Lilly had spent a long time wondering what her friend would like. Bringing something from her own shop seemed cheap, so she had gone to the competition and bought a silver candelabrum that would look good on the long table in the dining room.
Stories of women intertwine. A violinist, Rose, born to a European man & his native wife has an illegitimate daughter, Helen, born of a night with an English nobleman, who is given up. That daughter has two daughters of her own but the family was involved in a shipwreck when the daughters are aged 9 and 2. They are then separated, adopted by different families, and lose track of either other. In a bizarre twist of fate their daughters, however, become best friends without knowing that they're cousins. The relationship becomes clear when one of them, the recently-widowed Lilly, is given the violin by a man who seems to have rescued it after the shipwreck. The two friends embark on a mission to uncover the history of the violin and, in doing so, discover their own roots.