In the seventeenth-century court of England's King Charles II, three young ladies-in-waiting discover a palace teeming with love, intrigue, and treachery.
In London in the 1680s, sixteen-year-old Meg tries to decide whether to marry either of the two men who court her, taking into account both love and her writing ambitions.
In England in 1662, a time of religious persecution, fifteen-year-old Susanna, a poor country girl and a Quaker, and seventeen-year-old William, a wealthy Anglican, meet and fall in love against all odds.
Fourteen-year-old Gwendoline Riston, having been accused of being a witch, is hidden away by her father after the plague hits her English town and witnesses the townspeople die from the sickness while blaming her for it.
Mall Percival tells how the plague came to her Derbyshire village of Eyam in the year 1665, how the villagers determined to isolate themselves to prevent further spread of the disease, and how three-fourths of them died before the end of the following year.
Thrown out of her home by her stepmother in 1670, fifteen-year-old Eliza Rose becomes a companion of actress Nelly Gwyn, a mistress of Charles II, and learns a surprising truth about her parentage.
