Sister Agnes is helping to sort out a library of books before the building in which they're housed is sold. For the most part it's Victoriana and lives of the saints. There's one collection which catches her eye, though, and that's the Hawker archive - a beautifully preserved collection of leather-bound books dating from the seventeenth century. Many of the books are about spells and magic but Agnes is most intrigued by the diary of Alice Hawker which tells her story and those of her husband and their daughter who died in infancy. Alice did not live much longer herself, but her story seemed to have a strange resonance in the present.