In this moment, I feel the promise of America. I could be anything.

“Blacksmithing work?” she asks.

I smile, pleased she’s remembered. “Yes, miss.” I release her hand because I really ought to.

A small boy runs up to her, pulling on her skirts. “Sarah, come on, Mother says you can take me to hunt for crickets on top of the hill.” He tugs at her with eager energy.

“Now, hold on. This man needs to talk to your daddy,” she tells the boy. “He’s a blacksmith, so he can fix that fireplace grate in your room.” Her voice has the gentle pace of an unhurried mare. “I reckon he could even mend your pail and shovel.” She glances at me as the corners of her mouth lift and stretch. “For making mud pies.” Her smile is like the sun.

“Can you, mister?”

“I can.” I answer the boy, but I look at her. Sarah. I take in the curve of her cheek. The slope of her jaw. “With my eyes closed, I can.”

She pulls the door wide and steps aside to let me in. I want to touch her as I walk by. Instead, I squeeze my hat in both my hands.

She leads me to a bench along a wide hallway and disappears to speak to the plantation owner. The child sits beside me, telling me he’d like me to make him a poker for his fireplace—he and Sarah use a stick. When she comes back, she walks three steps behind the plantation owner. The boy hops up to take her hand and they slip out through a back door.

Matthew Johnson is a tall, soft-spoken man who’s more than willing to have me fix his son’s fireplace, and few dozen other things besides. He takes me down a narrow rear staircase to a hallway-like section of the cellar that he calls the “carry-through.” His slaves use it to carry his meals through from the kitchen house to the dining room. He shows me some iron-ringed barrels that need re-hooping and some hooks and buckets that need repair. We exit to a wide lawn behind his house that runs into a wood. Nearly in the center of the lawn, but not quite, is a grand old walnut tree, all twisted arms and gnarled bark. To our right is a walled garden.

“My wife had an idea for an iron door to this garden,” he tells me. “Something elaborate and decorative.”

I tell him I can make one, though I’ve never made anything like that before.

“That’s the kitchen house,” he says, pointing to a hut just behind the garden. Beside it I see more roofs over the garden wall.

“There’ll be a fair few things to mend and make in there. Pots and the like. Speak to Bessie and Maple about it, but get my approval before you start any work.”

“Understood, sir.”

The left side of the lawn carries on to the coach house and stables and the fields beyond. He tells me I can stable my horses with his and sleep above the coach house.