Burlington House

The lead character in this brief novel has no idea how much trouble a white man can get into while meaning to do the right thing for a young black orphan girl.
Set in the nineteenth century, this story traces a Carolina planter's trek through the South while trying to fulfill the deathbed wish of her mother, his former slave. Her dying request was that he "take care of" her teen age daughter. With the ink barely dry on his law degree, he departs the plantation with his wife and his new charge looking for a life and a legal career in the Post-reconstruction South.
Soon things start falling apart.