Wayward Winds (The Secrets of Heathersleigh Hall Book #2)

Michael Phillips

Description

On the brink of the Great War, all of Europe is caught up in a rising current of tension and political upheaval. The Rutherfords of Devonshire, England, are no exception. Estranged from her family, twenty-year-old Amanda has left Heathersleigh Hall to join the suffragette movement in London. Unaware of the danger surrounding her, can she survive on her own?

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441229540
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

© 1999 by Michael R. Phillips
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2015
Ebook corrections 09.21.2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-2954-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover illustration © Erin Dertner / Exclusively represented by Applejack Licensing
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologue
Part I: Hidden Currents
1. House of Light
2. Plans and Schemes
3. A Name From the Past
4. Hidden Dangers
5. A Mother’s Prayer
Part II: London Society
6. Sister Suffragettes
7. Unwelcome Face
8. Machinations
9. Kensington Gardens
10. A Surprise at Hastings
11. Larger World
12. Two Fathers
13. An Invitation
14. The Derby
15. Setting the Bait
16. Garden of God’s Blossoms
17. An Offer
18. Society
19. Amanda’s Coming Out
20. Coronation
21. Reception
Part III: Cross Purposes
22. On the Other Side of the Lawn
23. Former Acquaintance
24. Disquieting New Book
25. Private Confidence
26. Memories of a Happy Day
27. Heathersleigh Hall
28. Brother and Sister
29. Neighbors
30. A Brother’s Prayer
31. Curious Invitation
32. Land, Power, and Conquest
33. Family Evening in the Library
34. Suffragette or Society Belle?
35. The Chest
36. The Ledger
37. Milverscombe and Its Secrets
38. Curiously Disappeared Bible
39. Catharine and Grandma Maggie
40. Curious Gathering
41. A Caller
42. A More Welcome Visitor
43. Marriage and God’s Will
44. Evening at the Theater
45. Planting Seeds
46. A Talk
47. Nr. 42 Ebendorfer Strasse
48. A Country Ride
Part IV: Divergences
49. A New First Lord of the Admiralty
50. Another Curious Invitation
51. Romantic Weekend
52. Melancholy Memories
53. Light . . . Or Darkness?
54. Hugh Wildecott-Browne
55. A Skeleton
56. Stormy Birth
57. Milverscombe Parish
58. Father and Son
59. The British Museum
60. Argument
61. Confusion
62. What to Do
63. New Shock
64. Denial
65. Geoffrey
66. Happy Day
67. Refuge
Part V: Hostilities Loom
68. Out of the Frying Pan
69. Serious Talk With the McFees
70. Unwelcome Letter
71. Curious Eyes
72. Shifting Loyalties
73. A Visit and a Conversation
74. Another Letter
75. Another Conversation
76. Derby Disaster
77. Confusion
78. Difficult Question
79. Mounting Tensions
80. Stealthy Escape
81. An Offer
82. Another Offer
83. Acceptance
84. The Black Hand
85. Return
86. Strange Sensations
87. Departure
Part VI: War!
88. Churchill and Rutherford
89. The City of Mozart
90. Subtle Shift in Loyalty
91. A Fall
92. Gavrilo Princip
93. Bedside
94. Alone and Far From Home
95. Attempted Abduction
96. Assassination
97. Ultimatum
98. A Sleeper Awakes
99. War and a Witness
100. Haze
101. Courage to Look It in the Face
102. Trapped
103. Muhamed Mehmedbasic
104. Coming of Life
Part VII: Behind the Lines
105. A Man’s Decision
106. Welcome Face
107. Surprise Proposal
108. A Recollection
109. Heartbreaking News
110. Kaffe Kellar Again
111. Arrows of Clarity
112. Terrifying Discovery
113. Ancient Mystery
114. Into Vienna
115. Maggie Prays
116. Suspicious Eyes
117. Chase
118. Too Close
119. Search
120. Station
121. Secret Business
122. Waiting
123. Final Encounter
124. Toward Home
Notes and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Fiction by Michael Phillips
There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate. . . .” Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, and set off for a distant country. . . .
Introduction
Progress, Rivalries, and Alliances
As you open this book, those of you who are continuing on in T HE S ECRETS OF H EATHERSLEIGH H ALL series may want to skip ahead and get started with the story rather than spend time with a long introduction. Hopefully later you’ll find yourselves coming back for some historical background.
For those of you coming to this book without having read Wild Grows the Heather in Devon , I offer these introductory thoughts and observations in the hope that it will help you enjoy the book, and series, more thoroughly. This is a “historical” novel, and the early years of this century were historically very complex.
The story opens in Edwardian England during the opening decade of the twentieth century. These were happy times for the British people, an era of prosperity and British world domination.
