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Told from the perspective of Leo Colston, a callow twelve year old middle class boy, the story starts when he is invited by upper class school friend Marcus Maudsley to stay at his elegant family home for the blazing hot summer of 1900. Leo is instantly enthralled by Marcus's family and most especially his beautiful and wilful older sister Marian. When Marcus is taken ill, Leo is left to his own devices, but finds himself alone and adrift in a world of alien social mores and adult concerns. Gauche and anxious to please, Leo is slowly and unwittingly drawn into a web of deceit as Marian pursues an illicit and passionate affair with tenant farmer Ted Burgess, a man of much inferior social position whom she can never marry. Marian and Ted befriend the lonely and easily influenced Leo and use him to carry secret messages between them. Leo quickly grows friendly with Ted and worships Marian with a mixture of innocent love and incipient sexuality he barely understands. Only when he meets Hugh Trimingham, the kind, but war wounded aristocrat to whom Marian is promised, does Leo start to question his role as intermediary. As Leo's thirteenth birthday approaches, Marian's moods fluctuate and the summer heat becomes more oppressive. Wholly unable to comprehend the true implications of the adult emotions seething around him, Leo sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately prove the catalyst for a shocking tragedy that will haunt him forever.
