1907. Twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of his time locked in an attic room of a large house. Taken from his homeland and treated as an unpaid servant, he dreams of hisfamily in Africa. Decades later, Lowra, a young orphan girl born into wealth and privilege, will find herself banished to the same attic. Lying under the floorboards of the room is an old porcelain doll, an unusual beaded claw necklace and, most curiously, a sentence etched on the wall behind an old cupboard, written in an unidentifiable language. Artifacts that will offer her a strange kind of comfort, and lead her to believe that she was not the first child to be imprisoned there.