PRAISE FOR SHADOW AMONG SHEAVES
“A stunning retelling of Ruth that will hold you captive until the last page.”
–Roseanna M. White, bestselling author of the Ladies of the Manor and Shadows Over England series
“When all the exoticness of the Far East arrives in the quiet countryside of Victorian England, rumors abound—and so does love. Shadow among Sheaves is a fresh retelling of the story of Ruth that adds a whole new way to look at the Biblical account. Poetic prose. Strong characters. And a drama that gets under your skin.”
–Michelle Griep, Christy Award-winning author of the Once Upon a Dickens Christmas series
“Set in 19th century England, Shadow among Sheaves is the tale of an Indian widow and her beloved mother-in-law. Amidst fear, self-sacrifice, and starvation, the young widow finds desperately needed assistance in the form of Lord Barric—an earl who soon finds himself torn between his reputation and his heart. Lovers of historical fiction will enjoy this elaborate retelling of Ruth and Boaz.”
–Denise Hunter, bestselling author of On Magnolia Lane
© 2019 by Naomi Stephens
Print ISBN 978-1-68322-933-9
eBook Editions:
Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-64352-139-8
Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-64352-140-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Cover Design: Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design
Published by Shiloh Run Press, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., 1810 Barbour Drive, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.shilohrunpress.com
Our mission is to inspire the world with the life-changing message of the Bible.
Printed in the United States of America.
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people and your God my God.
Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.”
RUTH 1:16–17 NIV
For Curtis—the first person to call me an author.
For Ena—who met (and loved)
Rena and Barric before anyone else did.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
PROLOGUE
England, July 1861
The sun was the same, but that was all.
Blindingly hot, it hung low on the horizon as if dangled there by an invisible string. Rena studied the sun’s path as it settled at the base of the sky, her fingers fiddling with a tiny glass vial which hung from her neck by a cord. As she tipped the glass, the sand scrambled within, racing from one end to the other.
Sighing, Rena settled back into her seat. She wished she could have brought buckets of sand from India. She had lived in the northwest, in Jaipur, which was a considerable distance from the sprawling Thar Desert, but she and Edric had gone there on one of his leaves. She still remembered the way the sand had felt beneath her bare feet, sharp against the balls of her heels like tiny knives; she remembered the way the sand had smelled on her skin in the morning, as if she were knit together by heat and sunlight; she remembered the way her husband’s hands had felt on her neck in the evenings when they had lain down in the sand together to forget themselves and the cutting remarks of their countrymen. If she clamped her eyes shut, she could nearly taste the dry summer air of home, could feel the tiny grains of sand pressing against her shoulder blades as Edric’s fingers carded her hair….
But coming to England was far better, she reminded herself, reopening her eyes to glance at the seat across the compartment, where her mother-in-law still slept deeply. Nothing could grow from sand, Rena reasoned with herself. Nothing could grow from nothing.
As the train groaned tiredly along its track, she could already make out the shapes of fields and orchards, their foreign perimeters drawn jaggedly like the edges of an unfinished puzzle. Tree trunks the size of castle turrets lined the fields with a thick border of summer leaves. Beyond the trees, small buildings dotted the landscape, spread out in dark squares like a chessboard.
She looked from the fields to the unfamiliar buildings and back again. She pressed her vial of sand between two shaking fingers. Yes, she thought, redirecting her gaze to the sky. The sun is the same. But will that be enough?
“Abbotsville!” called an attendant, stepping sideways through the cramped compartment. He jostled Rena’s mother-in-law, Lady Hawley, as he passed her, nudging her out of sleep.
Nell looked worn from their journey. Rena was certain she looked little better herself. The passage by sea had been brutal for both women. Half of the three-month journey was spent huddled below deck as the walls of the steamer were blasted by turbulent squalls, which had made the entire structure feel as if it were made of matchsticks. Rena had lost control of her stomach enough times that she could no longer taste her own humiliation. Somehow she had endured jarring wagon rides across sweltering Egyptian deserts, followed by cramped barges and rickety paddle steamers. If she closed her eyes, she still felt unbalanced on dry land, and she suspected she might always feel the ocean’s silent sway beneath her.
The whistle blew shrill as the train slid into the station, its wheels slowing beneath them. As the train halted, Rena could hardly believe her grueling journey was finally at an end.
England awaited beyond those doors.
Edric’s England.
As the other passengers began to bustle, she once again checked the contents of her bag. She had not kept much in her haste. Two plain dresses in addition to the one on her back, a slab of hard bread, and a few stacks of henna leaves pressed between the pages of a book which had once belonged to her father. She shouldered her bag and then tucked the thin cord back beneath the neckline of her black widow’s dress. The vial of sand now rested against her chest beside Edric’s gold signet ring, as if she had buried him there.
