Fourteen-year-old Clare lives with her two aunts at 40, Norham Gardens, a vast, eccentric Victorian house whose rooms are filled with old papers, old clothes and antiquated furniture. For Clare it is a shadowy, disturbing time. She has discovered a shield in the attic, brought back from New Guinea by her great-grandfather. Her dreams are haunted by images of New Guinea and it eventually falls to Clare to lay the ghost of an encounter between a Victorian anthropologist and a Stone Age tribe living in New Guinea seventy years ago.