Set during the waning years of a long-reigning monarch, the narrative traces how communal rumor and fear transform private grief into public accusation when a woman becomes suspected of witchcraft. She endures arrest, trial, and imprisonment amid parish tensions and a plague-haunted countryside, then escapes and embarks on a perilous sea passage that deposits her on a remote isle. Years pass as she confronts isolation, encounters foreign forces, and negotiates survival, while the book moves episodically through courtroom scenes, rural life, maritime peril, and exile to examine superstition, social authority, and the human costs of scapegoating.