In Her Own Right

John Reed Scott follows Geoffrey Croyden, a young man of leisure who loses most of his half-million-dollar inheritance when the brokerage house of Royster and Axtell fails. Rather than face the pity of Northumberland society, and the wealthy Elaine Cavendish he never quite proposed to, he slips away to Clarendon, a neglected colonial estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that came to his father as security for a loan. A letter hidden in an old desk points him toward a pirate’s hoard buried near Greenberry Point, below Annapolis, while his new life draws him close to Davila Carrington, a sea captain’s granddaughter. Treasure hunt, quiet courtship, and the sting of reduced circumstances run side by side in a leisurely portrait of the American gentry around 1911.