In the spring of 1836, eighteen-year-old Chenoa Sandoval escapes the suffocating Mt. Saint Dominic Convent in Boston and sails around the tip of South America to the wild land of her birth, Carmel, Alta California. Chenoa is determined to honor the memory of Padre Tomas, Mission San Carlos Borromeo's last executor, who was also her adopted father. She will teach the Indian children born the years she was in the convent. Only her guardian, Don Sebastian Viandante, stands in her way.

Pilfering food for her sickly mathair, Aisling O'Quinn wanders amidst the filth-ridden cobbled streets of Five Points, Manhattan. A matron of the Children's Aid Society catches her and considers it her civic duty to force the twelve-year-old onto an orphan train to a "better life." Though Five Points is a notorious slum, with its rag-picker alleys and bandit haunts, Aisling desperately misses her beloved parent and their shabby room at the bend on Mulberry Street. In 1863, after four years of misery on a foster farm in Pennsylvania and as troops from the North and the South converge for the...