Redemption's Hope by Kathleen D Bailey

 

REDEMPTION’S HOPE

 

First blurb

“Two orphaned children. Two different sets of villains. A man without a country and a woman with too much past. And a rambunctious young country where anything went, especially in the West. Seriously. What could go wrong?”

Second blurb

“The world wanted to put their love in a box. So they made their own world.”

Third blurb

“Redemption’s Hope” is the third and last installment of Kathleen D. Bailey’s “Western Dreams” series, following “Westward Hope” and “Settler’s Hope.” The novel takes Jenny Thatcher, a secondary character in the first two books on the ride of her life, from the Oregon Country to New Mexico to San Antonio to New Orleans and back, as she looks for her dream and finds herself in the bargain.

White Bear, the Cheyenne brave, has a foot in two worlds but feels at home in neither. He longs to reconnect with the spirited white woman who had sought refuge with his family three years before. Is his true home with “Blue Eyes,” the woman he knew for only three days?

Only if he finds her.

 

 

                                                                              Chapter One    

 

 

 

The Eastern Plains

May 1849

 

            “Now see here.” Jenny Thatcher spoke through half-gritted teeth. “Ain’t only one of us is gonna come out of this, and I’m partial to it being me.”

            The mountain lion didn’t seem impressed as it moved her way, its hooves padding softly over the bare brown earth. Didn’t seem impressed. Didn’t seem worried. Didn’t seem scared. She had taken off her gun belt so she could wash in the creek, and her pistol and rifle lay in the cave next to her bedroll. No help there.

            What had Michael told her, a lifetime ago now? Try to frighten it away? Worth a try. She opened her buckskin jacket, flapped the sides like wings and let out a stream of gibberish.

            Try to appear larger, Michael had said. She clambered up on a rock, waved her hands over her head.

            The cat’s eyes gleamed green, the only other color in this wilderness of tumbleweeds and dust, as it continued its slow and sinuous pace.

            Throw something. Without turning her back she fixed her gaze on those blank jade eyes, flexed her knees and picked up a good-sized chunk of rock. It landed beyond the cat and thudded into the dirt.

            And the cat lunged for her.

            Jenny grabbed its forearms and tried to push it away. It pushed back, its yellow pointed teeth in a snarl. She kicked at one of its back legs. Iffen she could get the thing off balance –

            She did and it pulled her down with it. They thrashed together in the dirt. She could smell its foul breath, feel claws digging into her leg.

            God. Help me.

            She couldn’t die this way. Not until she found White Bear. Not until she knew. For better or worse.

            It was on top of her now, the yellow fangs bared as far as they could go. If she could only reach another rock –

            Or something better. “Rebel!” she gasped.

            Was that her stallion, breaking off from munching the short grass, bounding to her side? Kicking the cat with his powerful hooves, battering it till it set Jenny loose and rolled over on its back, panting hoarsely?

            Rebel gave the mountain lion a few more thumps and Jenny rolled away, fumbling for the knife she kept hidden in her boot. Rebel held one hoof on its stomach as Jenny crawled to its side, plunging her blade deep into the animal’s throat.

            “Thanks, God,” she said when she could breathe again. “And thanks, Rebel.”

            Rolling over on her back she added, “Pity we can’t eat it.”

            But she would bury it. She didn’t want the vultures coming to her camp here on the Eastern Plains. And it was a beautiful animal, even dead. Not its fault Jenny wanted to live.

            When she’d dug a hole and rolled the cat into it and covered it with dirt, she started her evening fire. Time to roast the fat rabbit she’d shot this afternoon, bounding across the plain on this fine spring day. The nights were still cold but this cave was snug enough. Lucky if she found as good a one on other parts of this fool trip. But Jenny didn’t much believe in luck.

            Rebel, herself and God. That was what she was counting on.

            She freed Rebel of his tack and led him to the stream, where he drank deeply. The rabbit was done when they came back and Jenny tore into it, letting the grease drip down her hands. Wouldn’t eat like this anywhere else on this planet, but who was there to see her? She finished, wiped her fingers on her denim pants, and banked the fire for night.

