When Vicar Flemming arrives with his wife, Eva, to take up his post in the Victorian village of Braxton in northern England, his handsome figure sets the ladies’s hearts aflutter, including that of Victorine Ellsworth, a young girl in her mid-teens who is bright, beautiful and bored by the confinement imposed upon her by her occasional bouts of epilepsy. With too much talent and time on her hands, she is determined to win the new cleric’s favor, a decision that brings death and mayhem to a quiet countryside.i.