The Right Direction

Polly Eccles, a pale, iron-willed Cockney sister-mother, drags consumptive little Billy from soot-black terraces where even the fog coughs; stethoscope prophecy sends them westward along rails of dust and mirage. Thumbing horizons, they are vacuumed into the chromium daydream of Kirk Drummond—scion of citrus groves and oil derricks—whose borrowed roadster smells of aftershave and unspent rebellion. California arrives like a gilt postcard: orange light bleeding into Spanish tiles, yet the air already curdles with patrician dread. John Drummond Sr., mine-baron and social surgeon, greets the urchin intruders with a smile sharp enough to core apples; behind polo lawns he lays siege—sabotaged employment, poisoned rumors, a banquet of ice. Polly, refusing to be a footnote in another man’s dynasty, digs her bare heels into loam and etiquette alike. Then the earth itself protests: a shaft in the ancestral mine hiccups fire, entombing men and capital in equal measure, forcing Polly and the Drummonds to confront which lives are ledgered as collateral and which hearts count as kin.