As the result of their brief affair Katherine is pregnant and soon gives birth to an asthmatic girl, Katrina (Nicole Kidman). The young girl is raised on her own at the estate, treated as a shameful product of the illicit affair. As an adult twenty years later Katrina loses her mother to cancer and inherits the family fortune. Having never ventured off the estate, she travels to Sydney, where she learns that her father is not dead, as she was told as a child. She decides to go to London, where his family lived to track him down.