She runs away from darkness with her young son but ends up in a strange new land. He runs away from God’s love and punishes himself for the past. How can the two accept that God works in mysterious ways and find happiness in each other’s arms?
After fleeing her abusive fiancé, Maddie and her young son hop on a train bound West. In a moment of desperation, she switches places with a mail-order bride that doesn’t want to get married. That’s how Maddie and her son find themselves on a distant ranch in Texas. How can she instill God’s love in her faithless husband and survive a rough life on the frontier?
Hank has become a shell of his former self after the tragic death of his wife and child. He’s not in the mood for love, but he must fulfill his father’s last wish. Meeting Maddie and her son weren’t in his plans, but he very much enjoys this turn of events. How can he unroot the sadness around his heart and let God’s word quench his thirst for love?
As Maddie’s unwavering faith helps Hank rediscover his own, they must work together to overcome the challenges that come their way—even if it means standing against people who want to take over their land. How can this new family fight off darkness with the help of our Lord?
Winter, 1888
Buds, Alabama
Madeleine Black had no illusions. The black-clad mourners who came to pay their respects to her deceased father were not at the churchyard to display forgiveness for her past transgression. They politely ignored the little boy at her side when they expressed their condolences. His presence was evidence of her sin. He had her untamed black curls and his father’s brown eyes, the latter now downcast as the five-year-old tried to understand that Grandfather was gone forever.
“Your father was a good man,” Mrs. Martha Lee Jackson said as she withdrew her gloved hand from the civil greeting she had extended. Unspoken, but eloquent in its deliberate silence, was the indictment against Maddie for the shame she had brought on the family when she gave birth to an illegitimate son.
The black mourning veil allowed Maddie the privacy of her grief. “Yes,” she agreed. “He was.”
“A true gentleman,” Mrs. Jackson went on.
“A true gentleman of the South,” her daughter, Eliza Lee Jackson, echoed.
“Yes,” Maddie said. Mrs. Jackson was the widow of a man who had fought under General Lee, to whom she had been distantly related. Eliza was a spinster born to a generation deprived of the sufficient number of young men who would have made wives of these women. She would never have a child, for unlike Maddie, she would not surrender herself to a man not her husband. Eliza Lee Jackson had never been in love.
The women passed on, to commend the vicar for his message of resurrection. Billie Deblaise Jackson lingered behind his mother and sister.
Even behind her veil, Maddie could see the appraising glance that he gave as he surveyed her. What did he see? A woman of twenty-five years who lived in the same genteel poverty as his family, who now, with the loss of her father, faced a dire future in which she had no means to provide for herself and her son? She would continue to live in her parents’ home, but there was no money for its upkeep or to pay the taxes owed on it. Did he see a woman wondering how she would pay for fuel for the winter, for even in the benign climate of Alabama, cold winds came? What did William DeBlaise Jackson, bachelor, see in Maddie?
“Perhaps,” he said in the courtly manner that did not match the assessing expression in his pale eyes, “you will permit me to call upon you in the future? To look in upon you and to see how you are faring?”
Maddie stifled an exhalation of outrage. That was what he saw in her. But perhaps he was merely being honest.
“Perhaps,” she said noncommittally.
She maintained her composure. Mother had taught her daughter that, no matter the circumstances, a lady did not succumb to her emotions. Mother had been gone these last five years, taking with her the stalwart patience of a woman who had witnessed the horrors of war and the privation that followed, but had never allowed bitterness to dictate her conduct.
Billie inclined his head. “Until then,” he said with a confident smile.
Maddie continued to go through the protocols of death as custom required. Only later that afternoon, when she and Harry were alone in the house and he was asleep, napping in his bed, did Maddie allow herself free rein to surrender to her tears. They were tears for the loss of a beloved father, for the memory of a cherished mother, for the absence of the man she had loved without the church’s sanction, and for the stability of a life which, lacking in wealth though it was, had given her a certain security.
She had to raise her son alone now. His father had died before Harry, named for him, was even born. Her family was gone. She was the scarlet-letter woman of Buds, Alabama, and Billie DeBlaise Jackson had just intimated to her how a woman of her character would have to survive. If he showed an interest in her, it was unlikely to be accompanied by matrimony. If he did offer marriage, she would have no choice but to accept it.
Early Spring, 1889
Buds, Alabama
“A wrestling story, Mama,” Harry said, nestling himself deeper inside the cocoon of blankets. His black curls, as wayward as those upon his mother’s head, seemed to be wriggling against the white pillowcase, belying his drowsy eyelids.
“A wrestling story! Goodness, Harry, a wrestling story out of the Bible?” Maddie Black brushed his curls out of his eyes. He had her curls, but his father’s eyes, brown and deep and warm. They brought Harry to mind whenever she looked at their son, the joy in her boy mixing with the pang of grief at his father’s death.
Harry Junior’s bedroom was her favorite spot in the house. Her son’s toys, the ones that her own father had played with, were neatly arranged on the wooden shelves on the wall. The dark green draperies that her mother had sewn were closed against the night outside. Her parents were gone now, but in this room where her son slept, there were mementoes of their lives.
