Two teachers, man-hungry Doris and restrained Marian, visit the Yorkshire moors a year after friend Evelyn disappeared there. On a stormy night, they take refuge in the isolated cottage of Stephen, one-time pianist shell-shocked in the Spanish Civil War. Doris flees as soon as the flood subsides; but Marian's suspicions about Evelyn's fate, in conflict with her growing love for Stephen, prompt her to stay on among the misty bogs.

A crime writer and his wife go for a break to a country cottage. They receive an unexpected visitor, the bossy Miss Tulip, who needs shelter for the night. In the morning there is a dead body in the house.

In the Seventeenth Century, in England, the naive and pure Caroline invites her cousin and best friend Barbara Worth to come from London and stay with her a couple of days before her wedding with her beloved bridegroom, the wealthy magistrate Sir Ralph Skelton. The selfish, evil and wicked Barbara uses her beauty and seduces the weak Ralph, who falls in love for her. Caroline calls off the wedding and Barbara marries Ralph. When Barbara loses a jewel inherited from her mother gambling with Lady Henrietta Kingsolver, she pretends to be the famous highway thief Captain Jerry Jackson, recovers her jewels and begins a career of crime, looking for excitement stealing travelers in stagecoaches. When she meets the real Jerry Jackson on the road, she becomes her passionate lover and also a killer. Meanwhile Ralph realizes that he loves Caroline, but it seems to be too late for their life together...

After a brutish, hedonistic Marquis marries a pretty young Clarissa to act as a 'brood sow,' he begins an affair with her friend who plots to take her place.