After seven-year-old Lavinia is orphaned on the journey from Ireland to the United States, she begins work in the kitchen house of a tobacco plantation and bonds with the slaves who become her adopted family, but when Lavinia is accepted into the big house, her loyalties are challenged.
In 1775, Nathaniel Dunn, a thirteen-year-old indentured servant in Virginia, befriends an elderly schoolmaster and soon finds himself torn between the two sides in the American Revolution.
In Farmington, Massachusetts, in 1839, nine-year-old Ethan experiences hardships as an indentured servant of the wealthy Lyman family alongside Daniel, a boy scorned simply for being Irish, and the boys bond as they try to right a terrible wrong.
Thirteen-year-old orphaned beggar Rob Brackett is kidnapped from the streets of London and taken to the New World for a cruel tobacco farmer master, who also owns a Pamunkey Native American girl named Mattoume.
In England in 1627, newly orphaned Pen Downing leaves her country village for London, where she is abducted and sent to Virginia to work as an indentured servant.
The doomed flight of two young indentured servants from their unkind master brings together an unlikely assortment of people in a mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania town.
