Ride the Fire (Blakewell/Kenleigh Family Trilogy, #3)
Page 35
And Bethie found herself blinking back tears.
* * *
Nicholas allowed the children to visit with their mother for a few more minutes, then nodded to Emma Rose and his parents, who shepherded them from the room.
“Come, children. It’s time for breakfast, and your mother must rest.”
The door shut, and he and Bethie were alone again.
He stroked her hair, grateful for her safe delivery and so relieved that her travail was over. It had not been the easy birth he’d prayed for. Each time a pain had gripped her, he’d felt beset by guilt and so bloody helpless. So it had been when each of their children had been born.
“You have made me a father seven times now. I’ve no words fit to thank you for your sacrifice or the gift you’ve given me, but I do have this.”
He took her right hand and slipped the ring on her third finger.
She glanced down at her finger, and her eyes went wide, her breath leaving her lungs in a rush. “Oh, Nicholas! This is so . . . beautiful!”
“’Tis a blue diamond from India.” He’d had his man in London searching for years to find a stone the color of her eyes. The center stone was surrounded by glittering white diamonds, the gold band decorated with filigree in the shape of roses.
She looked up at him, clearly astonished, her eyes brimming with tears. “I never imagined such a gift.”
He knew that was true, for she had never once asked him to buy her jewels or gowns or frippery of any kind. “I am glad it pleases you.”
“I shall treasure it always. Thank you.”
“’Tis but a trifle, a symbol of my love.” He looked down into her eyes, struggling to find the right words. “If I could, I would gather the stars from the sky and lay them at your feet. Your love has been my salvation.”
She gave him a quavering smile, a tear spilling down her cheek. “You have cared for me, protected me, given me a home, children, a family. Never once in these ten years have you hurt me, shamed me, been unfaithful, or given me reason to doubt you. You have the keepin’ of my heart, Nicholas, and you always will.”
Outside the window, the sun began to rise.
* * *
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Author’s Note
The idea for this novel came to me long before I started writing novels. I was sitting in a college history class and read in my textbook a short paragraph about the Paxton Boys, who had marched on Philadelphia in February 1764. They were enraged over the apparent indifference of the Pennsylvania government toward the brutality they had endured during the French and Indian War and the subsequent Indian revolt known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. My textbook called this event “the first American civil war” and gave a few lines of information about it. I had never heard of it before and began to gather research on it, thinking that one day I might write a novel and want to include it.
The results of that research appear in this book. While this is a work of fiction, I have tried very hard to remain true to the spirit of the terrible year of 1763, when the frontier, already soaked in blood from the French and Indian War, exploded into further violence. The events occurred generally as described, with one important exception. In this novel, the Paxton Boys’ march on Philadelphia occurs in late September 1763, five months earlier than it truly happened. This is the result of my need to condense history so that I could fit both the siege at Fort Pitt and the Paxton Boys’ Rebellion into one story.
Although I did take some small liberties with the siege at Fort Pitt—notably the grenade attack outside the West Ravelin—I have Douglas McGregor, educator at the Fort Pitt Museum, to thank for the fact that I was able to use actual soldiers’ diaries to reconstruct many day-by-day events of the siege and place Nicholas at the heart of them. I have used the names of real people in many instances—those of wounded and slain soldiers, for example—and have drawn from old census records for names common in Western Pennsylvania at that time. Captain Simeon Écuyer and Colonel Henry Bouquet are both historical figures, and Captain Écuyer did, indeed, order barking dogs to be shot. This alone qualifies him for infamy.
But far worse and unforgivably, he gave blankets from the smallpox hospital at the fort to Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee, two Delaware chiefs, as gifts—the first documented instance of biological warfare on the North American continent. While historians generally believe the blankets had no effect, there was an outbreak of smallpox among Indian people in the Ohio Valley later that year. American Indians have not forgotten this.
The history of our nation is complicated and multifaceted, and the violence of 1763 has had an impact on our culture today. It helped to define annihilation as the means European settlers would use to deal with indigenous people. Further, it drove a wedge between the American colonists and Great Britain. When the Scots-Irish frontiersmen of Paxton next took up arms and marched together, it was to fight beside the citizens of Philadelphia against the British in the war for American independence.
Those who’ve read the “author’s cut” of Carnal Gift will notice discrepancies between Carnal Gift and Ride the Fire. The version of Carnal Gift that was first published had a hundred pages cut in order to meet the original publisher’s maximum page length. The entire Nicholas plotline was removed from that book. In the midst of writing Ride the Fire at the time, I adjusted Ride the Fire accordingly.
When I got the rights back to Carnal Gift, I decided to self-publish the story as I had written it—a much better version of the story, in my opinion. Only when I sat down to work on edits of the manuscript to Ride the Fire for this reissue did I realize that the version of Carnal Gift that is currently available is now out of sync with Ride the Fire. In Carnal Gift, Nicholas is taken captive after the battle at Fort Necessity in 1754, and Jamie Blakewell, the hero from Carnal Gift, is also present. In Ride the Fire, Jamie isn’t present, and Nicholas is taken in 1756. In both stories, Nicholas is captured in the same way and suffers the same torment. Only the time line and the issue of Jamie’s presence is different.
I considered revising Ride the Fire to bring it into alignment with Carnal Gift, but when I considered what that would entail, I realized the best thing I could do is to leave the story intact. I believe readers now have the best versions of both novels. And isn’t that what readers truly deserve?
Berkley Sensation books by Pamela Clare
RIDE THE FIRE
The I-Team series
EXTREME EXPOSURE
HARD EVIDENCE
UNLAWFUL CONTACT
NAKED EDGE
BREAKING POINT
The MacKinnon’s Rangers series
SURRENDER
UNTAMED
DEFIANT