It is September 1991, three days before the autumnal equinox. Ronan is driving westwards into Cornwall, looking for the lover he has lost, and desperate to reclaim her. The search will bring him to Roseleye - the gull-coloured house by the sea where Alice has lived for almost fifty years since her time of scandal and disgrace. There, in the shifting light of an animate landscape, Ronan finds himself drawn into a masque of trial and transformation. By the time the equinox arrives he will come to see that more than one kind of death was waiting for him on the Cornish coast.