“I will take care of you,” whispered Nell, stepping closer. The older woman settled her hand on Rena’s cheek and smiled. “I promise we will pick up these scattered pieces.”
It seemed an impossible task. There were as many scattered pieces within Rena’s heart as there were leaves on England’s countless trees. Her husband was dead. Her family lived oceans away. Now she entered the land of those who sought to rule her people, where she was as strange to them as they would always seem to her. She glanced again at Nell and forced herself to banish these regrets. Nell had lost twice as much, Rena reminded herself. Nell had lost her husband as well as her only son, and yet she smiled at Rena with eyes as bright as Edric’s had once been—those lovely, almond-shaped eyes which ran in the Hawley family.
Together the two women had hardly enough money worth counting. Edric’s father, Sir Alistair, had set aside a fairly comfortable allowance for his wife and daughter-in-law. With the death of his son, however, he had weakened considerably in both spirit and frame until, worried for his wife, he had scrambled to secure further savings by making risky investments in his final year. Though Sir Alistair had never known so during his lifetime, he had been ruthlessly swindled. The collectors arrived the day after the funeral, forcing Nell to hand over nearly everything she had left to cover his debt.
“Alistair was rather good at chess,” Nell had remarked to Rena that afternoon, shaking her head in equal parts grief and frustration. “But he sometimes trusted his own judgment too well to foresee a checkmate. But, of course, there was always time to reset the pieces for another game.”
Until now.
The rest of the Hawley fortune, including the estate and the baronetcy, was entailed upon Edric’s death to an older cousin, Felix, who lived in Australia. Nell had written to him immediately for help but had received no reply. Now Nell was at last returning home, to Abbotsville, to stay with a cousin whom she hadn’t seen since childhood. But Rena knew how Abbotsville must really feel—a tomb-like world, where Nell had once been young, where she had been a wife and a mother, but she could never be those things again because the ones she loved the most had already been snatched away.
Rena had felt something similar when she had knocked on her father’s door to tell him she was leaving with Nell for England, when she had wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and wept that she must go. She had lived with her parents for nearly two years after Edric’s death. During that time, she had been confined mostly to her own quarters, where at her parents’ bidding she had fasted to the point of faintness and prayed to the Hindu gods that she might someday be forgiven for marrying him.
With time her father had hoped they might find a man to overlook her union with Edric and perhaps marry her despite of it. She was still rather beautiful, as was observed in town, and the laws had been recently altered under British influence to allow remarriage for widows. In many parts of India, however, widows were still beaten and shunned, cursed and spat upon, their clothes stripped away and ornaments ripped from their piercings so even their skin and flesh were broken. Though Rena’s parents had been devastated by her secret marriage, they had also been merciful to bring her back into their home and harbor actual hopes for her future.
But Rena had married an Englishman, an officer, and even if an Indian man was willing to look beyond her marriage, Rena could never be the same person. Never again a daughter. Never a wife. And so, nearly two years into her prayers and fasting, when Rena had learned that Sir Alistair had died and left his wife with nothing, she had rushed to the dear woman’s side and pledged herself, with many tears, to easing Nell’s pain. Now the rest of Rena’s life stretched before her like one of her father’s books, like a foreign language written in ciphers too jagged for her to comprehend.
She had married Edric impulsively. She had followed Nell to England impulsively. But her father had always said her heart was a steady strum, always guiding her forward, forward, forward.
As the train door jerked open, Rena jumped to clasp the older woman’s fingers. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, pressing this promise deep into Nell’s wrinkled palm. “I will take care of you.”
CHAPTER 1
Both women were starving.
After nearly three weeks in Abbotsville, Rena’s shoulder blades now cut against her skin like she was made of paper. Head pounding, she lay beside Nell in a stable which smelled of manure, desperate for any way to escape the unbreakable claws of poverty.
The sun was beginning to show through the dawn-filled haze, but Rena was too angry to look at the sky. In India she had loved watching the sun and stars unfold at the start and end of each day. She often pressed against the rail of her father’s balcony, lifted up, captured by the endlessness of it all. Now everything was different. She, a Brahmin, was forced to sleep in the hay like an animal. The humiliation was nearly unbearable. Her father’s home was filled with sacred, ancient texts and priceless artifacts. He was a valuable asset to the British troops stationed there. Even Rena herself had once been described as a prize.
And who was she now?
She yanked a few strands of straw from her hair—a trespasser, lying amid filthy cattle while Nell slept soundly beside her. To such concerns as starvation and poverty, Nell merely replied that all problems had their solutions. She was a sturdy woman with no intention of moping. But Rena was not convinced, even by such practiced bravado.
Many years ago, Nell had lived nearby, in a suburb of Liverpool, well before she met and married Sir Alistair. A few of her cousins were still scattered in various estates throughout the area, and Nell had written to them several months ago, shortly after Alistair had died, to announce that she was returning to England and would be much indebted if she could stay with one of their families until things were sorted.
