title: Blood Red Roses
author: Coker, Elizabeth Boatwright
description: It is 1860 in Albemarle County, Virginia.  Beautiful Angelica has agreed to seek a rich husband to save her family from financial ruin.  Her number-one suitor is a head shorter than she, but possessed of a considerable fortune.  A foxhunt is arranged to encourage him to propose, for Angelica says of herself, "If anything will sell me besides my looks, it will be my horsemanship.  I am more exciting in the saddle than in the waltz."
  
  But Angelica loses interest in both fox and suitor when an overlifesized, rich cotton planter, Beau Berrien of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, gallops into her life.  A whirlwind courtship leads to an ecstatic marriage.
  
  Beau and Angelica arrive at Cotton Hall Plantation on the eve of the secession of South Carolina and the onset of the Civil War.  Angelica is less startled by these events than by the appearance of Beau's widowed young stepmother, Elsa, who is claiming his inheritance as her own, and Frederick Pierce, masquerading as her lawyer and her lover but actually a Yankee spy.  Elsa can't take her eyes off him, and he can't take his off Angelica.
  
  The war begins and Beau and Pierce go off to fight - on opposite sides.  After a one-sided naval battle in Port Royal Sound, the entire white population of the island is evacuated by barge, steamboat, raft, and rowboat, leaving their beautiful plantation homes to the mercy of thousands of masterless slaves and celebrating conquerors.  In the confusion of the evacuation, Angelica is accidentally left on the island - behind enemy lines.  Pierce, fatally enamored of Angelica, returns with the Union Army of Occupation and declares himself her protector.  Beau quickly learns that a new master threatens his home.
  
  The great war between the North and the South converges on Hilton Head Island.  Angelica - headstrong, passionate, filled with the hope and courage and tough-minded good humor possessed by only the greatest of heroines - prevails, survives, and waits for Beau's return.
  
  