Twisted River Read online

  Table of contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ~~~

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Twisted

  River

  ~

  Kelsey Gietl

  Purple Mask Publishing

  St. Charles, Missouri

  Twisted River

  Copyright © 2018 by Kelsey Gietl.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the author.

  For information, contact:

  Purple Mask Publishing

  2025 Zumbehl Rd, Ste 33

  St. Charles, MO 63303

  This is a work of historical fiction. References to real events and locales are only intended to provide a sense of authenticity. All other characters, places, incidents, and dialogue are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Quotations within this book are sourced from the following public domain works:

  All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare

  The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9991105-3-9

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-9991105-4-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961907

  First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my grandparents, George and Amelia,

  and a 70-year love story that inspires me every day.

  Thank you for everything.

  I won’t forget to smile.

  As always, thank you to my readers. Each and every one of you is incredible—never forget that.

  To my husband, Scott, and our children. Thank you for continuing to encourage my crazy dreams and providing me with the best happy ending a woman could ask for.

  To my parents, Ken and Ruth, and my in-laws, Mark and Sharon. I am so blessed to have you! Thank you for your constant support!

  To my critique partners: Mary, Susan, and Tanya, for listening to me obsess about historical facts, character arcs, and the perils of marketing. God gave me a gift in each of you!

  To my beta readers: Heather and Katherine. You rock!

  To my online international author groups. I still find it amazing that we found one another oceans apart. Technology is truly magical.

  And most importantly, to my Lord and creator, Jesus Christ.

  Without Him, none of this could be.

  ~~~

  February 22, 1912

  Fontaine, Hampshire, England

  Good riddance, Beatrix Archer thought as she watched her husband’s labored breathing strain against his ribcage. Twenty years she had given to this sad infuriating man—the entirety of her twenties, into her thirties, the most fertile years of her life. Somehow he loved her, a complete absurdity. She had done nothing to encourage him to do so.

  Laurence’s chest rattled from the fluid lodged in his lungs, slowly reaching up to strangle the man whom it seemed none but she could ever cause to cower. It would not be long now. Within an hour, perhaps two, he would be gone and she a widow. Thank heavens her slender figure was even more comely draped in black.

  Admittedly, she had often pictured this day—not his death of course, but rather the freedom it would bring. She sensed it then as a great relief, never the reality of a ragged man, pale-faced and gaunt. Even so, there was still a sense of victory in it.

  “Bea.” The dying man exhaled in barely a whisper, but it echoed in the stale silence of the room. As though drawn by a string, she moved towards him, only a final sense of propriety arranging her on the bed beside him. He cradled her palm inside his.

  “Bea,” Laurence said again. A strangled cough erupted, and his grip slipped momentarily from her hand. Once he recovered, he gave her fingers a gentle squeeze to match his thin smile. “Even after all our miserable days, I would not redo a one.”

  Which day would you redo? It was the question he always asked someone when he met them, the question he believed could determine any person’s worth.

  “Not a one?” she asked. “Not even—”

  “No. Not even then.” His skin grew colder against hers, and fear lined his gaze. “I would not change the life you gave me. It was a good life even if it was not one we both wanted. And yet …” Another round of deep coughs emitted. He turned his face into the pillow and she realized he wanted to spare her even now.

  There was no need. Compassion was a cruel friend long lost. She had become hollow nearly fifteen years ago.

  “And yet ...” He continued slower this time, more calculated with his words. “What we have is based on deception. Yours. Mine. Ours. It is perhaps my only regret.”

  “It was at your insistence that we bury the truth.” Tossing his hand off, she rose to her feet. “I do not bear the blame alone.”

  Laurence shook his head, the motion little more than a thrust of his chin. “No; however, the time will come—the time has come—to tell the girls. Promise me you will.”

  With a deep scowl, she retreated, a hand high on either hip. It was a battle stance he would be all too familiar with. “Why must I? Even now you try to mar my own daughters’ opinions of me?”

  “You have done that yourself.”

  The terrible thing about his words wasn’t that they hurt her—for they didn’t—or even that they were false—for they weren’t—it was that he said them without an edge of malice. There was a soft peace in his voice and a simple hope. The faith that she could air the remains of their soiled past and from the destruction form a new life with their daughters.

  Except it was far too late for that.

  Her daughters were incapable of understanding the sacrifices she made to obtain the life she wanted or the lengths she would go to maintain it. Vicious rumors would spread like wildfire, a blaze that would burn their family name to ash. It was one sacrifice a young widow could not afford. She would not lose everything for a past which, like her husband, was about to be long dead and buried.

  Laurence’s golden eyes reached out to meet her blue-grey ones, a plea in his stare as well as his voice. “Promise me, Bea. When they ask, you will tell them everything.”

  Promise me, Bea. His pet name for her. He had only used it a handful of times over their years together: on their wedding night, when their daughters were born, and the night they moved from London. She stood over him, full of fury that even now he dared try to control her
with it.

  “Very well,” she spat. She would fulfill his dying wish, but on her terms. “Maggie and Tena will know the truth, but only if they ask.”

  His fingers reached for hers, and she focused on those shaking fingers rather than Laurence’s wondering voice. “I love you, Beatrix. Did you know? At the end of my world, I still love you.”

  She knew. Only there was always someone he loved more, and she had always resented him for it.

  By the time Laurence Archer drew his last breath, he was alone. His wife lounged in the Winchesters’ drawing room playing whist and sipping wine in a toast to the end of her worries. Her husband had taken their secret to his grave, and her daughters would never even think to ask.

  Part One