            She huddled in her bedroll and watched the play of the shadows on the stone wall. And felt the doubts creep in along with the shadows. Could she even do this? She’d crossed the country once before, but that had been with a wagon train, a wagon master and a scout. Plenty of people who knew more than she did, and she’d learned a lot from them. She’d beaten that cat, but what other dangers lay before her? Two-legged, four-legged? Iffen she could only sleep. It would all be there in the morning. Jenny had learned that, too.

            The nights were the worst part. Jenny had never been lonely before. Never let herself become lonely. Because if she let herself become lonely, it would have upset the house of cards that was her life. Until the house fell apart anyway, and she found herself with a better one built by her God.

            God had taught her about loneliness, even as He filled her life with people she loved and who loved her. And through that He’d taught her the hardest lesson of all.

            If you loved someone, sooner or later you ended up missing them.

            And if you loved someone, or thought you could, you had to know. Were they alive? Were they okay?

            The tall Cheyenne man who had a special way of looking at her, of treating her. Like she was better’n a saloon girl, like none of that mattered. Jenny knew her way around men. Knew and didn’t much care. But White Bear was different. Even though she’d only known him for three days, three years before.

            He’d treated her better than she deserved, and when Jenny found God she knew there was a name for that too. Unconditional, well, love.

            What she’d felt for him wasn’t a crush. Jenny Thatcher didn’t get crushes. She wasn’t sure it was love, not only after three short days. But there had been something there, an awareness of what they could be together.

            Enough to shove her out of the best life she’d had since she’d been driven from her home. But the ranch would wait, her friends would wait.

            She had to know.

            Jenny reached out and touched the worn canvas of her saddlebag. She carried an extra hundred dollars in gold on top of what she’d brought along for expenses. That would pay the Cheyenne back for her care three years ago, when a feverish, out-of-her-head Jenny had stumbled into their camp and they had nursed her back to health. And there were the clothes, the soft deerskin dress and trousers she’d worn while they cared for her. She had to return those, didn’t she?

            They were the excuses she’d given her friends in Hall’s Mill for taking off right after foaling season, leaving Michael Moriarty, her business partner, and their foreman in charge of the ranch. Had her friends bought the explanation? Jenny was having trouble buying it herself.

            But it was the best excuse she had for this trip if White Bear didn’t want her. Or remember her.

 

 

The story behind the novel:

 

                Twenty years ago, an idea lodged in my head and wouldn’t let go. We all have those days and those thoughts, whether it’s an annoying commercial jingle or the nagging need to apologize to someone. Mine was somewhere in the middle of the span, but it spawned a career.

            The image that wouldn’t release me was a young woman, a widow, down to her last silver dollar and forced to flee into the greatest challenge of the early 19^th century, the Oregon Trail. The woman picked up a name – Caroline Pierce O’Leary – and a nemesis, Michael Moriarty, an Irish charmer running from his own demons. In the crucible of the Oregon Trail anything could happen, and almost did. The couple took on flesh, blood and backstory, and resulted in my first published novel, “Westward Hope.” Caroline’s and Michael’s story continued in a series, “Western Dreams,” with two other novels and two related novellas. The series concludes this July 22 with “Redemption’s Hope.”

            From almost the beginning, I knew there couldn’t be just only one “Western Dreams” book. The series began with Caroline and Michael falling back into love on the storied Oregon Trail. As I mapped Caroline’s and Michael’s course, other characters grew up around them. Caroline’s best friend, Martha Harkness, and her husband Ben. Wagon master Pace Williams, hiding his secrets behind calm gray eyes. And Jenny Thatcher, the saloon girl turned wagon scout turned horse breeder. Jenny, who made her own definitions because there weren’t any for a woman like her. The secondary characters grew in the story and in my mind. Pace Williams got his own book, “Settler’s Hope,” when he decided to winter over in the Oregon Country instead of going back to St. Joe. After I wrote Pace’s story, complete with a fiery Irishwoman to love him, I knew it was time to finish Jenny’s.

