It’s 1786, and John Holdsworth has lost everything: his son to drowning, his wife to grief, and his home and bookshop to financial difficulties.He’s approached by an agent of Lady Oldershaw with an unusual commission. Her only son, Frank, had been a student at Cambridge University, but is now committed to a madhouse after claiming to have seen a ghost – the wife of a colleague that had died in mysterious circumstances a few months previously.