Three years after being kidnapped from her home in Martha's Vineyard, fourteen-year-old Mary Lambert receives a letter from Nora O'Neal, a servant in the house where she was held, who tells her of an eight-year-old girl where she's now employed whom Nora believes to be a deaf-mute, but who's being treated as insane, and asks Mary to come and teach the nameless child. A little scared, but intrigued, and bored with domestic life, Mary agrees--only to find that there's more to the child's story, and that freeing her from a world of silence and imprisonment may be more dangerous than anyone anticipated.
