When her father dies in the bitter autumn of 1897, Sarah MacDonald is left stranded in the Yukon gold-mining shanty town of Skagway, just south of the Arctic Circle.
With the onset of winter it is impossible to return to England, but Sarah is determined to be independent. Ben Adamson, son of her father’s old friend, is equally determined not to abandon Sarah — and has promised her dying father that he will marry her. But to his unwilling bride it is a marriage of convenience only. When spring comes it will all be over — yet why does the thought fill Sarah with such emptiness?
