Kennedy Square

Summary

Moonlit violins still quiver over antebellum parquet when hot-blooded Harry Rutter, silk cravat askew, plants a bullet through Langdon Willetts’s pride, thereby shredding the filigreed promise of a tranquil planter dynasty. Kate Seymour, whose gaze once pooled like warm molasses, chills to permafrost; she will not bind her future to a man who trades courtesy for gunpowder. Banished by a patriarch whose sense of honor is as wide as his cotton fields, Harry drags remorse down the oak-lined avenue and collapses into Kennedy Square, the columned refuge of St. George Temple—an aging sybarite whose pockets are deep yet hemorrhaging. While frost creeps across defaulted promissory notes, Harry sails southward, chasing El Dorado breezes through malarial estuaries, leaving St. George to watch his ancestral roof pass under the hammer of a rapacious bank. Years of exile calcify into a fortune culled from guano and coffee; Harry returns, sun-scorched, bearing gold enough to resurrect the lost manor house, to resurrect a friendship, to resurrect—if resurrection were so simple—the trust of the woman whose name still tastes of lavender and magnolia.

Synopsis

At a dance on his parents' plantation in the early nineteenth century, Harry Rutter wins a duel with Langdon Willetts, but loses his fiancée, Kate Seymour, who disapproves of fighting. Harry also is thrown out of the house by his father for violating every rule of Southern hospitality. He then stays at Kennedy Square, the home of his older friend and confidant, St. George Temple, who risks financial ruin in order to pay off Harry's debts. Tired of accepting charity, Harry leaves for South America, after which the bank forecloses on St. George's home. A few years later, Harry, having made a fortune, returns, and buys back Kennedy Square for St. George. Then, Harry and Kate reconcile, and begin making plans for their marriage.