            After escaping the saloon in St. Joseph, Mo., to warn Michael of the thugs threatening his life, Jenny Thatcher settles into a scouting role on the wagon train.  She’s a deeplt hurt young woman, scarred by rejection and the saloon life, and she keeps people at bay with sarcasm and swearing. Though “respectable” women mostly shun her, she finds full acceptance with Caroline and Martha. She grows closer to Caroline after they face the rigors of the trail, and when Caroline and Michael settle in a small Oregon Country hamlet, it’s a foregone conclusion that Jenny will light there too, but only for so long. She finds her God under Caroline’s and Michael’s tutelage. Though she and Michael start a horse farm, with her stallion Rebel as their first stud, she can’t forget the young Cheyenne brave she met on the trail, or the impact he had on her. With the flimsy excuse of paying his family back for her care, she leaves the ranch in Michael’s capable hands, and she and Rebel head back along the trail to find White Bear.

            White Bear has never forgotten her, the tall blonde he nicknamed “Blue Eyes.” Though she rejected his faith, he’s been praying for her for three years, and he longs to find her again and see if what he sensed was real. The burning of his village gives him the excuse to head out across the plains, looking for the guilty party, and searching for Jenny along the way.

            It’s a rambunctious young country and anything that could happen, does. Jenny rides through Taos, New Mexico, San Antonio and most of Texas, plus dusty little towns that barely have names. White Bear canvasses the Plains for his unknown enemy. And they collide with each other in New Orleans, where they have three blissful days before the forces of evil separate them again.

            Mix in two sets of villains and two orphaned children, a couple of real historical figures, an erudite miner-to-be, and a couple ordained by God to be together, though the world wants to keep them apart.

            So they make their own world.

            Though I knew Jenny from the first two books, I had to create White Bear as I went along, a young man who respects his people and their traditions, but has found, for better or worse, a different world in the white East. After five years in Baltimore, helping a wealthy merchant, he comes home with  a new awareness of where he doesn’t belong, but also a new awareness of where he does: Baltimore brought him to Jesus.  More than he wants Jenny on this earth, he wants to see her in Heaven, and he’s thrilled to find that after three years, she too serves the Lord. He’s a man of honor who won’t touch her until they’re married, and who gladly takes on her two adopted children. But there’s still more prairie to traverse, and more villains to outwit, before they can be together.

            And before I could move on.

            I finished the book to my satisfaction and thought it would let me go. Weren’t there other fields to explore? I’d never written about the Civil War or World War II. I’d never published a contemporary romance. Wasn’t it time to leave the West? As the saying goes, “Get out of Dodge”?

            Well, yes and no. I started a Revolutionary War novel and it’s now in draft form. It’s a respectable piece of work, nothing to be ashamed of, it checks all the boxes as we say, and at some point it will most likely be between covers.

            But what of the West? What of the Jenny people, her friends in Hall’s Mill, Oregon? What happened with Lucas and Sadie, the two orphans brought up by innkeeper Molly? What happened to Zebulun Wilkins, Caroline’s irrepressible student? What happened, or could happen, with the Jacksons, the two children of color in the settlement?

            Well, maybe I’ll just have to find out.

 

Author bio

Kathleen Bailey is a journalist and novelist with 40 years’ experience in the nonfiction, newspaper and inspirational fields. Born in 1951, she was a child in the 50s, a teen in the 60s, a young adult in the 70s and a young mom in the 80s. It’s been a turbulent, colorful time to grow up, and she’s enjoyed every minute of it and written about most of it.

Bailey is the author of the Western Dreams series. “Redemption’s Hope” joins “Westward Hope and “Settler’s Hope” to tell the story of people who settled out West. The books are published by Pelican/White Rose Publishing, a small firm out of New Mexico. In addition, she has published two related Western Dreams novellas with Pelican’s Christmas Extravaganza series.

While Bailey has always dreamed of publishing fiction, her two Arcadia Publishing projects, “Past and Present Exeter” and “New Hampshire War Monuments,” made her fall in love with nonfiction and telling real people’s stories. She lives in Raymond, New Hampshire.

 

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