While out walking his dog one evening during a terrible storm, Robert Harris finds a half-drowned figure lying at the edge of the sea. The strangely dressed man has no recollection of who he is, or how he came to be there. When Robert's ward, Mary, takes him to the nearby town, it soon becomes clear that others know of the man's identity and they will stop at nothing to get to him. As the details of the man's past are slowly discovered, he becomes embroiled in a battle of politics and power as the search for his identity leads him, and those willing to help, on a fast-paced and dangerous journey across Victorian England. When the truth about the man's past is finally unearthed, the shocking discovery has far wider reaching consequences.