Last week Alethea Williams visited my main blog, and as promised here's another chance to learn a little about her latest novel.
....and as a special bonus you'll find two more excerpts that she's sharing with us today.
Can an angel survive Hell on Wheels? When
Kit Calhoun leaves New York City with a train
car full of foundlings from the Immigrant Children’s Home, she has no clue she
might end up as adoptive mother to four of them in rip-roaring Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Kit has spent her life in the Children’s Home and now she rides the Orphan
Trains, distributing homeless children to the young nation’s farmers as fast as
the rails are laid.
The first time handsome Patrick Kelley
spies Kit in Julesburg, Colorado Territory, he wants her. But
circumstances, and a spectral-looking demented gambler as well as Kit’s
certainty no one in his right mind would want her cobbled-together family,
conspire to keep them apart. As Patrick and Kit and her brood ride Hell on
Wheels into their destiny, they’re all forced to leave behind everything they
knew and forge new lives in the raw American West.
About Alethea:
Western history has
been the great interest of my adult life. I've lived in Wyoming, Colorado, and
Oregon. Although an amateur historian, I am happiest researching different
times and places in the historical West. And while staying true to history, I
try not to let the facts overwhelm my stories. Story always comes first in my
novels, and plot arises from the relationships between my characters. I'm
always open to reader response to my writing.
A little for you to read...
“Frau Goff, you must listen,” she said
softly. “Your son was arrested by the constable. Helmut will not be coming
home. Reverend Howe is trying to convince the magistrate to release the boy
into our custody, rather than have him spend ten days in the public Juvenile
Asylum under the influence of the older, hardened hooligans incarcerated there.
It was Helmut, Frau Goff, who told us where to find you.”
At the news, the woman’s hand flew to her
mouth. Her eyes distant now even though they never left Kit’s face, she moaned,
rocking the little girl back and forth. “Ah, Gott in heaven, what shall we do
now?” she pleaded under her breath.
“You need to go to the hospital, Frau
Goff,” Kit urged, even though she knew the charity wards were full to bursting
with sick and dying immigrants. Reverend Howe, however, was prepared to use all
his considerable influence to convince the Baldwin sisters to take just these
three more into their already overburdened care.
“I cannot go to hospital.” The woman
covered her mouth, throat rasping as she coughed up more blood. Twin spots of
fever-induced color suffused her sallow cheeks. “Then Hannah would have no
one.”
The woman’s hands lovingly kneaded the
little girl. Kit waited, fingertips resting on the woman’s arm. Puffs of vapor
escaped the child’s rosebud mouth, freezing as her warm breath hit the cold
air. Hannah’s eyelids drooped as she lay quietly now in her mother’s arms, and
she blinked sleepily.
“It makes no difference if I agree, yah?
All you have to do is wait. When I die,” the sick woman said in a dull rasp,
“my children will truly be left all alone.”
Kit swallowed the reply that wanted to
spill from her lips, words of false hope and promise that the woman would
recover. Perhaps, with time, good food, rest and a change of climate, there
might have been a chance. But as it was, destitute and starving and already
ravaged by her illness, there was in truth little the medical profession could
do for Helga Goff.
“Will you sign?” Kit asked in German,
fingers tightening on the woman’s skeletal arm. Educated at the asylum in
languages, as well as painting and piano, at least some of her training stood
her in good stead this day. “Will you give us the opportunity to shepherd your
children toward a better life?”
The widow Goff studied Kit with burning
eyes. “You will keep Helmut and Hannah together?” she pleaded, also in her
native tongue. “Brother and sister always. You will not separate them? Make
your solemn pledge to me now, before Almighty God.”
“I assure you the asylum will educate them
and find them a home.”
“No! To you! To you alone will I give up my
children. Promise me they will be together. Always.” Her voice fading, the
woman’s last word ended on a sigh. Her small strength in defense of her
children spent, her head drooped toward her chest.
Kit craned her neck, looking frantically
over her shoulder to Reverend Howe for guidance. He held out his hands, palms
up. “You have chosen to do this work, Katherine.”
Finding no help from the bear of a man in
the massive greatcoat, Kit turned her gaze back toward the woman and child.
Looking down on the little girl’s soft, golden curls, she said, “Very well,
Frau Goff. I promise you that Helmut and Hannah will remain together.”
The sick woman raised her head. For an
instant she searched Kit’s face. Then apparently reading truth there, she
reached unsteadily for the pen that Reverend Howe had already dipped in ink.
Her lips moved as she struggled to read aloud in English:
This
document certifies that I am the mother and sole legal guardian of Helmut Goff,
age eight, and Hannah Goff, age two. I hereby willingly agree for the Immigrant
Children’s Asylum to provide them a home until they are of age. I further
promise never to interfere in any arrangements made on their behalf.
Once more she raised fever-bright eyes to
Kit’s, as if seeking a way out of signing away her children. But both of them
knew it was too late. There was no rescue in this world for Frau Helga Goff.
Shoulders rounded in defeat, she lowered her eyes to the release form and signed
in a spidery European hand.
