Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for slavery he takes Florens, a young slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. Her slave mother has urged him to take her since she can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.