Flame-haired Charity Delafield has grown up in a vast, isolated house - most of which she is forbidden to explore - by her strict, cold father. With only her kindly nurse, Rose, and her cat Mr Tompkins for company, she knows very little of the outside world - or of her own family's shadowy past. What she does know is that she is NEVER to go outside unsupervised. And she is NEVER to over-excite herself, because of the mysterious 'condition' that...