When the soft-hearted, bare-knuckle fighter Ishmael Slaughter rescues an abandoned baby from the swirling River Wear, he knows that if he returns home with her his predatory employer will give the child short shrift - or worse. So it is to Janine Druce, a Scottish draperwoman with a dubious reputation but a child of her own that he takes the baby - whom he has christened Kitty Rainbow. Kitty grows up wild and stubborn in Janine's tough household but she is as fierce in her affections as she is in her hatreds. And she saves her greatest affection for Ishmael, the now ageing boxer who is the only link with her true parentage - apart from the scrap of blue cloth she was wrapped in when he found her. Eventually the cloth leads Kitty to her true origins - a discovery that shakes the very essence of her being - but eventually allows her to resume the life she so passionately embraces...