Savage Lands — Clare Clark

For fifteen sols a day and a trunk of linen and lace, she had sold herself into exile, the property of the King of France until, in a savage land on the other side of the world, a man she had never met might take her in marriage...

It is 1704, and Elisabeth is among those virtuous few who will be known as casket girls, women recruited through churches to travel from France to Louisiana as wives for its lonely, struggling settlers. Educated and skeptical, she has little hope for happiness in her new life, but she finds herself surprisingly, passionately in love with her charismatic, ruthlessly ambitious new husband. Betrayal is as much a part of the new world as the old, though, and Elisabeth will find many surprises in her new home -- deception by those she loves and love for those she never expected to know.