Authors: Gen LaGreca
A Dream of Daring
Copyright
© 2013 by Genevieve LaGreca
Available
in ebook and print formats from Amazon and other booksellers.
A Dream of Daring
ISBN
paperback: 978-0-97445796-3
Library
of Congress Control Number: 2012952967
Published
by Winged Victory Press
Cover
by Elizabeth Watson, graphic designer
Clothing
on the cover courtesy of the Gentleman’s Emporium
Edited
by Katharine O’Moore-Klopf of KOK Edit
Printed
in the United States of America. First edition 2013.
This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons is purely coincidental.
Quality
discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For information,
please contact Winged Victory Press.
Email:
[email protected]
Also
available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions,
NOBLE
VISION
, a novel
by Gen LaGreca
Praise for
A Dream of Daring
“ . . . thought-provoking . . . [the tale] intrigues and should
attract readers interested in historical fiction set in the antebellum South.”
–
Booklist
“Throughout the narrative, LaGreca masterfully creates metaphors
to explore her key themes. . . .
A Dream of Daring
is suspenseful. The
crime at the center of the narrative will keep the reader guessing until the
final revelation. . . . LaGreca’s exploration of how people respond to, and
sometimes reject, change and progress is relevant for all generations.”
—
ForeWord Reviews
"Old ways do not fade into the night quietly.
A Dream of
Daring
is a novel set on the dawn of the industrial revolution. Tom
Edmunton builds a proto-tractor, and tries to bring a world of change about
Louisiana with his invention. But the whiplash is hard, as a loved one is
killed, and his invention is stolen. [As Tom is] faced with a crossroads and
the charms of multiple women,
A Dream of Daring
is an enticing blend of
mystery and romance, much recommended reading."
—
Midwest Book Review
“I thoroughly enjoyed the plot twists and turns, the passionate
inter-racial romance, the delicious rebellion against convention, and the
challenge to subjugation of all kinds.”
—
Marsha Familaro Enright
, President, Reason, Individualism
and Freedom Institute
“Grab your seat for a tumbling ride back to the high-stakes,
hoop-flying, tumultuous time when cotton was king. Gen LaGreca takes you for a
jaunt in her carriage through fields of fragrant words, luscious descriptions,
and panoramic views. Hang on as the road gets bumpy, with zesty characters
stirring up the dirt and sudden plot twists swerving you onto uncharted paths.
Wait, the hooves have left the ground and you’re airborne till the end. You’ll
come back excited, enchanted, and enlightened.”
—
Barry Farber
, host of
The Barry Farber Show
and
author of
Cocktails with Molotov
“This is a heroic and inspiring novel that’s also packed with rich
insights, lessons—and warnings—for today. It is a highly potent cocktail of
psychology, philosophy, and politics with a generous pour of economic history,
not to mention romance, violence, and money shaken into the mix.”
—
John Blundell
, author of
Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait
of the Iron Lady
and
Ladies for Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in
American History
AWARDS FOR
A DREAM OF DARING
Finalist in Regional Fiction
2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Finalist in Multicultural Fiction
2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR'S FIRST
NOVEL,
“The novel deals with some of the most serious issues of the day,
lending the story an immediacy and vibrancy. The author’s prose is polished and
professional.”
—
Writer’s Digest
magazine
“. . . A well-researched . . . sensitively written . . . inherently
captivating novel of suspense,
Noble Vision
is very highly recommended
reading.”
—
Midwest Book Review
“This is a beautifully written book! . . . For a first novel, this
is a marvelous achievement.”
—
Midwest Book Awards
“The mounting conflicts of this lovingly sculpted first novel will
keep you turning pages late into the night.”
—
Laissez Faire Books
ForeWord
Magazine
Book of the Year Finalist in General Fiction
Writer’s Digest
13th Annual
International Book Awards
Honorable Mention in Mainstream Fiction
Midwest Book Awards
Finalist in General Fiction
Illinois Women’s Press Association Fiction
Contest
Second Place
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The
research for this novel began as a daunting task but became one of the most
exciting intellectual adventures I’ve ever had. The books, websites, and
institutions that made every aspect of the antebellum period and the early
industrial age come alive for me are too numerous to list. I’ll settle for
mentioning just a few noteworthy moments in my study.
