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When she was twelve, Grace Aitken's parents were killed in a carriage accident in a London street and she became a ward of her father's business partner, Herbert MacKinnon and his wife and led a comfortable, privileged, if restrictive life at their gothic mansion in Hampstead village.

When Grace was seventeen, her pious father-in-law convinced her that she owed him a debt of gratitude which could be expunged by marrying his son, Frederick; a kind, sensitive youth two years her senior. However, after five years of childless marriage - a fault placed squarely at Grace's door, Frederick died after a bout of pneumonia.

Now 23 and Frederick's widow, her in-laws assume she will take on the role of dependent housekeeper in a home where her semi-invalid mother-in-law and two aunts adhere to the view that Grace's "wicked ways" need to be corrected, despite the fact these "sins" are no more outrageous than going for walks without a maid, or reading a Women's Suffrage pamphlet.

Grace resigns herself to being an upper servant in her father in law's house, when she discovers an inheritance from her parents has been kept in trust for her until her 21st Birthday. She concludes the MacKinnons have been lying to her and immediately formulates her escape and books passage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the SS Parisian from Liverpool On board she encounters Aoife Eva] Doyle, an outspoken Irish housemaid travelling steerage, who is being sponsored as a mail-order bride for a farmer in Alberta.

The ship reaches Halifax harbour, and while they await the arrival of a pilot boat, another ship enters the port and rams the SS Parisian and holes it, causing panic and a chance encounter that has Grace bravely venturing towards Prince Edward Island, a locale that Lucy Maud Montgomery will one day mark as the most famous Island in Canada