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Flanders, 1577.

Margriete Daviles, the Flemish born widow of a Spanish soldier, believes all the exciting chapters of her life are over. She is resigned to spending the rest of her life in the godshuis of Sint Lucas, a charitable foundation for widows, who receive food and shelter in exchange for their prayers for the souls of Sint Lucas' founders in Purgatory.

Margriete's boring routine of petty squabbles with her neighbors is swept away when rebels against the Spanish crown proclaim the independent Republic of Ghent. The new Republic's leaders are Calvinists who do not believe in Purgatory, and want to close the godshuis. One of them, Cornelius van Hoven, is also the direct descendant of Sint Lucas' founder, and therefore has good legal claim to the property which is the only place Margriete and her neighbors call home.
The Calvinist Republic dislikes both Catholics and Spaniards, so as the impoverished Catholic widow of a Spanish soldier, Margiete is hardly in a position to fight the most powerful men in the city. Still, after a chance encounter in an abandoned church gives her an idea, she begins to assemble an unlikely coalition to save Sint Lucas: Pieter Heijndrickxssen, the middle aged administrator of the godshuis, who has no interest in being a hero her grandson Johan, who is apprenticed to a Calvinist baker and shares his master's religious convictions Symoen Andries, a suave lawyer of uncertain political and religious sympathies and a mysterious young man named Jacob, who is definitely a Spanish spy, but who may also be a Jew, acting out of fear of the Inquisition.
Margriete must bring together a motley group of allies of varying religious beliefs in a near impossible fight to save her home - without getting herself or anyone else burned as a heretic in the process.