A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads a young girl into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a group of people held together by odd ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner who was killed in France as a young man. At Montefort, under the domination of the deceased's cousin and heiress, Antonia, and in the midst of an unusually hot and dry summer, young Jane pursues her own imaginings. Not far off an immigrant from another world - a rich promiscuous, parvenue Englishwoman Lady Latterly, who will play a part in Jane's awakening.