Legacy

Twenty-three-year-old Laurel Sinclair Laughton has known a lot of misfortune: her parents died when she was young, her husband died after three weeks of marriage, and since the death of her uncle she has taken it upon herself to watch over her flighty aunt and self-pitying, physically weak cousin. She shocks post-Reconstruction Charleston with her willful, unladylike ways, bargaining down the grocer's prices and playing a mean hand of poker. While searching desperately for the money needed to stop a foreclosure on her family's house, she hooks up with Seth Tait, a man with a murky past who claims to be a rancher from out West looking for a civilized place to settle down. In reality he is searching for a stash of gold stolen by Laurel's father before his death in the war and buried on a run-down piece of property she inherited from her parents. Laurel and Seth are credible characters who behave in surprising and original ways. The plot moves at a brisk pace and Bristol ( Amber Skies ) smoothly integrates historical detail about Charleston in that era, recreating the atmosphere of a fallen city where the newly poor gentility carry on as if nothing has happened. (May)