It was her aristocratic beauty, her fine English breeding, and her impeccable social sense that first drew Gilbert to Eugenia and made him think of her as the perfect mistress of Yarrabee, the great plantation and vineyard he had wrested from the wilderness. But as Eugenia learns more of the ruthlessly ambitious man she has married and the rugged land he has brought her to, the very elegance and delicacy her husband prized in her soon prove liabilities. She is appalled by many aspects of plantation life - the convict slave laborers, the suffocating summer heat, the merciless winters. It is a maid who seems to be the real mistress of Yarrabee.