Anya Seton

In 1631 Elizabeth Winthrop, newly widowed with an infant daughter, set sail for the New World. Against a background of rigidity and conformity she dared to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony; dared to challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends the Siwanoy Indians; and, above all, dared to love a man as her heart and her whole being commanded. And so, as a response...

When Celia Marsdon and her husband Richard visit his family's hereditary manor of Medfield Place in Sussex, she begins to relive the experiences of an earlier Celia. In a parallel tale, Celia de Bohun has a love affair with Stephen Maisdon, a priest in 1552, that leads to heartbreak and tragedy.