The Widow's Walk
Page 24
“Do you want to take the pennant home with us?” he asked. “If so, I will order one of the crew to fetch it.”
Constance shook her head.
“No, my love,” she answered. “It has done its job, and we shan’t be needing it anymore.”
Garrett smiled at her.
“Then at last it’s time to go home,” he said.
However, as they began walking to the waiting carriage, a growing look of concern crossed Constance’s face. The change in her expression was not lost on him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“If you no longer go to sea,” she said, “then how will we live?”
To her surprise, Garrett let go a little laugh.
“Do you remember the hundred-thousand-dollar check Brooke gave us, that day out at Fairlawn?” he asked.
“Certainly.”
When Garrett again looked into Constance’s eyes, he smiled mischievously.
“Well,” he said, “before we took the leap of faith I cashed her check and converted all those funds into gold bars. Then I loaded them into the back of my Jeep and buried them in the woods behind Seaside. When I finished, I made the wish that those gold bars and Brooke’s letter were what I wanted to accompany me, should our leap of faith succeed.”
Constance gasped.
“My God, Garrett!” she said. “Do you really think that the gold came back with you?”
Garrett stopped walking and took her hands into his.
“I do indeed,” he answered.
“Then that means . . .”
“Yes,” Garrett said. “Before we took the leap, I did a little research. In today’s currency those gold bars are worth about three million dollars. We’re filthy rich!”
Pausing for a moment, he looked deeply into her eyes.
“How fine ye are to me, wife,” he said.
As she realized that at last all the promises had been made and all the pacts had been sealed, Constance smiled.
“And how fine ye are to me, husband,” she answered.
Just as the happy couple rounded the next corner, Eli spotted them and began happily running their way. Thinking, Garrett pursed his lips.
“You know,” he said to Constance, “there’s something that you must begin doing right now, or people like Eli will start to wonder about us.”
Constance gave him a quizzical look.
“And what might that be, my love?” she asked
Laughing a little, he put one arm through hers.
“You must start calling me Adam.”
P.S.
About the author
Meet Robert Barclay
About the book
The Story Behind the Book
Reading Group Discussion Questions
Read on
More from Robert Barclay
About the author
Meet Robert Barclay
AFTER GRADUATING from Colgate University with a B.A. in Economics and a minor in art history, Robert Barclay enjoyed a successful career in business, also serving as chairman of his industry-related consulting group. After selling his business and moving from upstate New York to Florida (and with some rather successful prodding by his wife), he was finally able to devote his full attention to something he had always wanted to do—write a book. Rob lives in sunny south Florida.
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About the book
The Story Behind the Book
WHEN I FIRST STARTED contemplating the premise for The Widow’s Walk I was enjoying what I like to call my “happy time.” Put another way, my “lazy time” might be a more accurate description. I had just finished the revisions for my very forgiving editor, Lucia Macro, on my previous book, More Than Words Can Say. I was not yet under contract for another book, I had no looming deadline, and my time was pretty much my own. Even so, in this business the wheels of creativity must be kept turning or they begin to rust, and so I soon found myself in search of a new premise for another book.
The Widow’s Walk became my third love story for HarperCollins, and I think its premise is an interesting one. Oddly enough, if I intentionally attempt to devise a premise for a book, nothing comes of it. But if I simply let the project rest on the “back burner” of my mind and I go about my normal business, an acceptable idea always seems to surface on its own.
This was certainly the case with The Widow’s Walk. After putting the previous book to bed, I began struggling to come up with a good premise for another one, and true to form I could not invent an idea that pleased me. And so I did what I always do and just tried to forget about it for a while. Although this rather illogical process works for me, it is not an altogether easy thing to do. Have you ever made a truly conscious effort to not think about something for days on end? Unless you must, I don’t recommend it!
About one month later my wife, Joyce, and I attended a family wedding in the Baltimore area. Joyce’s son Paul rented a house in which we could stay, accompanied by him and his wife, Katie, and their two children, Elizabeth and Allison, ages eleven and eight. When we arrived at the house it exceeded our expectations. It was located on a spacious, tree-lined street, and given that it was August the leaves were still lush and full.
A long veranda lay at the front of the house overlooking the street. The veranda held several wonderful old rocking chairs. During the week that we stayed there I began rising earlier than the others each day and then making a pot of strong coffee. Until I get my coffee each morning I can be a real bear, but that’s another story entirely.
