Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh", he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who 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 er new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.