It was a new era. Queen Victoria was dead. Her son Edward was on the throne. Prosperity and progress were in the air.
The past half century had been an enormously expansive and creative fifty years of ideas and change. Science had explored the perplexing puzzles of the universe, and seemed on the verge of resolving most of them. Man’s place in the order of things, according to the evolutionists, was accurately understood for the first time. The development of machines, the harnessing of electricity, and the explosive growth of invention had created an industrial power that seemed capable of accomplishing nearly anything man could envision. The automobile was barely fifteen years old, and now men were flying aeroplanes in the sky. The last reaches of the globe’s unknown corners had been explored. Advances in medicine and health care made life better and easier. Once dreaded diseases were slowly being conquered. A rising humanitarianism reduced human suffering on any number of levels. Women were stepping forward to occupy newly “emancipated” roles in the world. Work for most was easier and shorter. More people had more money and were working less to get it. In art and literature, music and philosophy, medicine and science, philosophy and politics . . . in all ways culturally the nineteenth had been a century of genius. As the twentieth century opened, therefore, expectations were high that the result of all this progress would be more of the same, with yet more lofty achievements.
Have I made it sound like a utopia? It wasn’t. There were problems too. All this progress came with a price.
Industry and modernization, and the raised standard of living of workingmen, brought new lines of division into society. No longer was the world defined merely by the fortunes of the very rich and the very poor. A third socioeconomic class had been born. It was called the middle class. This change benefited millions and contributed to the overall good. It carried with it, however, a consequence—the rising expectation of the masses.
Today you and I tend to take what is called the middle class for granted. That’s where most of us spend our lives and we think nothing of it. But back then this change, in a sense, turned all of society on its ear. A huge middle class was something altogether new—what today’s politicians would call a new “constituency,” with needs and demands that had to be addressed.
With the explosive growth of cities, mounting numbers entered this new middle class daily. With this growth came social and political power, creating a whole range of new cultural conditions. Steadily new voices made themselves heard, demanding larger and larger slices of society’s affluence. Not far behind was their cry for political representation. In such a climate were communism, socialism, and many diverse forms of liberalism born.
Unfortunately, the reality lagged behind the ideal. Every new constituency wanted change more rapidly than the institutions of their governments were prepared to give them. We recognize that very same problem in our own day, and it was equally true back then. Some of the more radical elements sought a wholesale overturn of society; others sought to gain their ends through the vote. In Great Britain the rising expectation of the masses led to the birth of the Labour Party and the suffragette movement. In Russia it would lead to revolution.
One thing was certain—the voices spawned by industry and modernism would be heard. Sound familiar? Everyone wants his or her voice heeded more than anyone else’s. These new demands would not go unmet. The eighteenth and nineteenth had been centuries of kings and queens, autocrats and tsars. The question was: To what extent could the old order survive in the new?
And there were other problems too. The most serious was the most obvious: The world was on a collision course toward war . . . but no one knew it.
You and I have the benefit of hindsight. As you read this book, you know World War I is looming on the horizon, just like you know the Titanic is going to sink. But the characters in the story, just like the men and women living in the years prior to those events, don’t know. And nothing could have been further from their minds. Understanding that, I think, makes their lives and responses all the more intriguing.
Calm appearances of society often mask turbulent undercurrents destined one day either to cause the collapse of that society from within or its destruction from without. Such social fissures had already begun to ripple through the underpinnings of a European exterior of equilibrium and tranquility long before the nineteenth centu