Anyway, I would then take my morning joe out onto the porch, where I would sit all alone in one of the lovely old rockers and watch the occasional car and pedestrian pass by. Those mornings held a slight chill, as the sun came up and the birds began singing. It was such a lovely scene that I guess my subconscious mind began trying to somehow incorporate it as part of the premise for a new book.
As the mornings passed in this way, I began imagining how nice it would be to have such a large house as this situated by the ocean, where I could sit on my spacious veranda and watch the restless waves assault the shoreline anytime I chose. Such wishful thinking certainly wasn’t yet a full-blown book premise, but as I was soon to discover, the seed of one had at last taken root.
During our trip to that house, I noticed that several homes in the area had widow’s walks located on their roofs. I knew very little about widow’s walks, save that they were reputedly used by the wives of whaling captains to gaze out over the ocean in search of their husbands’ returning ships. Curious, one morning I left the porch and walked all around the house, trying to find whether this particular home had its own widow’s walk, but it did not.
The next morning when I took my coffee out onto the porch and sat in one of the generous rockers, for some reason I began wondering what it was like for these women as they waited for their husbands to return. How often would they climb up to their widow’s walks and search the ocean for their husbands’ ships? And even more curiously, from such great distances how could they possibly discern whether a ship was indeed his? For those of you who have read the book, it was from that unanswered question that the great red pennant Adam took along on his final voyage was born.
I also began wondering whether any of these women from the nineteenth century had perhaps ever fallen from her widow’s walk. Given the constant assaults by the elements, surely some of those widow’s walks had grown weak, and perhaps even rotten over time. What if a wife fell from her broken widow’s walk and crashed onto the shoreline? Would she survive the fall? I wondered.
Along with those questions, more soon arrived. And what of her husband? I wondered. What might he be doing at the precise time of his wife’s death? Was he half a world away? Might he be in danger himself? If he was, and if he died at the same precise moment as she, might that have some possible effect upon time itself? And if the fabric of time was in fact disturbed,
even for only an instant, might one of them die while the other perhaps remained caught between worlds? Might the “survivor” ever have any hope of escape? With such questions now rattling around inside my head, The Widow’s Walk was finally born.
Even so, the premise was not fully developed enough for me to begin writing. I still needed a hero, a heroine, and a supporting cast of characters. I also needed to do a good bit of research into the whaling era and the customs of those times, and to figure out how to save Constance, our heroine, from being trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead, in a way that would be both believable and understandable to the reader. While thinking in this vein I was soon reminded of Nostradamus, and of the many surprisingly accurate quatrains he wrote. After doing more research, I was able to find a quatrain that could be adapted to the story. Before I knew it the book seemed to be writing itself, the plot and people sometimes surprising me, but always reminding me that it was a pleasure knowing them.
It may also interest the reader to know that this book contains some real-life things from my own experience. Like Garrett and his father, Dale, my father also took me pheasant hunting. And like Dale’s dog, our best bird dog was also named Freckles. Soon I found additional facets from my own life creeping their way into the story, such as Garrett’s nieces, Allison and Elizabeth; Garrett’s enjoyment of Jack Daniel’s and good cigars mirrors my own.
In the end, writing a novel always boils down to the question, “What if . . . ?” What if some character behaves this way, instead of that; what if the pacing seems too fast or too slow; what if this person dies, or this person lives? That having been said, I never work from a collection of notes, or from some outline that has been etched in stone. Instead I have no set plan. I prefer to come to the computer each morning to find out what’s going to happen, rather than already knowing what’s going to happen. I cannot say that this is the recommended method of writing a novel, because I honestly don’t know. I only know that it’s my way of doing it, and it seems to work for me. The same can be said for the method (or perhaps I should say the lack of one) that garners my ideas.
If you have not already read The Widow’s Walk, then I hope that you will enjoy it. And if you have already read it, I trust that some of what you found here in “The Story Behind the Book” will provide additional insight into the various methods that produced it. In the end, The Widow’s Walk is proof positive that a premise for a novel need not spring only from overwrought and convoluted thought processes. It can also be born from something so simple and pleasurable as enjoying a cup of coffee on a southern veranda.