As she read a bedtime story to her son after he had said his prayers and before she put out the lamp light, she forgot all the cares that clustered around her during the day. This room was so filled with the humble treasures left by her parents that, even though they were dead, she felt their presence.
“A wrestling story,” Harry said stubbornly, but he smiled. Harry’s smile rose up from his cleft chin and dipped into the curve of his cheeks, just as his father’s smile used to do more than five years ago.
“Very well,” Maddie said. “It just so happens,” she went on as she opened her Bible, “that there is a wrestling story in the Bible. It’s in Genesis. It’s the story of Jacob—“
A barrage of knocks beat in a haphazard rhythm against the front door downstairs, interrupting her narrative.
Mother and son looked at each other. “Who would be calling so late?” Harry pondered aloud, voicing her thoughts.
“I’ve no idea,” she said, but with a sinking heart; she knew there was only one person who would appear on her doorstep at such an hour.
Maddie pulled the covers up to her son’s shoulders, the bright colors of the patchwork quilt made by her mother enfolding him. “I’ll be right back up,” she promised as she rose from her chair.
The waning light of the lamp left most of the room in shadow and as Maddie turned toward the door, she felt as if she were leaving the safety of the light around Harry’s bed to venture into the shadows beyond.
“Mama,” Harry said, his voice tremulous. “It won’t be Uncle Billie, will it?”
Maddie forced a note of calm into her words. “Oh, perhaps; but if it is, I’m sure he simply wants to leave a message about the wedding,” she assured him. “I’ll be back up in no time and we’ll finish the story, never you fear.”
Harry didn’t answer. Maddie took care to close the door behind her. She walked down the staircase, pausing on the landing as the volume of the knocking increased. She inhaled, and then released her breath slowly before walking down the rest of the stairs.
“Billie,” she said as she opened the door, “whatever are you doing here at such an hour? I was putting Harry to bed—“
Billie Jackson, her fiancé, thrust himself past her and into the foyer. “You’re going to be my wife,” he said. “I can come here whenever I want.”
The scent of whiskey came with his words, although she already knew, by his slurred speech and his tone, that he had been at the tavern before he came.
“It isn’t proper,” she argued, keeping her intonation firm but reasonable so that her words would not set him off.
“Proper?” Billie grabbed her left hand. “What’s proper got to do with anything? You didn’t have a ring on your finger when that boy came to be, did you? You weren’t so high-and-mighty about his father showing up when he ought not to have done! I’ll not be denied what you gave him freely, so don’t be talking to me about what’s proper—“
“Shhh, you’ll wake Harry!” Her words were a warning, her tone a plea. Whenever she had any sort of discussion with her fiancé, communication seemed to follow that pattern. But when he had been drinking, he was rarely responsive to anything that she said. It was not a promising start for a future marriage, but Maddie did not feel that she had the freedom to expect more from him. Everyone in the town of Buds knew that she was a fallen woman, and as such, she could not expect a chevalier to claim her. Billie was decidedly not a noble knight in shining armor.
“And what if I do?” Billie challenged her. His sandy-brown hair was disheveled. The odor of tobacco clung to him, mixing with the smell of the whiskey. He had been drinking, just as she’d suspected, and likely gambling as well, she realized; her senses translated his appearance into the facts she could not escape. He was perspiring despite the coolness of the spring night, and Maddie could smell the rank odor. “We’ll be married soon enough and he’ll have to obey me. I’ll be the only father he’ll ever know and I won’t stand for impudence in my household!”
William DeBlaise Jackson was the scion of one of Buds, Alabama’s most genteel families. But the Jacksons, like all the fine old families of Alabama, had lost much in the war that had robbed the South of so many of its young men.
Instead of coming to manhood with the expectations of a prosperous plantation living, Billie, who had been born just four years before Alabama seceded from the Union, now practiced law in a nondescript office on a shabby street that had once been the center of town.
The young men of Alabama found themselves in circumstances considerably altered from those in which their male ancestors had come to manhood. Harry, her son’s father, was a distant relative of Maddie with the same surname—Black. He had likewise come from a family that found itself down-at-heel in the years of struggling after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.
Harry Black, although he had no memory of the father who sired him and then died at Vicksburg, had not abandoned the family tradition of military service. He had joined the army like his father and grandfather before him, and been posted to the West.
Harry had died there before he could return, though he had promised to marry Maddie. The love that had overwhelmed them before they could be joined together in marriage had borne the evidence of their passion. Even though it left Maddie a ruined woman in the view of the town, she treasured the son she had borne.
“This isn’t your household,” she told Billie in a whisper which surrendered nothing of its urgency despite the low voice. “It was my parents’ home and now it is mine.”
“Mortgaged to the hilt,” Billie jeered. “Worthless to me.”
Maddie’s shoulders slumped. It was true that the house owned by her parents had been mortgaged and that it was part of her indebted legacy. But the same was true of so many houses in Buds, where wealth that had come out of cotton was now only a memory. Her father had fought in the war and been lucky enough to return home alive, but poverty had clung to him like a disease upon his return. The shame of financial desperation was inescapable, not only for her family, but for the whole town.
“And your house isn’t?” she flung back at him.
