Our narrator alice, a precocious pre-adolescent, puts together the world from what she can overhear in her traditional anglo-irish family. sent to live at the country estate ballydavid, county waterford with her widowed grandmother and great aunt after the death of a beloved uncle at the front. during the war, alice eavesdrops on the hushed conversations about the ferment among the locals in the irish nationalist cause. simultaneously, we get the story of roger casement's activities on behalf of the cause. though the casement and alice's paths never truly cross, the complex machinations of casement mirror the sometimes mysterious relationships in alice's household: o'neil, the major domo whose jewish arriviste, nicolas rowe, an irish catholic whose politics are diametrically opposed to those of alice's family, and the mysterious sonia, a white russian mystic who inveigles her way into the household. in the end, alice works out the puzzle of her society in her own way, and chooses the future, and what she feels is morally right, rather than cling to the dictates of the past.