The Scarlet Doll
Files
Lynn Library Catalog Record
Description
Two hundred mannequins crossed the Atlantic. Only one carried the truth.
When fashion historian and couture authentication specialist Dr. Scarlett Beaumont is commissioned to authenticate a wire mannequin in a scarlet gown from a private San Francisco estate; she expects three days of standard work. What she finds changes everything she thought she knew about her family, her career. Why her mother gave her a pair of black-handled scissors at eighteen without a single word of explanation.
Inside the bodice of a miniature gown made for the legendary Théâtre de la Mode — the 1945 Paris exhibition that sent two hundred wire-framed couture mannequins across the Atlantic to prove that French fashion had survived the Nazi occupation — Scarlett discovers an encoding system unlike anything in her twenty-two years of authentication work. Not a cipher. A language. One that has been traveling toward her hands for one hundred and sixty years.
Three women. Three timelines. One secret that certain people will kill to keep buried.
Richmond, Virginia. 1864. Ada Beaumont, the finest seamstress in the Confederate capital, develops an intelligence encoding system drawn from West African Kente textile tradition and hidden inside the garments she makes for the wives of Confederate officers. She passes it forward through letters to her daughter — not written instructions, but a grammar that lives in hands.
Paris. 1945. Celeste Beaumont, Ada's granddaughter, witnesses a secret agreement being made two floors below her atelier — American intelligence officials, British establishment figures, and Nazi financial architects dividing cultural assets and gold reserves through private channels that will never appear in any official postwar accounting. She encodes the evidence inside the scarlet gown of the two hundred and first mannequin, using Ada's system, working alone after midnight when everyone else has gone home.
San Francisco and Washington State. Present Day.
Book Format
Book
Department
College of Business and Management
Publication Date
6-8-2026
Edition
Kindle Edition
Recommended Citation
Burstine, A. (2026). The Scarlet Doll. https://a.co/d/08gXIsNh
