On a quest for his lost nephew an eighteenth-century Englishman journeys across America, before finally discovering the startling truth about the "bastard boy" . . .
Ned Gudgeon is asked to find the bastard child his brother Daniel fathered in America during the Seven Years War. Following the few clues he has, he travels first to a Carolina plantation, where he helps two slaves to escape; to Mount Vernon, to see Daniel's former brother-officer, George Washington; and then across the Appalachians, into the wild "back country" of the frontier - where he has a series of perilous adventures with settlers and bandits, visionaries and murderers, land-speculators and American Indians, before finally reaching his journey's end.
