James West, a farm labourer in 1890's Worcestershire receives a letter informing him that his sister Emma is dying. He travels to London to comfort her in her final days. Emma is anxious to unburden herself to her brother before she dies about events that occurred more than forty years before. The family was broken up due to the death of the father; the punitive poor laws of the time compelled the destitute mother to remarry and move to a distant parish. Emma promises her mother to do everything she can to keep the family together. Working on a farm as a live-in servant with her younger sister Eliza, she made a secret pact with the master of the farm allowing her to regularly visit George, the youngest member of the family. The agreement was honoured. But she paid a heavy price. The unholy pact involved favours of a sexual nature and all those whose lives it touched experienced consequences which were good and bad or even deadly when repercussions surfaced in the distant Americas many years later.