A Victorian gentleman is forced by illness to entertain himself with the family archive and he uncovers the Regency-era correspondence and diaries of one Miles Lufton MP - apparently a black sheep of the family connected with a scandal long buried. But through the pieced-together artefacts from the past a fuller picture emerges of a man torn between two personalities - Miles serious studious and penniless and 'Pronto' flirt political mover and eternal 'extra man'. Miles longs to dispose of his disreputable alter ego but that way lies calamity...