The book starts in 1792.
Sal Clitheroe walks to the field where her husband and other men are working. She and other women are taking them their lunch. Kit, her six-year-old son, is by her side, and she watches as the squire's son, Will Riddick, supervises the men loading the cart with baskets of turnips. Will Riddick is cruel and nasty, and when he sees the women appear, he says that they are early. Ike Clitheroe, Harry's uncle, tells Rick that they shouldn't load the cart so much, but he ignores his advice. When the men try to move the cart, they can't control it, and Harry ends up being run over by the car. The surgeon is fetched and Harry is taken home, badly hurt, and he dies.
After Sal's death, she is logically devastated, and she is also worried about what to do about money. She is angry with Will Riddick because Harry's death was his fault. Yet, when he talks to him, he dismisses her, so she goes to see his father, the squire, who tells her that she should resort to the church. Sal, though, says that since she is a Methodist, the rector, who is his son, George Riddick will ignore her. There is nothing she can say to move the older man. However, later George Riddick appears, and after talking to his father, he has a plan for Sal. He wants Kit, her son, to work for them in the manor as a boot boy. The boy cries, but Sally understands that Kit is already of a age that could work. So Kit goes with the rector.
In the manor Kit makes friends with the maid, thirteen-year-old Fan. Will Riddick is cruel and nasty to them, but the youngest son is kind to him. In reality, he is not doing too bad because he has new clothes, hot food and a bed to sleep in. And on Sundays he visits his mother, but when he has to leave, he always cries.
There are other characters in the book. Amos Barrowfield is a nineteen-year-old clothier, who brings wool to some of the women in Badford, including Sal, and they weave. Amos is also a methodist, and his main problem is that his father doesn't pay him a penny for the work he does, claiming that he is only an apprentice. Amos likes a girl, Jane Midwinter, the daughter of the methodist canon, and he hates the fact that he has no money to buy anything. When he asks Jane if she would walk out with him, she turns him down, reasoning that although she likes him, he has nothing to offer her.
Another character is Elsie Latimer, the bishop's daughter, in Kingsbridge. Elsie has the idea of creating a Sunday school for poor children, but her father is a hard nut to crack. Yet, with the help of her mother and a poor boy, she finally persuades her father that it is a good idea.
I love Ken Follett and his novels set in Kingsbridge, and I am sure this novel won't disappoint me.
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