The desertion of Lord Lysander Burton's wife had come as a complete surprise, even though he readily admitted that he'd never excelled as a husband. The death of the wife he'd ignored for close to a decade was a downright nuisance, making him further fodder for the gossips, and now a target for every designing matron in London.

In line with her consistent talent for being disagreeable, Lady Adele Warburton had run off with a lowly lieutenant, leaving safety and respectability behind, then died in a cholera epidemic in a far flung country.

In a last show of husbandly duty, Lysander decides to recover her effects, and grudgingly those of her lover, retracing the steps of the wife he'd barely known across half the world. But arriving in the mayhem of India, he finds that all is not as it should be.