  ~~~

  Upstream

  ONE

  July 5, 1912

  St. Louis, Missouri – Five months later

  Men certainly were a baffling species.

  Leave it to a man to drive the blade when a woman was already at her lowest. Leave it to a man to still consider a lady enticing when she appeared anything but.

  Maggie Archer wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, flicking sordid saliva to the pathway after heaving her minimal breakfast into the bushes of Shaw’s Botanical Garden. Meanwhile, the dark-haired man in the boater hat continued to openly eye her from across the path. Yet another lout anxious to—as last week’s Billy Cranzton suggested right before her heel not so innocently collided with his shin—“instill his wisdom in her.”

  If she had a nugget of wisdom for every man who ever offered, she would be more intelligent than Sir Isaac Newton.

  Ignoring the man, she quickened her steps. Even at eleven in the morning, St. Louis’s summer sun blazed against the deep black mourning cloth which had draped her shoulder to ankle since her father’s passing last February. Sweat slicked her shoulder blades, pooling along her spine where her dress quickly soaked up the moisture.

  Summers in her English hometown of Fontaine were never this stifling. Even her wide-brimmed garden hat couldn’t diminish the effects of rising humidity, and she braced herself against the nearest tree to keep from fainting. That was her fault for considering water and a biscuit a suitable breakfast. But, confound it, her appetite was non-existent and an extra hour’s sleep won out. Exhaustion had been a constant companion as of late, often from chores she wouldn’t have batted an eye at a month ago.

  Her stomach flipped, sending her dry heaving into the grass. Hands pressed to her middle, her insides convulsed with the strain of expelling food that wasn’t there. With each heave, her hard little lump of abdomen swayed, proof in the pudding that she finally took her usual seditious antics one step too far.

  At last the nausea relented, leaving her throat raw. Her chest strained against her corset, swollen breasts pinched within ties already severely loosened. She shouldn’t even be wearing it, but what was she to do—go without any support? That would be a scandal unto itself.

  Although, truly, what did another indignity matter now? Her horrid reality already screamed like a street newsie shouting about Titanic.

  The girl who never wanted children was with child. Not merely with child, but unmarried and uncertain even as to which man was the father.

  She had entertained three men in the same number of weeks, the last two within twenty-four hours of each other and forty-eight hours after Titanic’s sinking. Calculating from the time passed since her last cycle, the most realistic culprit was half a world away in London. Derby, the smooth-talking, charming, second footman who had seen the inner workings of almost every one of Lady Alexander’s maids, and she had been no exception. Despite a physique that stoked her fires, he was as capable of being a suitable father as Beatrix Archer had been a caring mother to her, which was to say not at all.

  Yet, while Derby fit the bill based on timing, Maggie couldn’t discredit two other possibilities: Reuben Radford, whom she met in their hometown cemetery on May Day two years past, and Lloyd Halverson, Reuben’s archenemy whom she slept with for information that, in hindsight, should have been left deeply buried. After that night on the steamship Höllenfeuer, everything escalated in a rapid course of events that now left her with secrets of her own.

  Secrets, secrets, are no fun. Secrets, secrets, hurt someone.

  A mere childhood rhyme and yet, a line never rang truer for Maggie’s life. Every secret sought, every truth forced, had gained nothing except heartache and ruin. After Reuben explained his past, he nearly died in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. After her sister, Tena, revealed her clandestine relationship with German-born Charles Kisch to their anti-German mother, it resulted in both sisters’ dismissal from the Archer family. What damage might be done when Maggie told her sister she was expecting or informed Reuben that he might be a father?

