Born in a Mission in China, Lucy Waring finds herself with fifteen small children to feed and care for when she is thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu and meets Nicholas Sabine - a man condemned to death. He asks her the same cryptic riddle that Robert Falcon, another 'foreign devil', has asked her only the day before, and the mystery of this riddle echoes through Lucy's when she is brought to England by the Gresham family. Unused to English ways, she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the long and bitter feud between the Greshams and the family who live across the valley in the house called Moonrakers. In England Lucy discovers danger, romance and heartache, and mystery as strange events lead her to doubt her own senses. How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? Who carried her unconscious into the labyrinth of the Chislehurst Caves and left her to die? It is only when Lucy returns to China, a country now at war, that she finds the answers to the mysteries of her past. It is in China, at the moment when all seems lost, that she at last finds where her heart belongs.