her safely home. Handsome, heroic and aristocratic, Henry Kingsman seems the ideal match for her.
But then she learns that Henry is in fact the Fourth Earl of Berwick, a notorious rake from a dark and dissolute family. He is rumored to deal with smugglers, and his ancestry riddled with incest, insanity and murder. Beth’s father forbids her from seeing him again.
However, Beth refuses to believe that Henry is as bad as his forebears, and starts seeing him in secret. When her father finds out he gives her such a beating, that she feels her only choice is to elope with Henry to his forbidding castle in Northumberland – the same bleak fortress where his family committed their loathsome deeds…