The knowledge that, upon their marriage, she would be expected to leave this familiar home and take Harry to live with Billie, his mother, and his sister, preyed upon her peace of mind daily. A wife went to her husband’s home, even if his kin despised her. Stern Martha Lee Jackson traded on her connection to the Virginia Lee clan at every opportunity, establishing her connection to the late, revered Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
She and her daughter, the sour Eliza Lee Jackson, ignored the fact that they were as poor as Maddie and instead concentrated their vitriol upon what they described as the “sordid” manner of her son’s birth.
Billie grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer to him. Drink had begun to bloat his once-handsome looks, and ill temper gave his countenance what seemed to be a permanent expression of resentment. He was attired as a gentleman of means, even a fashionable one, in his striped trousers, high-collared white shirt, vest, and cutaway jacket that allowed his pocket watch to show. His clothing was rumpled, though, from an evening of carousing that had begun, Maddie knew, before the afternoon had ended. He bore no resemblance to the prominent William and Mary University-educated lawyer he believed himself to be.
“You’re no better than a harlot,” he growled. “You deny me what you handed out for free to your soldier lover.”
“It wasn’t like that!” she exclaimed, his offensive words hurting her more than his grip on her wrist.
“Wasn’t it? Then why don’t you tell me what it was like, that year that he wooed you and won you before setting off for the West in his uniform. Is that what it was? The uniform? Is that what made you act the harlot?”
“I wasn’t a harlot,” Maddie cried out, stung at the term that sullied the deep bonds of love she and Harry had shared. She had always idolized him when they met at family gatherings, and he had been kind. But it was not until he joined the military and faced the prospect of leaving that his eyes had seen his adoring second cousin in a different light. They had broken the conventions of their community, it was true. But they had done so out of love.
“The devil you weren’t!” Billie pulled at her arm, twisting her wrist tighter as he forced her body closer to his.
“Go away!” she sobbed. “Why must you do this?”
“Because you make me do it, that’s why!”
His free hand reached out and slapped Maddie’s face before he thrust her away from him. Billie stood over her as she sprawled on the floor of the foyer, her hair coming loose from its pins and her dress a tangle around her heels.
“Mama!”
Maddie heard Harry’s voice from the landing and then, to her dismay, she heard his feet on the stairs as he rushed down. She moaned in fear, a silent call to God to protect her boy from harm, knowing that Harry’s appearance would only incite Billie’s ire further.
“Don’t you hurt my mother!” Harry told Billie in a resolute voice, his fists balled against his nightshirt as he looked up at the towering figure.
Billie’s answer was a second slap, this one across Harry’s face. “Who are you to speak that way to your elders?” Billie demanded.
Billie looked from the boy, whose hand was cradling his reddening cheek, to Maddie, struggling to rise from the floor.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, “and tomorrow night,” he added meaningfully, “I’ll expect a proper welcome!”
With that, he turned and walked out the door, leaving it open in his wake. Maddie held her breath in trepidation until she heard the sound of his horse’s hooves receding down the cobblestone street. The dimly lit foyer, with draperies closed against the night, still seemed to bear the presence of Billie’s volatile outburst. Maddie shivered at the memory.
“Mama?” Harry kneeled down beside her, the frightened five-year-old that he was and not the brave little man that he tried to be.
“We’re leaving, Harry,” Maddie whispered.
“Mama?”
Maddie sat up, her dress in disarray around her. “Harry,” she said, still whispering as if Billie were in earshot. “We are leaving. We must pack our clothing and leave tonight.”
“Where shall we go, Mama?” Harry inquired, sitting down beside her.
His white nightshirt glowed against the dark carpeting upon which they were seated.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maddie said softly, reaching out to touch the imprint of her fiancé’s hand against her son’s pale cheek. “As long as we get away, I don’t care where we go.”
Harry stood up. “Let me help you, Mama,” he said in a grown-up tone, making one of those sudden transformations from childhood to maturity as he offered her his hand.
Maddie, despite the grimness of their situation, had to hide a smile at her little man. She moved to give him her hand, but her ring got caught in the folds of her dress.
She pulled it free. She wouldn’t be wearing that anymore.
Then she did smile. Billie’s engagement ring would pay for their train tickets out of Alabama.
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Beautiful cover and start to the story.
Ah, thanks so much for your kind words!
Great start! Can’t wait until tomorrow to get book.
Thanks so much for your kind words! God bless!
What an exciting start to this book. I can tell she’ll be taken on a twists and turn journey. Looking forward to reading this book.
Ah, yes she is! God bless!
Can’t wait for the book. What suspense awaits us! Looking for a journey with Maddie & Harry out west.
💓💓 super happy you liked it! God bless!
Oh my, this story sounds very intense to start. Looking forward to tomorrow to read this story all the way to the end.
💓💓 super happy you liked it! God bless!
Great beginning, looking forward to the rest of the book.
So happy to hear this! God bless you!
Love it and can’t wait to read the rest of the story.
💖💖💖 God bless you!
Looks like a good read
Thank you so much for your kind words!
Loved reading chapter 1 and can wait to read the rest of the book.
Thank you so much for your warm words! God bless!