In late summer 1903, Nancy Desanges leaves her grand London house and her miserable, stifling marriage to run away to Dartmoor to live with her widowed cousin Mabel. She is soon enchanted by the moor, a place of stark contrasts, dark folklore, evil pixies, ghosts and a sinister wood.

But when she starts work at Beaumont Lodge, she is fascinated by the tortured, haunted world of its master Raphael Beaumont whose wife mysteriously disappeared 15 years before.

Mabel, and the women she works with, warn her never to look the master in the eye and never to go in the study when the door is closed.

The headstrong, fearless Nancy does both and that’s when everything changes.