Wobbly, a good-natured young farmer in a Victorian England, loves Prunella, a London socialite whom he meets during her visit with Wobbly's cousin, Marigold. Marigold adores brilliant, articulate Tobias, Wobbly's adopted brother, who in childhood had survived for two years wandering a nearby wood with a pack of dogs. As a warm and complex relationship develops among the four, Wobbly and Marigold find themselves in the painful position of imagining that their dearest friends are their rivals. Over the next four years, while Marigold waits for Tobias, Wobbly pursues Prunella with gentle persistence as she struggles between her strong sense of filial duty and her growing acceptance and love of Wobbly, whom her adoptive mother adamantly rejects. The course of their lives is, all the while, overseen and subtly influenced by the mysterious solicitor Beggintrade, for reasons of his own..