As I write this article, I am now again in my “happy time.” With the prospect of another premise for a novel now on the “back burner” of my mind, I am once again going about my regular daily business while waiting for another worthwhile idea to surface.
And that is quite all right with me.
Best regards and happy reading,
Robert Barclay
Reading Group Discussion Questions
1. The book makes great mention of a concept called “unconditional love.” What is your definition of unconditional love? Do you believe that you have ever loved someone unconditionally? And if so, do you still love him or her that way to this very day?
2. When Garrett and Constance visit Brooke Wentworth, Brooke is not at all what Garrett expects. And when she takes them into her secret study, they are amazed to find that she seems to have many of the answers to their questions. Would you have believed Brooke? If not, why not? And if you chose not to believe her, then what would you have done instead? Did Garrett and Constance really have any other choice but to accept Brooke’s pronouncements?
3. When Brooke first tells them that in order to break the grip of the mora mortis they must both risk their lives by re-creating Constance’s death, Garrett is appalled. Would you have had enough faith in your own brand of unconditional love to take the leap like they did?
4. Constance tells Garrett on more than one occasion that despite all of the world’s advancements and the great gains made in women’s rights, she still prefers her world of 1840, and she unashamedly gives her reasons. As a modern-day woman do you ever long to live in a more genteel time, when things were less harried and complicated? Or are you the sort who much prefers the many advantages of the here and now, despite how hectic life has become?
5. Constance is the wife of a whaling captain who is sometimes gone at sea for as long as two years at a time. Could you abide such an existence? Would your love be strong enough for you to wait faithfully for him, while every day you hoped and prayed that he might soon return? Despite the customs of those days, was it too much for a husband to ask of his wife? Have you ever been in such a situation, perhaps with a husband who is serving in the military, or whose job requires that he be gone for long stretches at a time?
6. When Jack Rackham insults Adam, Adam immediately challenges Jack to a duel to the death with pistols. Despite that dueling was an accepted custom, was Adam right to insist upon his satisfaction in this way? Was it fair to Constance? If you had been a woman living during those times, do you think that you could have accepted your husband’s need to do such a thing, even if it meant possibly losing him forever?
7. At the end of the book it is revealed that Garrett Richmond is really Adam Canfield reincarnated. Do you believe in reincarnation? Have you ever felt like you are the reincarnation of some other person who once wandered the earth before your time?
8. What do you believe will become of Garrett and Constance? Do you suppose that they will “live happily ever after” in the past? Or will their knowledge of the future cause them to regret leaving that time? Have you ever felt that you might prefer living in the past, and if so, why?
Read on
More from Robert Barclay
FOR MORE BOOKS by Robert Barclay check out:
MORE THAN WORDS CAN SAY
Chelsea Enright never expected to inherit her grandmother’s lakeside cottage deep in the Adirondacks—a serene getaway that had been mysteriously closed up decades ago. This is no simple bequest, however, because when Chelsea finds her grandmother’s World War II diaries, she’s stunned to discover that they hold secrets she never suspected . . . and they have the power to turn her own life upside down.
Even more surprising is the compelling presence of local doctor Brandon Yale, and Chelsea soon finds her “short stay” has stretched into the entire summer. She cannot put this cottage and her family’s past behind her easily—and the more she learns about the woman her grandmother truly was, the more Chelsea’s own life begins to change . . . and nothing will ever be the same again.
IF WISHES WERE HORSES
Devastated by the senseless deaths of his wife and son at the hands of a drunk driver, Wyatt Blaine remains unable to forgive or to love again. Searching for a sense of peace, he decides to revive his late wife’s equine therapy program for troubled teens at the Blaine family ranch.
But then Wyatt’s pastor asks for the impossible—for Wyatt to meet with Gabby Powers, the widow of the man responsible for the accident, and accept her troubled son, Trevor, into the program. Wyatt reluctantly agrees.
To his great surprise, Wyatt finds himself drawn to Gabby. But to heal completely, Wyatt and Gabby must first overcome the common tragedy that separates them and learn the true nature of forgiveness. And only by conquering these seeming impossibilities might their hearts become free to love each other.
Also by Robert Barclay
More Than Words Can Say
If Wishes Were Horses
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE WIDOWS’S WALK. Copyright © 2014 by Robert Newcomb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-221880-3
EPub Edition March 2014 ISBN 9780062218827
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