Four university friends visit Jerusalem and return home sharing a secret which will change their lives and those under their influence. After his father's death, and before taking up his ownplace at university in Edinburgh, the son of one of the four finds himself at the centre of a dangerous quest. Evil swirls around him as he encounters a mystical ferryman with superhumanstrength, a strikingly beautiful girl who befriends him, his father's contemporaries who he meets for the first time, and a professional assassin employed by one of them to kill him. In arace against time, and in his naivety unable clearly to distinguish between friend and foe, he receives his father's sole legacy, a box apparently only containing a candle. The quest takes himto Jerusalem and Southern France; to Whitby, the Hebrides, Walsingham and the Norfolk salt marshes. 'Something almost lost to the world remains'.