1875 Vermont. Asa James hasn’t exactly sucked on the silver spoon. No one chooses to grow up on a rural poor farm, but a mixed-race orphan with Asa’s scarred face has little choice.

Determined to be a naturalist and scientific thinker in the vein of Charles Darwin, instead he finds himself thrust alone into the wider world, taking a tutor’s position at a mountaintop mansion. There, the widow Caro Rockwell is glossy and sardonic, someone so far outside Asa’s experience that she could well be another species. But soon he glimpses the broken woman inside the shell. Amid a series of eerie events, they form a friendship that grows into a sweet and tender sort of love.

His heart has what it wants. But then, from within the many dark recesses of Mansfield Hall, a shameful secret is discovered that will force Asa into making a terrible choice.

Jodi Lew-Smith lives on a hill farm in the rural “Northeast Kingdom” of Vermont with her husband, dog, chickens, and 250 apple trees. Her grown children come and go, staying long enough to make her laugh. She has always been a writer but also enjoys biology, which comes out in her fiction. She holds a bachelor’s in English literature, a master’s in botany, and a doctorate in molecular genetics and works as a biocurator for a genomic database. Her stories and essays have appeared in various journals, including a story in The Wax Paper that was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her novel The Clever Mill Horse won the 2014 James River Writers Indie Novel Contest, the 2014 Feathered Quill Book Awards prize for historical fiction, and the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Awards prize for historical fiction.