Devastated by a broken marriage, Alex Darken retreats to a remote Norfolk village where he encounters the volatile old poet Edward Nesbit and his young American lover, Laura. Alex is increasingly intrigued by their attempts to recover the lost secret of alchemy through research into the work of Sir Henry Agnew and his brilliant daughter Louisa who had lived there a hundred years earlier. The two interwoven stories of this novel of human passion and intellectual obsession are set on a dramatic collision course across time as both the nineteenth and twentieth century characters seek to penetrate a mystery. The 1989 Whitbread Award for Fiction winner.