Once upon a time the village was famous for its honey. Liquid gold, an aphrodisiac, it was sweet on the lips with a fragrance reminiscent of honeysuckle, and cherry blossom trees, and foreign shores. In 1846 a beekeeper died and a Cardinal rule broken; someone forgot to tell the bees of his passing, and they, scorned, vanished overnight. Forty years on, and though surrounded by lavender fields, every hive in Lower Langley remains empty. In the spring of 1886, young and ravishingly beautiful Meredith Barclay is hired by the Church Committee to teach at the village school, and the former schoolmistress, Dorothea Simmonds - old and ugly, and suspected of being a witch - is sent packing. Still the hives are empty until Reverend Nathaniel Stone, a University man, a Master's Degree in Science at St John's College, Cambridge, a newcomer to the Church (and according to gossip completely out of his depth), intervenes. Tall, and not yet thirty, a handsome man with mesmerising green eyes - St Mary's Church was never so popular on a Sunday morning, ladies of Upper and Lower Langley in their best bonnets wishing to be blessed - Nathaniel decides the curse of the Honey Bees has gone on long enough.