During the revolutionary late 18th and early 19th century nothing raises greater consternation in the minds of the American planter class than does the prospects of an ex-slave, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, who'd driven the whites from Saint-Domingue after crushing the English and Spanish imperial armies then sullies the burnish image of Napoleon Bonaparte's invincibility so close to the southern main.
Events orbit around the Family Calderón, members of New Orleans' Spanish mulatto elite striving to preserve the family wealth bequeathed to the beguiling Giselle by way of a string of left-hand "arrangements." Her defiantly unconventional oldest daughter, Julia Océanna (Gato), is a "sexually conflicted" beauty who'd just assume spend her maiden years honing her uncanny skills at swordplay than yield, as her mother had, to those very often loveless dealings where mulatto debutantes are brokered as practical concubines to wealthy white "protectors" upon the shrewd negotiations of their mother's at Cordon Bleu, New Orleans' infamous fall season ball for quadroon virgins. By contrast, her highly alluring younger sister, Eloisa Bernadette (the fraternal half of an eccentrically religious twin sister, Alejandra Conchita) shamelessly seeks to outdo her mother in wealth and love, even as she herself sinks into the severities of a mental disorder.
Into their charmed lives steps Baron Victoire Toblowski, the vengeful Pol driven into exile from Saint-Domingue at the height of ĽOuverture's rise to power.Without means and penniless, and a vaunted peerage his only leverage, he has long set his sights on seducing some wealthy Creole matron into marriage. His philandering ways launch him from the seamy dins of territorial subversives and the spectral haunts of the Voodooese to the glitzy salons of Creole gilded society. By cordial introduction he comes across the Calderóns, of whom Eloisa assays every shameless advance to gain his eye. Yet the mysterious nobleman is drawn to Gato from the start.
But wooing Gato's affections only proves a jousting of wits, sending Victoire on a course that leads him into witnessing a grisly murder. The ensuing trial and its unsettling verdict, by way of the French Code, exposes the day's most counter-intuitive extents to which the law applies to and defines persons of color, made more apropos by what Victoire had earlier uncovered of his own African heritage.
Braving the ravaging scourge of yellow fever descending upon New Orleans, Victoire is impaled upon the horns of a dilemma. If he can pull off securing Gato's hand, does he deny himself and set sail with expatriates intent on aiding the mulatto insurgency at Saint-Domingue in overthrowing ĽOuverture? Or does he reveal the truth to all and run the risk of losing his high place in society, perhaps even the woman he has somehow fallen in love with?
The "resolution" of Victoire's quandary culminates in a bittersweet ending when a vista of the New World's promise is unveiled in hopeful clarity. In her most decisive hour, at a time when England yet for a second time hurls war upon the fledgling nation at the Battle of New Orleans, the Old World is given a glimpse of the first fruits of the potential power of America's racial-oneness.
