On a hot summer’s day in 1880 the beautiful Lady Rosella is cutting a basket of blooms in her beloved Rose Garden at her aunt’s house in Hampshire. It is her seventeenth birthday and no one remembers it except for Thomas, the gardener’s boy. Later she is driven to Winchester and has an unpleasant encounter with two raucous gentlemen in the local tavern before going on to fit her first ball gown that her aunt has given her the money for just before she died.