Riddle me this: I have a price, but it cannot be paid in silver or gold.
- Porlock Weir, Exmoor. Thirteen years after the Great Pestilence, the plague strikes England for the second time. Sara, a packhorse man’s wife, remembers the horrors only too well and fears for the safety of her children. Only a dark-stranger offers help, but at a price that no one is willing to pay.
Fear gives way to hysteria in the village and when the sickness spreads to her family, Sara finds herself locked away by the neighbours she has trusted for years. And, as her husband – and then others – begin to die, the price that the stranger demanded no longer seems so unthinkable.
The price that I ask, from one willing to pay … A human life.