Seventeen-year-old Cassandra lives in not-so-genteel poverty in a crumbling ruin of an old English castle. She lives there with her father (a writer suffering from writer's block), her beautiful mother (a free spirit named Topaz), an older sister, Rose, a younger brother, Thomas, and young Stephen, the orphaned son of a former maid.
Life gets complicated with the arrival of the estate's young, handsome American landlords, Simon and Neal, who take a romantic interest in Cassandra and Rose.
