Summary
A Gothic-Virginian fever dream unfurls when Eugene Lenoir’s ephemeral marriage to Major Warfield’s sister curdles into dynastic vendetta; the newly-weds perish in a hush of scandal, bequeathing only a shadow: an infant girl spirited from crumbling plantation porticoes to Manhattan’s gas-lit warrens by a nurse who swaps lethal oath for clandestine mercy. Years later the child, now Capitola Black, is summoned back to the rotting grandeur of the Old Dominion by her hawk-eyed uncle, just as Europe’s guns thunder across the Atlantic. Amid tobacco ghosts and magnolia rot she prowls chandeliered parlours doubling as spy nests, unmasking her implacable guardian Gabriel Lenoir—embezzler of her patrimony and saboteur of the American war machine. Through trapdoor, precipice, and cellar she duels daggers and destinies until a doughboy-sleuth, Herbert Grayson, extricates her from the tightening noose, restores her birthright, and claims her hand beneath a sky already streaked with troop-ship smoke.
Synopsis
Eugene Lenoir weds the sister of Major Warfield. The couple dies not many months after the marriage, but there is much animosity between the two families. Gabriel Lenoir inherits his brother's estate, and he makes the nurse, Nance Wilson, swear to kill the baby that was born to Eugene's wife shortly before she died. But the nurse takes the infant to be raised in a New York tenement instead. After the girl is grown, the nurse tells the Major of her existence. Warfield brings her back to Virginia under the name Capitola Black. When the United States declares war on Germany, Herbert Grayson comes to town to ferret out a gang of spies. Capitola decides to help her country, too, and she discovers that Gabriel Lenoir is one of the conspirators. She is almost killed but Grayson rescues her and reveals that Lenoir stole Capitola's fortune when she was a baby, and the villain gets his just rewards for his wrongdoings. The estate is returned to Capitola, who is attacked by one of Lenoir's accomplices that she locks up in the cellar. As Grayson is about to enlist and leave for the front in France, he asks for Capitola's hand in marriage.
