On a terrifying night in 1768, Daniel and his young sister, Pearl, narrowly escape their brutal life of slavery when a Jamaican sugarcane plantation is torched in a violent uprising. More than a decade later in New York City, Daniel anticipates sailing with Pearl, now 15, to a new life promised by Britain's king to former slaves who fought for the Crown in America's War of Independence. For saving a Major's life in battle, Daniel is doubly rewarded with the man's inheritance, to be claimed on the other side of the ocean. But a king's promises can be forgotten, and fortunes snatched away by the cruel prejudices of strangers in a new land. Hopeless and homeless, Daniel and Pearl are lured into a dank maze of passageways roiling beneath London's teeming streets, far below the crypts of St. Giles church. A world of unimaginable poverty, where the desperate live as outcasts, the blackbirds of St. Giles.