When summer rains uncover a body on a Lake District hillside, a local legend surfaces that Fletcher Christian staged a massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. Once home he told his story to his old friend William Wordsworth, who turned it into a narrative poem that he kept hidden for fear he would be accused of harbouring a fugitive. Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham wants to discover whether the manuscript ever existed, but as she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels.