After the early death of her mother, young Martha Jefferson accompanied her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to Paris. Five years later, father and daughter have come home to Monticello, the family's beloved plantation set high in the lush hills of the Virginia countryside. Though Monticello has suffered from her father's absence, Martha finds it essentially unchanged, even as she has been transformed. The sheltered girl who sailed to Europe is now a handsome seventeen-year-old woman with a battle-scarred heary who sees a world far more complicated than it once seemed. Blessed with her father's sharp mind and independent spirit, Martha has long abhorred slavery and yearned for it's swift end. Yet she now discovers that the home she adores is burdened by growing debt and cannot survive long without the labor of its slaves. Her relationships with those around her are shifting too. As the doting father she has idolized since childhood returns to government, he becomes increasingly distracted by tumultuous fights for power and troubling attachments that pull him further away. And as Martha begins to pay closer attention to Sally Hemings - the beautiful light-skinned slave long acknowledged to be her mother's half-sister - she realizes that the slave's position in the household has subtly changed. Eager for distraction, Martha welcomes the attentions of Thomas Randolph, her exotic distant cousin, but soon Martha uncovers burden and desires in him that threaten to compromise her own.