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The story begins a year after the rumored disappearance of Catherine the Great's coronation crown in 1794.Sarah arrives ar Carrefour Plantation in colonial Haiti to visit her island cousins, and walks in on the opening salvos of the Haitian Revolution. Sarah witnesses the massacre of her entire family, and takes refuse in a small cave, where she stumbles upon a curious child wearing a strand of pearls and an oversized Mardi Gras crown. Sarah rescues the child, leaves the crown and escapes the island to return to Charleston, but not before she causes the deaths of three teenaged boys. Sarah returns to boarding school, but she's not the same girl-she's crippled by the memories of the brutal acts she was forced to perform to survive the island. She tells no one. At seventeen Sarah meets her future husband and moves to True Blue, one of the finest rice plantations in the Lowcountry. She raises a family, creates celebrated gardens and starts a pepper sauce business with her housekeeper. For two colonial-era women to start a business is unheard of; for one of them to be enslaved, makes the whole thing illegal. Sarah doesn't flinch, she is a feminist before there is a name for it. Sarah eventually tells her husband about Haiti. She confesses that she mortally wounded a teenaged boy carrying a large machete. And then she found a cave, and within moments, set fire to it knowing that two boys her age are inside. Only later did she learn that the boys in the cave were her cousins. Seventeen years later, Sarah's husband dies unexpectedly, Although devastated by her loss, she eventually marries a mysterious man, who reveals that he has known all along that the Mardi Gras crown was real, and that Sarah was the last person to have seen it. He is obsessed with the crown and forces Sarah to return to Haiti, where her second nightmare begins. They recover the crown but are attacked by an unseen mob and must flee the jungle. Sarah escapes the island a second time. She returns home bloody, bald and unrecognizable, but with a worn burlap bag containing something priceless.
