The novel opens briefly in 1977 at the Troubadour Club in London, where Seth Hardanger meets Eliza, a charismatic young folk singer considering him as a support act. Eliza is fascinated by his Yorkshire surname, joking that “Hardanger” sounds like “Hard Anger,” while Seth is immediately overwhelmed by her beauty and force of personality. Their professional conversation becomes flirtatious, ending with Eliza almost falling from her stool laughing and Seth catching her. Twenty years later, in 1997, their romantic beginning has become a complicated marriage at Hardanger Farm in the North York Moors. They have three children in the house: Merlin, almost thirteen; Morgan, ten; and seven-year-old Tristan, who prefers to call himself Stan. Seth also cares for his frail, bedridden mother, known simply as Mam. Eliza, now forty-four, is still a professional folk singer, but her fame has faded drastically. She drinks heavily, sleeps increasingly often in a special armchair in the kitchen instead of her bed, contributes relatively little to domestic life and guards her money obsessively. On the night of Labour’s landslide election victory, a drunken Eliza secretly takes 497 Krugerrands—nearly thirty-two pounds of gold—out onto the moor, intending to bury them before Tony Blair’s government can somehow get its hands on her wealth. She is so drunk, cold and disoriented that she loses track of where she is. After falling backwards onto the rucksack of gold, she briefly thinks she has broken her spine and is going to die of exposure. While lying on the ground she suddenly invents what she considers an excellent lyric: “Being dead when you’re alive – that’s the real death.” The thought convinces her that she may still be capable of writing meaningful new songs, and she struggles onwards. Eventually Bob Waite, Seth’s lifelong best friend and Eliza’s drummer, finds her lying near Tolley Cross, almost frozen to death, and brings her home. When she recovers, however, she cannot remember where she left or buried the gold.
At virtually the same moment another crisis erupts: Merlin has disappeared. Unknown to his parents, he has been repeatedly skipping school on Fridays, using forged excuses and hiding in the back of John Agget’s yellow van so that he can smoke Eliza’s cigarettes, drink stolen cider and practise magic tricks. John Agget is a despised local odd-job man from the notorious Agget family who has himself recently vanished from Scardale. Village gossip claims that John has run away with his sixteen-year-old niece Milly, suggesting a sexual relationship. Merlin accidentally remains hidden when John drives away and eventually finds himself in Leeds, where Milly is staying. Merlin immediately becomes infatuated with her. Milly is kind to him, and he mistakes her attention for something potentially romantic. Police eventually raid the property and recover Merlin. During the frantic search, Eliza behaves increasingly erratically: she is more concerned with retrieving her gold than anyone initially realises, and at one point abandons Seth and the younger children beside roadworks so that she can drive illegally back to the farm and continue searching. At Millgarth Police Station, John Agget whispers a poisonous remark into Seth’s ear: Merlin is “not the only Hardanger” John has had in the back of his van. Seth already knows that Merlin is not biologically his son. Twelve years earlier, during a crisis in his marriage, Eliza became pregnant by another man, and Seth agreed not to know who the father was so that he could legally and emotionally raise Merlin as his own. John’s remark makes Seth suspect that Eliza slept with John, reopening every wound in the marriage. Yet the real revelation is considerably worse for him. Eliza begins to suspect that Bob stole her missing gold because Bob was the person who found her on the moor. She searches Bob’s car and confronts him so ferociously that she threatens, if he does not tell her where the gold is, to tell Merlin that Bob is his father. Seth happens to be standing behind Bob and hears everything. Bob turns around, and when Seth asks simply, “Merlin?”, Bob silently nods. Seth discovers that his wife and the man he has regarded since childhood as virtually his brother have concealed the truth from him for twelve years.
The chaos surrounding Merlin also contributes to another tragedy. Mam, already severely disabled and dependent on the family, is forgotten for hours. Eliza eventually finds her dead in bed, rigidly stretching towards the bell she used to summon help. Rather than immediately presenting Seth with the disturbing reality, Eliza rearranges Mam’s body into a peaceful position and later reassures Seth that she had fed Mam soup and that the death was peaceful. Seth is horrified because he suddenly remembers that amid Merlin’s disappearance he himself had forgotten to feed his mother. Mam’s death also revives the history of an earlier Hardanger catastrophe. Five years earlier Seth had accidentally burned down a large section of the farmhouse. He had been planning to disappear from his family and make everyone believe he had died accidentally; because he needed his passport to escape abroad but thought taking it would betray his plan, he tried to burn the family passports in a desk drawer using petrol. The “small” fire spread through the house. During the emergency Seth injured Mam while trying to get her away from the blaze, contributing to the physical decline that left her largely bedridden. The insurance company refused to pay because the fire had been deliberately started, and Eliza had eventually helped rescue the family financially. The new crises therefore reactivate years of unresolved guilt in both Seth and Eliza.
