Confined to shabby London lodgings, sixteen-year-old Flora makes secret friends of her own--Lydia, the beautiful and wayward mistress of a Grenadier captain, and Dedalon, the French automaton-maker intent on creating a living creature from springs and clock escapements, free of such romantic notions as compassion, loyalty, and tenderness. Love is an illusion, insists Dedalon the evolutionist, while to Lydia, it's simply a woman's weapon for making her way in a man's world. Certainly, Flora finds precious little love in George IV's dissolute London, until she falls startlingly and inexplicably under the spell of the very man she blames for her family's downfall--Darius Elder himself.
Before long, Flora's love--and her strength as a woman--is tested to the utmost. As her fate and that of Darius spiral toward one another, across an ocean to the frozen shores of Canada's Hudson Bay, they pursue a dangerous and forbidden dream that could eventually destroy them both.
