Scent of Cloves
Norah Lofts

The Dutch East Indies, in the seventeenth century, were lands of legendary riches; of ‘nutmeg princes;’ of fortunes and family empires built on barbaric plantations and slavery. And amid the extravagance, the cruelty, the bizarre customs, perhaps the strangest events of all were the curious weddings that
sent girls half-way around the world to husbands they had never seen.
Julia, brave and stoical with a stormy and turbulent history behind her, took her ‘glove’—of yellow, pearl-sewn silk—and began the journey to the island of Rua, to a land of seeming paradise where nothing was exactly as it appeared.