Third volume in the new series of Regency mystery-romances by English author Anna Dean, with a heroine obviously patterned on Jane Austen, and with plots that combine elements of Austen's life with elements drawn from Austen's books.
Dido Kent is an impoverished gentlewoman dependent on her brothers for her support and maintenance, too intelligent for her own comfort, and chafed by her dependency and the assumption that she is at the beck and call of everyone around her. At the age of six and thirty she is aware that her family and friends have consigned her to spinsterhood, but unknown to them, she has received a proposal of marriage from the very personable Mr. William Lomax. Unfortunately, Mr. Lomax, while powerfully attracted by Dido's intelligence and wit, is equally dismayed by her independence is exercising that intelligence, and her penchant for involving herself in situations that "no gentleman wishes to hear from a lady he respects and esteems."
The current situation to which Mr. Lomax objects, concerns Dido's efforts to uncover the truth behind the recent discovery of the remains of a woman, found when an ornamental lake was drained during improvements to the grounds of nearby Maddenstone Abbey. The remains are identified as those of Miss Elinor Fenn, a governess employed at Maddenstone, who walked out of the house fifteen years ago and was never seen again.
The coroner's jury declares a verdict of suicide; but if this were the case, Dido reasons, why would some unknown person now go to great lengths to remove all remaining traces of the dead woman's history and connections at Maddenstone? And why is no one willing to admit who ordered the draining of the lake? What is causing the apparition of the "Grey Nun" to manifest itself in the Abbey ruins and even to appear in the Great House itself? Why is a gazetted fortune hunter like Captain James Laurence pursuing Penelope Lambe, a pretty but penniless orphan of unknown antecedents, while simultaneously persuading Miss Lucy Crankford to agree to an elopement and clandestine marriage?. Why should Lucy's elder sister Harriet be so adamantly opposed to their brother Silas' attachment to Penelope?
Despite Mr. Lomax's disapproval, Dido knows she cannot stop until she finds the answers to these and other questions, so that justice may be done, the dead laid to rest, and happiness restored to the living. But even in this, Dido finds to her dismay, there may be a vast and seeming unbridgeable gap between a woman's notion of justice and a man's.
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