[1] Ten years after the events of The Final Reckoning, a red squirrel artist and writer named Gervase Brightkin is staying as a guest of mouse heroine Audrey Scuttle, now the Starwife in Greenwich Park.

While in Fennywolde, Gervase encounters Alison Sedge, the field mouse who was jealous of Audrey in The Crystal Prison.

At the end of the year, the Great Oak (in which the evil rat god Hobb was imprisoned by a previous Starwife, Ysabelle) falls down because of heavy winds.

When two black squirrels, Morella and her father Modequai, arrive in Greenwich, everyone is shocked as that monarchical race was thought to be extinct.

The almanack ends on this ominous note, setting the stage for a future Deptford Mice novel to resolve the cliffhanger.