‘But duck, you ’ave my heart… when all the others want my body, which the Lord knows they don’t get as no gift!’

As a prostitute in Regency Brighton, Sary Snudden has no faith in love between a man and woman, until she meets Lord David Stanville.

Caught up in a passionate affair with the heir to the great Sussex estate of Hadderton, the painted lady and her lover cross the Alps in a perilous journey by coach and sled to the excitement of a popular revolution in Turin and an erotically charged idyll in the Italian lakes. But the question of how she’ll bridge the greater gulf between her humble origin and the noble status David seeks for her, remains for Sarah the central problem of her life.