  It was why she regularly paid for shoddy hotel rooms where she slept alone despite being the conquest challenge of the city. There was a time not too long ago when she would have given in simply to break her mind free of life. Every dinner or moving picture or dance hall would have led back to those same hotels only not alone and definitely not for sleeping. She would have lavished in the intimacy, and he would have praised her for walking away in the morning.

  All she desired now was undetermined paternity for her baby.

  If Reuben even so much as suspected she was with child, his honor would demand they marry. Despite being a complete mismatch, he would remain in an unrequited marriage exactly like her father. He would shower her and their baby with love she could never reciprocate.

  Swiping her sleeve across her sweat-baked brow, she opened the door to the Linnean House. A long rectangular building, it contained botanical specimens ranging from citrus trees to ferns. Nearly floor length windows drew excess heat into the greenhouse—necessary for the plants to thrive, but also able to send her into radical sickness.

  “Where did you wander off to?” Tena asked, making her way to the door. She pushed damp honeynut tendrils from her face. “Are you feeling ill again?”

  Maggie waved her off, wishing desperately that she could undo the buttons at her wrists and scrunch her sleeves past the elbows. “Felt a bit faint from the heat, so I fancied a walk into the shade. I’m afraid I’m not yet used to the weather here.”

  Tena frowned. “I heard you vomiting in the toilet again this morning.”

  Well, blast. All her discretion and it appeared someone had noticed. Of course, it would be her sister. Birthdays only ten months apart, they shared a bedroom for the first four years of Tena’s life until their father’s banking career led them from London to the quaint town of Fontaine and a much larger dwelling. Even so, four years sealed their fate. Closer than blood, when it came to Maggie, Tena had eventually learned all her sister’s darkest secrets.

  Except for one.

  “I told you, Tena, it’s merely the weather.”

  Tena shifted her handbag and offered Maggie her arm. “I’m not convinced; however, it’s far too warm to argue the point out in the sun. While you were away, the gardener told me about a research library at the other end of the garden. Would you fancy a look?”

  “I suppose.” In truth, Maggie had no interest in spending hours cramped between shelves while her sister carried on with her imaginary book beaus. But between sharing a room with Tena and sharing a living space with the Kisch family and Reuben—who staunchly refused to relocate—life had been beyond tense. She didn’t want to ruin the one pleasant afternoon they had shared in months. So she swallowed her annoyance down a throat now raw from vomiting and accepted her sister’s arm.

  Vibrant with color and sweet with floral fragrance, the walk carried her back to her favorite summer days. Chasing after their family’s gardener as a little girl, she sat in the grass while he worked, eager for an explanation of each flower and its meaning. Every May Day, she and Tena mixed up bouquets for the annual festival, the day her sister declared just for them.

  What Maggie wouldn’t
give to be a child again. What she wouldn’t give to have her father back. What she wouldn’t give to have never read his final letter to her.

  The words were branded on her brain, she had read them so often. The letter started out in her traveling case, tucked safely under the bed she shared with Tena until she found herself stealing away to her room nearly every day to read it. Then it took up residence in her skirt pocket, safely hidden if her sister decided to go prying in her things. Tena knew about the letter and also knew that she hadn’t received one.

  Dearest Maggie,

  It saddens me that my time grows short. I find myself with many fears these days, in particular I fear what type of life I leave for you to endure.

  There is a secret your mother holds, and once I am gone, she will not hesitate to tell you. I am sorry I cannot explain myself. It is her secret to reveal, although I fear she will attempt to destroy you with the truth.

  Know this, Maggie: I have cherished you and Tena all your lives. I loved you more than any father could. Your happiness was all I ever wanted above my own.

  Claim your happiness, my little girl. Love will find you one day. Ensure it is with a man who understands your heart.

  Love always,

  Father

  Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets, hurt someone.

  Her father wouldn’t lie to her. It hadn’t been in his nature to manipulate or ruin. Whatever lay between the lines of his letter would be exactly as he said, enough to destroy them ... a truth so unpleasant even their heartless mother had, as of yet, deemed it unspeakable.

  Maggie breathed a sigh of relief as they pushed through the doors of the Herbarium-Library building. An assistant directed them to a room lined with bookshelves and cabinets labeled in fine print. At one of several small desks, a young man quietly pored over a stack of thick volumes.

  She stepped nearer to extract one of the cabinet drawers. In neat little rows lay flower varieties pressed flat between two square panes of glass, each labeled in Latin. She smiled, the knot in her stomach beginning to unfurl. She wasn’t familiar with the ancient language, but she didn’t need to be. These were all plants in the market at Covent Garden. The flowers purchased there adorned her sparse upstairs room during her employment for Lady Alexander. Their scent brought her through nearly a year without her family, reminding her of the sister she left behind.