Two families seemingly very different but with intertwined fates.
Young Janey Rowland lived in Linden Mews, in the flat over the garage. She was the housekeeper's daughter, the chauffeur's daughter, and even though she was a bright and sensitive child, she had been taught to know her place when it came to going round to the big house - the Marchant house - in Linden Square.
But the two families - on the surface separated by a gulf of birth, wealth and breeding - were deeply involved and reliant on each other. Old secrets, old emotions, seethed beneath the respectable facade they preserved between them. And then the war came.
As the barriers between the Marchants and the Rowlands began to crumble, so Jane - quiet, beautiful, and with a great capacity for love - began to become more and more the hub of the wealthy Marchant family, the one on whom they all depended, the one who had to unravel and solve the emotional disasters left over from the past.