Wanted: A Brother

A porcelain-skinned gamine named Bab Fanning—her eyes two candle-flames of yearning—haunts the sooty alleyways of an East-Coast mill town, desperate for the phantom rib-cage of a brother she has never had. Into her orbit drifts Tom Wellsley, a runaway baronial heir whose silk cravat still smells of mahogany libraries and punitive silences; he trades silver buttons for a newsboy’s cap, craving the bruise of liberty. The cobblestone fraternity of pint-sized headline-hawkers, smelling sulfur and envy, stitch contraband peaches into his threadbare coat, sending him shackled to a House of Correction whose walls perspire vinegar and despair. Bab’s lisping petitions to magistrates ricochet off iron doors, so Tom bolts into the night alongside a hydra of juvenile delinquents who plot to sack the very manse he fled. Repelled by their molten greed, Tom instead stoops behind a scythe in the lambent fields of a tenant farm, while Bab—pigtails unbraided by wind—tramps to the Wellsley manor, a mausoleum of chandeliers and unspoken apologies. There, the pint-sized outlaw-gang strong-arms her through a sash-window; once inside, she forgets burglary and befriends Tom’s granite-jawed father, a widower whose grief tastes of cedar and old ledgers. Together, the iron magnate and the scrap-of-moonlight girl track the furrowed earth until Tom is discovered, sunburned and contrite, and is lured homeward by a duet of voices—one baritone, one bell-bright—promising that kinship can be chosen, not merely begotten.