Eugénie Bearhani (1760–1835) was born in Calcutta, raised in Haiti, and brought as a servant—a free woman of color—to America by an English officer on the eve of the American Revolution. Yet none of that prepared Eugénie for her next employer: Colonel Aaron Burr, a man some whispered had made a pact with the devil.

The lines between master and servant soon tangle and blur, and first attraction becomes dangerous obsession. Many historians deny she even existed, but Eugénie and the children she bore to Burr were very real—and so was her little-known marriage to America's first true villain.