Amazon.com description: Product Description: The year is 1819. The Napoleonic Wars are now only a memory, but for Flora St. Serf and her family, Bonaparte's defeat has brought nothing but misery in its wake. Major St. Serf's court-martial has led the family to disgrace and social ruin; poverty follows when Flora's grandfather cuts them off forever from the family estates and the powerful Elder's Bank demands repayment of the major's debts. In desperation, Flora's mother is forced to give up her younger daughter, Sophie, to her grandfather in exchange for a few thousand pounds with which she hopes to keep the bailiffs at bay.

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.