After twelve-year-old Annika, a foundling living in late nineteenth-century Vienna, inherits a trunk of costume jewelry, a woman claiming to be her aristocratic mother arrives and takes her to live in a strangely decrepit mansion in Germany.

In romantic, pre-WWI Vienna, 12-year-old Annika is contentedly learning the arts of pastry and housekeeping under the affectionate tutelage of Sigrid and Ellie, servants in the home of unconventional professors. The two women discovered Annika, who was deserted as a baby, in a church and tenderly fostered her themselves. Everything changes when the mysterious, majestic Edeltraut von Tannenberg appears, claiming to be her mother. Enthralled by the sophisticated stranger, Annika is taken to a dilapidated manor in northern Austria where she eventually finds herself embroiled in a morass of secrets, rife with danger.