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London, 1794.  Revolution creeps across the channel, coffee houses seethe with gossip and the City is full of upstarts, émigrés and speculators.  But even in unruly times, daughters need husbands.  For four City men, the question is how to get them.

The daughters.  Motherless Alathea, whose charms are grown disturbing, uses the whole of London exactly as she pleases.  Harriet, Georgiana, Marianne and Everina are cosseted at home, but home is not always a safe place.  As Claude Belladroit, piano-master, remarks, what’s the point of locking the shutters when danger comes through the front door?

In the shadow of Tyburn gibbet, Vittorio Cantabile, exile and instrument-maker, also has a daughter.  Born with a deformity her father cannot forgive, Annie is far from cosseted.  In her father’s workshop, resentments are fashioned as well as pianofortes, and dreams are smashed without mercy.

Fathers and daughters; mothers and daughters; husbands and wives; girls and boys; the pursued and the pursuing.  Whether in gilded drawing room or dusty workshop, when a city is infected with sedition, everything is reflected through a distorting prism of jealousy, revenge and sexual devilry.