For Katherine Donovan, the slums of Dublin are a lonely place. Her father, a pawnbroker, is one of the most hated men in the district, notorious for his mean viciousness, and as a consequence Katherine is little better that an outcast. Her only friend is tiny Ceppi Healy, dishevelled, underfed, irrepressible and, as the youngest child in orphan as eighteen-year-old Katherine.Then, one night, the unthinkable happens. Katherine';s father is found murdered, a victim of local revenge for an act of cruelty that even Katherine couldn';t have anticipated. Amidst the chaos surrounding the Dockers'; Strike, Katherine unearths her father';s money and flees, in fear to her life, to Liverpool, taking the desperate young Ceppi with her.There they finally find a temporary haven with the good-hearted Boland family, until the worrying behaviour of their eldest boy convinces Katherine that they must move on. Using the last of her money to rent a ramshackle lodging house in a street decimated by the Ttanic';s sinking, Katherine discovers that, far from finding a refugee of herself and the little girl she promised to protect, she has put them into the path of terrifying danger...