“Of course,” they had all responded. “With pleasure. You are always most welcome.”
They’d made arrangements to stay with a Lady Harriet, who lived the closest to Abbotsville. All was quite settled ahead of time. But then Nell had arrived in England with an unexpected surprise—Rena.
“There must be some mistake,” Lady Harriet had stammered, stunned to find an Indian girl waiting beside Nell at her gate. “We did not expect you so soon. We haven’t enough room for two houseguests….”
Rena had counted at least two dozen windows from her place beneath the gate. Two dozen windows in Lady Harriet’s home, and yet not a bed for two widows to share. Nell had made her way down her list of cousins and second cousins, but all had given the same answer with varying degrees of shock and disgust as they stared at Rena in her plain widow’s dress.
Rena rolled onto her side and studied the careful way Nell now slept in the hay, with not a single hair out of place. Nell had come from one of the most estimable families in northern England. She didn’t belong here, sleeping like a vagrant with a foreign castaway. But even those sorrows paled in the face of another—before Nell had fallen asleep that night, she’d mentioned the workhouse.
“It is always best to consider all options,” Nell had said bracingly, but Rena also read the terror thinly masked in the woman’s eyes.
Restless, Rena pushed herself up from the ground, burying her face between her hands. Several times she had passed the Liverpool workhouse during her daily search for work. Cramped and full of sickness, it was a glorified prison for the hapless, desperate souls who needed it. If Rena and Nell were even admitted, they would be forced to turn over their own clothes, to bathe supervised, to work their way through a system dead set on breaking them.
No. Rena climbed to her feet. She could not let that happen. She would not.
With one last anxious look at Nell, Rena left the stable and marched straight into town. People were already beginning to gather on their way to the fields, and they watched her steady approach with alarm. Rena wanted to spit on them. When she and Nell had knocked on every door in town, no one had looked either of them in the eyes. When they had slept in doorways, alleys, and barns, the people of Abbotsville had pretended not to see them, not to notice. But now they watched Rena, their gazes pinned and direct.
As she turned the corner at the edge of town, three field hands jumped quickly to the side to avoid running into her. Rena fisted her hands. She was so hungry. So tired. She wanted to tell those men her family belonged to the highest caste in India, that her father was far more eloquent and learned than any of them would ever be. But Rena knew, even if they believed her, they would not care. They would still leave her and Nell to starve in gutters. All the money in the world would not make them look at her with any less disgust.
And why should they? The Indian Mutiny was painfully fresh in everyone’s mind, only a few years past. When Edric left England in pursuit of coloniz
ation, no one could have expected him to marry an Indian woman. That she had returned in the wake of his death was an unspeakable scandal.
When the English looked at Rena, they saw a tapestry of evil: Indian soldiers rising up and shooting their British officers, British women and children hacked to pieces in defiance of westernization, Christian converts hunted down and murdered at Delhi for forsaking the Hindu faith.
It did not matter that Sawai Ram Singh, the Maharaja of Jaipur, had sent nearly all of his troops to aid the British. Or that he had housed the wife and children of Major Eden in the Badal Mahal, refusing to hand them over to the demanding rebels who had then marched onto Delhi. The people in Abbotsville only knew that Rena was Indian. She had lived in the north where the mutinies had raged the hardest. She could never be trusted.
In times of weakness, Rena still considered sneaking off in the night so Nell might live with her own family in comfort. But Rena loved Nell too much to abandon her in such a way, and she knew Nell would never allow them to separate. An even weaker part of Rena was too afraid to starve to death alone.
She came at last to the door she was searching for and froze on the threshold, feeling herself approaching a precipice from which she could never draw back. At Nell’s warning, this was the only door she had not visited in her relentless search for lodging. “Edric.” She whispered her husband’s name, just to hear it spoken. Then she shoved through the weathered door and stepped inside.
She had heard many rumors of the Gilded Crown, an establishment well known for thievery and prostitution, though it masqueraded as a common roadside inn. Splintered tables and benches were scattered about the dining hall, half the tables still not cleared from the previous night’s revelries. A dingy portrait of a rather severe-looking Victoria loomed above the sooty stone fireplace—as if the queen herself actually cared to know what went on in such a place.
The dining hall was mostly vacant, save for a few passing travelers who ate breakfast in the corner and a scattering of women who lounged on benches along the farthest wall with bored, waiting expressions. Rena tried not to look at the women, but she could not help noticing as one of them stood abruptly and stepped across the room to lean against the bar. The woman wore a gaudy dress, wrinkled and slightly too big for her slender frame. The heavy smear of bright rouge on her cheeks made her appear perpetually tired but no less pretty. To Rena she looked like a butterfly wing someone had accidentally stepped on.
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