There is Divine intelligence behind every event in nature.

This was what Eliza George has been told. But as she tries to care for her bedridden grandmother, Jessica, while the terrible winter of 1817-18 overtakes the port town of St. John's, she would rather not believe it.

It seems the George family has been cursed ever since Jessica tragically lost her lover, a respectable petty officer, forty years before. Cast out of her home and with child, Jessica is finally rescued by a Quaker family but her son, Michael, and granddaughter, Eliza, must forever live with the taint of being the objects of charity.

When Eliza discovers that the death of her grandfather all those years ago was no accident but the result of a duel, and that the culprit was none other than the governor of the colony of Newfoundland, the notion of Divine will takes the blackest of turns.

Can Eliza usurp the creator and make herself the instrument of her family's retribution?