When Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine yars old and
unmarried, leaves her Aunt Merriweather's comfortable
English estate to join her father and brother in the
remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New
York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and
unwavering purpose: to teach school. It is December of
1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has
ever experienced. And she meets a man different from any
she has ever encountered -- a white man dressed like a
Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his blunt
honesty. He is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk
people as Between-Two-Lives.
Determined to provide schooling for all the children of
the village, white, black, and Native American, Elizabeth
soon finds herself at odds with local slave owners. Much
to her surprise, she clashes with her own father as well.
Financially strapped, Judge Middletown has plans for his
daughter -- betrothal to local doctor Richard Todd. An
alliance with Todd could extract her father from ruin but
would call into question the ownership of Hidden Wolf, the
mountain where Nathaniel, his father, and a small group of
Native Americans live and hunt. As Judge Middletown brings
pressure to bear against his daughter, she is faced with a
choice between compliance and deception, a flight into the
forrest, and a desire that will bend her hard will to
compromise and transformation. Elizabeth's ultimate
destiny, here in the heart of the wilderness, lies in the
odyssey to come: trials of faith and flesh, and passion
born amid Nathaniel's own secrets and divided soul.
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