After her father dies, Maude, daughter of England's Henry I, prepares to assume the throne. But her trusted cousin Stephen seizes the treasury and crowns himself king, throwing England into a 20-year conflict.

Miss Bridie emigrates to America in 1856 and chooses to bring a shovel, which proves to be a useful tool throughout her life.

After her mother's death, fourteen-year-old Susannah is taken by her father to live in a Shaker community in Ohio, but she does not find the same sense of peace there that he does.

Henry Oades and his family move to New Zealand in the late 1800s, where he has accepted a job, but when his wife Margaret and the children are kidnapped during a Maori uprising and presumed dead, Henry moves back to California where he marries Nancy, a young widow, and the couple is just starting to settle down when Margaret and the children show up, and Henry, Nancy, and Margaret are all charged with bigamy.

In old Siam, young elephant trainer Run-Run and his old charge, Walking Mountain, must deal with the curse of a sacred white elephant.

Escaping from a hotel fire, Nicholas Van Tassel glimpses a woman standing beneath a streetlight and is so overwhelmed with the sight that he focuses on the single goal of marrying her, a decision that leads to both happiness and tragedy.

Tally and her friends at Dalderton Boarding School form a dance troupe and travel to Bergania, where she befriends Karil, the crown prince, and helps him flee the Nazis after his father is assassinated.

Lilly Armbruster is forced to work for the powerful mill owners who caused her family's financial ruin, but her feelings of revenge become clouded when she discovers that her former fiance Matthew Cheever is working for those whom she despises.

Moinette, a mixed-race child born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, gains an education by listening to the lessons given her young mistress, and when she is sold and separated from her beloved mother at the age of fourteen, she immediately begins to make plans to gain her freedom.

Elenora Lodge accepts a position as the paid companion of Arthur Lancaster, the Earl of St. Merryn, and soon discovers that he is concealing dark secrets that involve her as his unwilling partner in a quest to catch a killer.