Upon the arrival in Whitby, the children are adopted by a kind and eccentric elderly spinster named Miss Alice Boston, a former university lecturer.

The Fisher Folk were once plentiful in centuries past, until the witch-doctor of the tribes, Oona, fell in love with a human fisherman and together they produced a half-breed child.

Cheated of revenge, the Lords of the Deep turned to the Fisher Folks and condemned all the mothers and their newborns to die in childbirth, meaning that the tribes would never prosper.

Meanwhile, a newcomer in town, Mrs Rowena Cooper, opens up a new antiques shop, and begins making herself very popular with the Whitby residents, by donating large sums of money to charity and charming even the most disagreeable neighbours.

In its pages, she discovers a horrifying truth: Rowena Cooper is in fact an evil woman named Roslyn Crosier, who, along with her diabolical husband Nathan, tormented and tortured an African tribe, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on them using black magic.

Overcome with fury, she confronts Cooper, who reveals the truth of her identity and mocks Prudence, who is killed on the way home when an enormous black dog attacks her.

Shortly after Prudence's death, a hand of glory is stolen from the museum, and Mrs Banbury-Scott's manor is seriously vandalized, yet she and her entire staff slept peacefully through the chaos.