Summary
A widower’s mind fractures like antique glass after his wife’s death; the shards are swept up by a half-brother whose smile glints sharper than the asylum key. While the patriarch languishes behind padded walls, his infant daughter is spirited into the limbo of a mammy’s lullabies, her birthright locked away like a moth in a money-box until the hinge of her eighteenth year. Sixteen seasons of dust and whispers later, the father escapes, a gaunt ghost in moonlight, to deposit his blooming Virginia—now a flame of girlhood—into the calloused but gentle palms of Lafe Grandoken, a cobbler who stitches soles and souls alike. Death overtakes the father before sunrise, but the girl’s orbit soon crosses that of Theodore King, a golden-blooded plutocrat whose yacht is a floating Eden. Their courtship is a cascade of parasols and confetti, yet the half-brother, hungering for the long-gestating fortune, hires Maudlin Bates, a hyena in a bowler, to assassinate the lover. Double-crosses ricochet: Bates threatens the cobbler, Morse shoots Bates, Lafe is shackled for the crime, Virginia is gagged and imprisoned in a turret room where sunsets bleed through barred windows. She slips her cage, races the moon to the courthouse, and unfurls truth like a banner; Morse is dragged away in iron, while Virginia and Theodore walk into a horizon stitched with rose-gold thread.
Synopsis
After his wife's death, Thomas Singleton suffers a temporary breakdown and is committed to an asylum by his scheming half brother, Jordon Morse. Although Jordon has been appointed the guardian of Thomas' little daughter Virginia, he shuns the responsibility, placing the girl in the care of an old mammy and planning to retrieve her only on her eighteenth birthday, when she comes into possession of her mother's fortune. Sixteen years pass. Thomas, deeply worried about his daughter's well-being, escapes the asylum, and after sending Virginia to live with a poor but kindly cobbler named Lafe Grandoken, he dies. Virginia's chance meeting with millionaire Theodore King leads to romance, and her happiness is complete until Morse, anxious to secure her money, hires Maudlin Bates to kill Theodore. When Bates, plotting to double-cross Morse, threatens Lafe, Morse enters and shoots the gunman, but Lafe is accused. Morse imprisons Virginia, but she escapes in time to free Lafe and bring the villain to justice.
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