Three mistresses of an English manor, each living in a different era, relate the influence on their lives of the Saracen lamp given to the first mistress as a wedding present in 1300.
This is a book that spans six hundred years. It begins with the marriage, in about 1300, of 15 year old Melisande, a girl of Southern France, to Sir Hugh de Hervey, six years older than herself and an English knight and landowner. Melisande takes with her to England a very special lamp, a lamp of gold and jewels, made for her by a Saracen servant in her father's household. The lamp becomes the spirit and treasure of the de Hervey household.
The lamp remains at Littleperry Manor, the de Hervey estate, long after Melisande is gone and her children and her children's children are gone. It is more than two hundred years later when Alys appears, clever and vengeful Alys, who is wilfully responsible for the lamp's disappearance and with it the joy of the house.
It remains for Perdita, a girl of the present, ill, temporarily crippled, and haunted by the spirit of Alys, to wonder about the past of the house, to find a solution to its problems, and even to uncover the identity of its ghost.