With the British primed to attack Washington in the final months of the War of 1812, Pennsylvania ironmaster John Old and his young slave, Peter, set out to find Old's son, who's been captured as a spy, hoping to bring him home, whether alive or dead. ? But when Old himself is captured at the Battle of Bladensburg, Peter is cast adrift in a perilous world of slave catchers, robbers and vacillating laws as Washington is put to the torch by the British. Should he run North, or stay and try to find Old's son, a near blood brother to him growing up? Meanwhile, the forge itself comesunder attack.Something in the woods is killing livestock, and maybe some of the workers. Someone is sabotagingoperations -- possibly a rebellious slave angry at the Pennsylvania law that makes any slave born before March 1, 1780 a slave for life. Old's new wife, a Philadelphia socialite, stranded in the near-wilderness and pregnant, is visited by a ghost. And a British deserter arrives with ill intent in mind. Six thematic elements are forged into an engrossing tale, including the love story between Old and his black servant, Naira, and thenearly irreparable riftbetween Old and his captured son, with added componentsof Quaker abolitionism, Pennsylvania-German folk mysticism, the supernatural, and early American Catholicism.