In
Dearborn, Michigan, the kind people at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield
Village were most helpful. At Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial
Library, I will always remember holding in my white-gloved hands the crisp
pages of the actual plantation journals of a cotton planter in the 1850s. I was
also aided by the rich array of artifacts and documents, as well as the
friendly, knowledgeable staffs at the Cabildo, the Historic New Orleans
Collection, the Rural Life Museum, and the various Louisiana plantations that
are preserving history—the Cottage, Rosedown, Butler Greenwood, Oakley,
Frogmore, Laura, and others. I’m especially grateful to Helen Williams, the
director of the West Feliciana Historical Society Museum, for patiently
answering my questions and directing me to many useful resources.
The
following people read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions: Steve
Radow, James Peron, Bailey Norwood, Marsha Enright, and Sara Pentz. My superb
editor, Katharine O’Moore-Klopf of KOK Edit, was indispensable in giving the
manuscript its final polish.
My
enduring gratitude goes to Edith Packer for being the first person to suggest
to me that I could—and should—write fiction. It has since become the passion of
my life.
The Meddler
But do you
dream of daring—
Cyrano
I do dream of
daring . . .
From Act 1
Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond Rostand
Thomas Edmunton was out
of step with the world around him.
He sat in an open
carriage, observing the fields just off the road. In his mind he was upturning
the dormant winter soil and cultivating the land in ways never before imagined.
His body tensed with a nervous energy, as if he were ready to jump out of the carriage
and prepare the earth for a spring unlike any other. There were new methods to
explore, discoveries to make, changes to transform this
countryside . . . and the world. The vision of what could
be—and one day
would
be—didn’t give him a moment’s peace.
But his tailcoat and top
hat told of a different purpose that would occupy him that early February
afternoon. Instead of farming the dual fertile fields of the land and his
imagination, he was in a caravan of coaches climbing up a hill on a plantation
to a funeral for its mistress, Polly Barnwell.
Tom saw the big house of
the Crossroads Plantation shrinking in the distance as the horses trotted past
an iron gate and into a clearing. When the carriage stopped, he jumped out to
assist the two women traveling with him. He extended his hand to help Charlotte
Barnwell descend. Then he turned to her daughter, Rachel. Before the young
beauty could step down of her own accord, Tom placed his hands around her tiny
waist, swung her through the air, and planted her on the ground with the
lighthearted air of lifting a ballerina in a dance. The gesture seemed
incongruous with the women’s voluminous black dresses and long veils, the
funeral attire of Louisiana’s gentry in 1859.
“Why, Tom, you have the
wildest eyes,” said Rachel.
He had reason to have
wild eyes, he thought, but he mustn’t think about that now.
“It’s downright indecent
to look so happy at a funeral!” she whispered.
He realized he was
smiling, almost laughing, and quickly subdued his expression. He kissed her
hand and explained simply, if not completely. “I couldn’t help but notice how
lovely you look.”
“Be mindful of the
occasion, Mr. Edmunton.”
Rachel lowered her head
and peered up at him in the gently reproachful way that he knew well. Despite
her protest, the red-haired belle he was courting smiled at his attentions. As
his hand lingered on hers, their eyes locked. But her smile faded to
disappointment when he suddenly dropped her hand and his attention moved to an
older man approaching them. The man raised his arms to embrace Rachel.
“Hello, darlin’,” said
Senator Wiley Barnwell to his daughter.
Rachel kissed her
father’s cheek.
The senator then bowed to
his wife in greeting. “Charlotte, my dear.”
“Hello, Wiley.” Mrs.
Barnwell smiled at her husband. She was a woman whose age was difficult to
guess. Her face made her look younger, while her clothing added to her
forty-five years. She possessed the same smooth skin and vibrant red hair as
her twenty-one-year-old daughter. But her dress, cut high to her chin, and her
braid, coiled at the back of her neck like a snake ready to bite anyone who
might dare unravel it, weren’t only for mourning. They were typical of her
normal style. “Did you take care of the things you came here to do for the
sale, Wiley?” she asked her husband.
“Yes, dear. In fact, I
took care of
more
than I’d hoped to.”
Tom knew the senator had
inherited the Crossroads and was here reviewing the plantation records with an
eye to selling the place, but the pointed way in which Barnwell looked at his
wife seemed to imply something more.
“My boy,” the senator
said, turning to Tom, “I want to thank you for accompanying the women, so I
could come earlier and tend to a few matters.”
“My pleasure, Senator.”
Tom bowed his head to Greenbriar’s most distinguished citizen.
The senator’s pale
complexion and thinning white hair suggested a mellowness of age beyond his
fifty-five years. But his eyebrows remained dark, bushy, and arching, as if
warning the world that he was still strong-willed—even intimidating—when the
moment called for it. His tall, solid build enhanced his air of authority. He
looked like the town elder that he was.
