Since she was found as a baby floating in the Thames one foggy night the web-toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted & pampered there it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile the orphaned twins Lily & Elijah have shared an idyllic childhood raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather Augustus Lamb. But when Lily & Elijah go on a visit London a chance meeting with the ethereal Pearl will have repercussions for all of them binding their fates together in a dark & dangerous way... In this bewitching sensual novel Essie Fox has written another tale of obsessive love & betrayal moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art & literature & into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels asylums & freak show tents
- a world in which nothing & no-one is quite what they seem to be.