About This Book
All over Europe in the late 18th century, people are trying desperately to escape revolutions and religious persecution. But where can they go to build new lives?
Santino, a young Italian cooper, follows cousins to Cornwall. Patrick is lured there from Dublin by Zephaniah Cobbs, a man who, it seems, has many secrets. One not-so-well-kept secret is that Cobbs offers his services to French aristocrats fleeing the Revolution. Paying him an enormous sum of money, Bianca and Sébastien, her young charge, fall prey to his warped brand of evil and become virtual slaves. And then a motherless child arrives in Cornwall when a clerical error at an orphanage lands her, a bi-racial baby girl, in the arms of a single man who sent for an apprentice but ends up with a daughter.
Arriving one by one in a tiny, hard-pressed Cornish village, none of these newcomers find much of a welcome. Must the villagers greet them with open arms when jobs are so hard to come by, when fishermen's nets are coming up empty and more mine workers are laid off every day?
Time must be relied on to bridge some of the gaps. But the work of acceptance, it turns out, rests not only with the Cornish villagers.
