When a finely wrought silver sleigh figurine turns up in her thrift shop, Lori Shepherd recognizes it instantly. It was the object that mesmerized the sweet but very poor nine-year-old Daisy Pickering at Sproggton Manor, the bizarre Jacobean house-turned-museum Lori recently visited with her twin sons. Hoping to avoid any real commotion, Lori decides to speak with the museum curator, who turns out to be oddly uninterested in the theft. But there's not much that could be done anyway for the Pickerings seem to have come into some money and moved to Australia. With Aunt Dimity's otherworldly guidance, Lori's search for the sleigh's true owner leads her to a tangled web of secrets stretching from the finest English country estates back to the blood-drenched soil of the Russian Revolution.