“Senator, please forgive
me for asking at a time like this, but did you—”
“Now, don’t worry, Tom,”
Barnwell said kindly. “I got it here just fine. I took right good care of it.”
“Golly, Tom, I thought
you might be thinking about something else at Aunt Polly’s funeral.” Rachel
pouted.
Tom was undeterred. “If I
may ask, sir, where is it?”
The senator pointed
through the trees to the big house and its dependencies down the hill. “It’s in
the old carriage house. Safe as anything could ever be.”
Wiley Barnwell gave Tom a
reassuring look, then extended his curved arm to his wife. Charlotte hooked her
black-gloved hand through it, and the couple walked to the ceremony. In like
fashion, Tom escorted Rachel across the grassy field drilled with headstones
that was the Barnwell family cemetery.
Tom walked handsome and
soldier-tall in his formal clothes, with a poise and self-confidence beyond his
twenty-six years. Only his face revealed his youth in the open, innocent way he
looked at people, as if he expected the world to be as forthright with him as
he was with it. His blond hair and blue eyes reflected the Irish-English
lineage of his ancestors, who had arrived in Louisiana sixty years ago to
obtain a land grant from the Spanish colonial government and, in time, to amass
three thousand acres of wilderness on the east bank of the great Mississippi
River north of Baton Rouge, transforming it into one of the richest cotton
plantations in the country. A fire in Tom’s eyes and a tenseness in his body
gave a vitality to his figure even when he was at rest.
He glanced at Rachel on
his arm as she greeted some of the guests. Her ivory skin and red hair provided
a bright contrast to the black mourning bonnet framing her face. Her comely
features—the pursed lips, the small pointed nose, and the crystal blue
eyes—reminded Tom of the serene beauties he had seen in paintings. He liked the
contrast between the pristine, classical beauty to be gazed at from afar and
the sensuous creature she could be in his arms.
Another eligible planter
in the group was intrigued with Rachel Barnwell. Nash Nottingham, twenty-eight,
walked toward the couple. His lackluster brown hair and eyes were like a
sedative offered after a bracing dose of Tom’s brilliant gold hair and flaming
blue eyes. Nash gave a brief nod to Tom, then planted a protracted kiss on
Rachel’s hand.
“My, what a beautiful
ring!” Rachel gaped at a large sapphire on Nash’s finger.
“Oh, that? Just a trinket
from André Benoir
in Paris.”
“How lovely to shop at
such an exclusive place.”
While the two chatted,
Tom noted the showy gold carvings on Nash’s walking cane and the large diamonds
on his watch fob, also likely purchased on one of the wearer’s frequent trips
to Paris. These objects possessed a brilliance that the owner’s face lacked.
The fashion statement that was Nash Nottingham left Tom with a vivid memory of
what the man wore, rather than of what he said or did. The hopeful planter
followed Rachel as she walked with Tom. When the couple stopped at the black
crescent of guests gathered before a closed casket, Nash positioned himself on
Rachel’s other side.
The preacher placed his
notes on a podium. His simple black suit and string tie were humble compared
with the finery of Greenbriar’s most affluent citizens.
Carriages tended by black
coachmen formed a caravan against the stone walls of the cemetery. On the
sidelines the slaves from the Crossroads Plantation clustered in a large group;
they had been given time off from their tasks to say farewell to their
mistress. Tom noticed a white face among them, a stocky man with suspicious
eyes, a short tangle of hair, and a frown that seemed to be his natural
expression. His frontiersman’s coat of buckskin with long fringes set him apart
from both the aristocrats and the bondsmen. He appeared to belong to neither
camp, thought Tom, figuring he must be Bret Markham, the overseer, whom he had
heard the senator praise for his work at the Crossroads. But something about
the man made Tom uneasy as his eyes stopped on the bulges under Markham’s coat
made by the whip and gun that he had brought to the funeral.
In the custom of the
gentry, Polly Barnwell’s body lay in a body-shaped cast-iron casket, adorned
with a wreath of wrought iron to symbolize permanence. A hole had been dug for
the coffin in front of a white marble tombstone. The statue carved for Polly’s
grave site was of a little girl holding a flower basket, commemorating the
deceased’s well-known love for children. This love, the townspeople had often
said, was intensified by the untimely death of her husband, Henry Barnwell,
twenty-four years earlier, too soon in the marriage for Polly to have borne her
own offspring.
