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The luxury ocean liner Normandie cuts through the Atlantic bringing home Edward and Edith Mason to Depression-era America. The couple and their two young sons, Sebastien and Simon, are returning from England to claim Edward's inheritance, a Maryland Eastern Shore estate known as the Retreat.
Edward is a failed businessman, the owner of a near-bankrupt English machine tools company. Prosperity does not await him on the other side of the Atlantic either; when the family reaches the Retreat, they find it rundown and impoverished. Mason tells his father-in-law, who questions Edward's ability to take care of his family, that the estate will soon turn a profit--a patent untruth.
Just as Edward fails in business, he has no aptitude for farming, or, for that matter for cultivating healthy relationships within his own family. He fails to win the respect of the farmworkers or his elder son, Sebastien. Sebastien, 14 years old and searching for an identity of his own, does, however, find a friend and mentor in Robert, a black farmhand--an alliance that causes even more tension in the already troubled Mason family.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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