Publisher's Synopsis
In the troubled aftermath of the English Civil War, a girl grows up on the ancient marshlands of Somerset, raised by her Puritan soldier father and heiress to the rich estates of her late mother. Like her friends, she longs for love, marriage and children, but alongside this desire, an altogether more reckless passion develops: an obsession with natural history and with butterflies in particular. Eleanor Glanville was destined to become a great scientific pioneer, but in a world which believed butterflies to be the souls of the dead, her passion would lead her into lethal danger - even from those who most loved her - for society will always seek to destroy what it fears.