****************
Toward
Hell on Wheels, somewhere near Brule, Nebraska, early spring 1867
The sun rose, bringing another day to the
vast Western plains. The gambler stood fingering his new silk vest in the faint
warmth of the rising sun. Ever since he was a small boy, he’d received much of
his sensory information through touch. The feel of the new vest’s cool
smoothness pleased him. It soothed for a time the constant jittery feeling that
dwelled in his head somewhere behind his eyeballs. His new prize was fine. Very
fine. It was even more pleasing to him that he’d wiped out everyone at the card
table down to their undergarments in such a short time. He was good at what he
did, the cards. It was the only thing he’d ever been good at. He had the touch.
Sometimes, not often, his thoughts drifted
back in time. He wouldn’t have made any kind of farmer, that was for sure. His
real father had been a farmer back in Iowa. A good one, too, come from a long
line of farmers and knew what he was doing. And still it hadn’t made any
difference in the end. He’d still lost it all. Lost it, ironically, on a bad
turn of the cards while he was deep in his cups. Old Dad had a problem with the
drink: couldn’t stop once he started. So he’d squandered it all: the land, the
equipment, the livestock. The gambler remembered the bleak, hopeless look on
his mother’s face as the last steer was led away, her life and her children’s,
everything they knew and depended on, brought to abrupt ruin.
And yet his father hadn’t been a bad man.
Not in the way some of the men his mother brought home later, after her husband
deserted them, had been bad. Bad for young boys, at least, who hadn’t the
strength to fight them off in the dark of night after the woman had stopped her
drunken shrieking and moaning, and collapsed in a sodden heap. For one who
absorbed fully, seeming with his whole body, the feather lightest of touches,
those long-ago hours of endured pain at the hands of men his mother insisted he
call father had been horrifying and excruciating.
He was relieved to finally be on the move
again. He’d spent the winter in St. Louis after the railroad company shut down
operations for the winter at North Platte. The Nebraska town newly sprouted
from the prairie grasses possessed an ice house, a wash house, a blacksmith
shop, stock pens and a slaughterhouse. All the comforts a town built to service
the Union Pacific could need. What North Platte didn’t have was liquor. North
Platte was a dry town, the single dry town with a temperance house in existence
out on the plains.
Since the gambler’s business depended on
the rotgut whiskey that greased the wheels of his commerce, he had quickly
decided to head for Denver and then parts southward and eastward for the cold months,
instead of staying in North Platte. He’d followed the Missouri from Omaha to
Kansas City, where he fortuitously met up with his brother, whom he hadn’t seen
in a while. They’d made their way thence to St. Louis, almost scouring clean
the purses of that town’s overwintering trappers and emigrants before spring
found the two making their way back upriver to open their mobile tent-based
business, following the railroad. He got itchy to get on the road again as soon
as the weather gave hints of warming. And St. Louis hadn’t been sorry to see
them go either, the Brothers Grim, as some witty French tavern keeper had
dubbed them.
The gambler felt her before he heard her,
some overdeveloped sense warning him of her presence in the door flap of the
small tent behind him even before he smelled the pungent perfume that failed to
completely cover the musk of the night’s copulation emanating from her.
“What are you staring at?” she asked.
He turned unfeeling eyes on her, watched
her shiver slightly when he did although she tried hard always not to show fear
of him. They were business partners, of a sort. Had once been more, although
any bud of sentiment had always been tended on her part and not his. He was numb
toward women. Toward almost all people, if the truth were known. He just had
very little capacity for emotion; it had been beaten out of him in darkness
until only black emptiness was left.
Wordlessly she handed him some gold pieces,
his cut of her business dealings for the night. He liked the feel of those,
too, their round contours lying cool in his palm. She knew that, and let the
coins fall one at a time from her hand to his, teasingly, as if she might dare
think to withhold one or two. She started to smile, lips curving a little.
He slapped her suddenly. Hard.
She licked blood from the corner of her
mouth, head tilted and eyeing him with only the mildest of reproaches. After
all this time, she knew better than to say anything out loud.
“I’m not in the mood for your games,” he
said. She was commonly called Maud the Bawd, but any humor in the rhyme had
long since worn off for both of them and he never used it, seldom called her
anything.
“Go away,” he added so quietly she almost
couldn’t make out the words.
But she obeyed, instantly, with a swish of
long skirts whose hem was caked stiff with mud and other unmentionable grime.
The gambler continued to stand alone with his thoughts, watching the sun rise
and trying to tamp down the jitteriness that had resumed with the whore’s
interruption. Tonight had been just a little diversion in a temporary tent on
the side of the road that continued to build westward, toward the next Hell on
Wheels. Soon they would be able to set up like royalty and begin their work of
stripping the railroad workers’ pockets all over again. He looked forward to
erecting the Big Tent, with its mirrors and paintings of reclining naked women
that drew the gawking yokels night after night like gnats to sweat. The whore
was already recruiting new doves from Chicago for her flesh business. Soon
they’d both get back to what they knew best: making money.
Slowly he secreted away his cut of her
earnings in the pocket of his shiny new vest. No one else approached him, and
in truth few who knew him dared. Only the faintest trace of woman’s scent
indicated anyone else had stood near him.
Walls for The Wind sounds excellent Alethea- Best wishes for your launch and thank you for featuring with me today.
Slainthe!
