Lake in the Clouds

Since returning from Scotland, Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner have been raising a family at Lake in the Clouds above the village of Paradise, where Elizabeth teaches school with their eight-year-old twins in attendance. There have been losses, the most recent a typhoid epidemic the previous year that took their little boy Robbie from them. Though she is barely recovered, when her close friend Curiosity Freeman calls on Elizabeth to help at a difficult birth, she doesn't hesitate to attend. With her goes her step-daughter Hannah, now well into her medical apprenticeship with Dr. Richard Todd.

On the way home, Elizabeth and Hannah come across an escaped and very pregnant slave hiding on Hidden Wolf mountain. Selah Voyager, as she calls herself, is looking for Curiosity. Elizabeth and Hannah take a seriously ill Selah to their cabin at Lake in the Clouds to care for her, and are thereby drawn into the Freeman family's clandestine mission: as manumitted slaves themselves, the Freemans are committed to helping runaways make their way to Canada. Despite the danger the Bonners never hesitate: they will do what they must to protect the Freemans and Selah Voyager, the woman Curiosity's son Manny Freeman considers his wife. This might all be possible, if not for the man who has tracked Selah to Paradise. Hannah’s childhood friend, Liam Kirby, who disappeared ten years before returns as a bounty hunter. Hannah hardly knows how to talk to this man she loved when she was a girl, but others are less reserved in their appreciation. Jemima Southern, at odds with Hannah since they were girls, jealous and ambitious, sees in Liam an opportunity, and she makes her plans.

Elizabeth and Nathaniel must once again set off on a difficult and dangerous journey through the endless forests to bring Selah to safety in the north and Hannah must leave home, too. Dr. Todd has arranged for a short internship at the new Kine-Pox Institute in Manhattan, where she will learn how to vaccinate against smallpox. She is determined to make the most of the opportunity, but she finds the obstacles that stand in her way will force her to reconsider her place in the world. In Manhattan in 1802 there is little understanding or appreciation for a woman, no matter how intelligent, well intentioned or educated, who is Mohawk in her heart and bones.

Returning to Paradise with the miraculous smallpox vaccine, Hannah learns that there may not be a place for her even there: Jemima Southern has plans, and she is determined to see them through no matter to cost to those around her. The decision about where Hannah belongs in the world -- with her father's people or her mother's -- may be taken out of her hands.