Daughter of a bankrupt Virginia tobacco farmer, Susannah Bry found herself on her own at sixteen, traveling abroad to the lavish country estate of her mother's family in England...only to find herself spurned by her aristocratic aunt and facing a life of humiliation and servitude as the companion to her aunt's cruel and domineering neighbor. Susannah maneuvers her escape by entering into a loveless marriage to her kind, shy, scholarly cousin Harry. They soon separate, and Susannah enters the fashionable London underworld -- a bohemian society of pleasure gardens and masked balls, brothels and love nests, opium and sweet, sensuous death. Here Susannah will lose her heart to the most fascinating man in town, the actor, dramatist, and sensualist Nicholas Carrick.

Now as the shadow of the French Revolution falls across Europe and a burgeoning new America beckons from across the sea, Susannah must fight with all the strength of her pioneer roots for her own life, liberty, and destined love, little knowing that her future rests on a question that may never be answered....