Perhaps it is her name, perhaps her inadequacy as a wife, but Jane Gray feels doomed. Locked in a marriage to Malcolm where her strongest emotion is apathy, Jane is about to give birth to their second child. Malcolm finds this an apt moment for departure, leaving Jane in the care of her cousin Lucy and Lucy's husband James. In the intimacy of Jane's bedroom she and James create a mutual bond of love and dependence. But along with the joy must come guilt and anguish, longing and compromise all part of the price a woman pays for love. 'There are many writers with a good eye and almost as many with a good ear- very few are as well endowed with both as she is' - Sunday Telegraph