Tom restlessly turned to
Senator Barnwell, standing behind him. “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me
where the old carriage house is?”
“Tom! How could you?”
whispered Rachel. “The pastor’s about to begin!”
Nash looked pleased at
her reproach.
But the senator smiled
patiently. “I forgot, my boy. You’ve never been here before, have you? It’s the
red building with the white door. That’s where I put it.” He pointed down the
hill. “See?”
Through the tangle of oak
branches on the hillside, Tom saw the sprawling big house and a cluster of
smaller structures around it. His eyes stopped on the building Barnwell
described.
“I see it, yes. Thank
you, sir, for taking good care of it,” Tom whispered.
Rachel poked him as the
pastor began the service.
“My dear brethren, let us
live a life of honor and fear not our final day of reckoning,” said the
clergyman. “And let us honor Polly Barnwell, who lived such a blessed life and
to whom we must now bid farewell.”
As the pastor recited a
local version of an ancient prayer, Tom seemed unaware of the lowered heads
around him. His head was raised, his face filled with hope.
Lord,
make me an instrument to sow good.
Where
there is despair, let me sow hope;
Where
there is darkness, let me sow light;
Where
there is sadness, let me sow joy.
Lord,
make me an instrument to sow good.
Where
there is ignorance, let me sow wisdom;
Where
there is strife, let me sow calm;
Where
there is death, let me sow life.
The words seemed to hold
a special meaning for Tom. His eyes again traveled through the trees to the red
building with the white door. Was the latch closed tightly? Was the item inside
safely out of sight of any curious glances? What would
he
sow with it? he
wondered, as Wylie Barnwell took the podium to give the eulogy.
Greenbriar’s state
senator and prosperous planter walked imperially. With a rich baritone voice
that matched his imposing presence, he gave a moving account of Polly’s kind
and generous nature. He described how his sister-in-law’s slaves loved her and
cared for her during her long illness and ultimate passing from consumption.
Tom noticed many of Polly’s slaves weeping, giving truth to the senator’s
words. He also heard the hushed sounds of Rachel and her mother crying near
him.
“My brother would have
been proud to know that after his untimely death, his young wife confidently
seized the reins of the plantation he had recently purchased. With not the firm
hand of a man but the gentle touch of her gender, she worked the rich soil on
the bluffs, the great gift from the silt deposits of the mighty Mississippi, to
produce some of the finest cotton crops in the country—and the world. Now,
twenty-four years later, the Crossroads Plantation that she so lovingly tended
is her gift to pass on to a new owner.”
The heir to the
plantation looked directly at Ted Cooper, a prominent planter in the area. Tom
knew that the senator hoped Cooper would purchase the place. At a youthful
fifty, Cooper stood out in the crowd. He had the sun-bleached hair, lean frame,
and ruddy complexion of a planter still active at his work and looking for new
opportunities. With sharply intelligent brown eyes and a shrewd half-smile, he
subtly nodded at Barnwell in response.
Tom noticed that Bret
Markham was also looking at Cooper. The overseer appeared uneasy, as if he
himself were at a crossroads, with his fate hanging on a new owner’s pleasure.
Tom’s thoughts again
wandered down the hill: Was
he
at a crossroads too? he wondered.
The preacher ended the
ceremony with the same thought he had used to start it: “Remember, my brethren,
what you do today, you are judged by in eternity. Live a life of honor and fear
not your final day of reckoning.”
Tom wondered if he would
reach the reckoning he sought: recognition and reward for his work on a dream
that was the reason he lived. He so keenly yearned for such a day that he was
unaware of the evasive eyes and lowered faces of others who heard the
preacher’s words, planters who shot somber glances at the slaves.
Four field hands gently
lowered the casket into the ground. The guests gathered flowers that had been
brought there and placed on a nearby table, and then they filed past the grave
and dropped the blooms on the casket in a final farewell.
Rachel didn’t throw all
of her flowers on her aunt’s coffin. She kept a few and offered some of them to
her mother. “For Leanna,” she said.
Charlotte shook her head.
“You go ahead, dear. I’ll wait for you in the carriage. The air here makes me
ill.”
Tom accompanied Rachel to
the smallest headstone in the burial grounds. It was sculpted in the form of a
winged baby kneeling with her head bent and her hands covering her face. The
cherub seemed to be crying at a sad turn of fate. When Rachel placed her flowers
at the statue’s feet, Tom read the inscription on the stone:
Leanna.
Stillborn daughter of Charlotte and Wiley Barnwell.