The Wages of Fame
Page 71
—WILLA CATHER
By Thomas Fleming from Tom Doherty Associates
Remember the Morning
The Wages of Fame
Hours of Gladness*
*forthcoming
“Fleming has performed a masterly feat in combining history with a compelling narrative.”
—Lucy Kavaler, author of Heroes and Lovers
“In Remember the Morning Tom Fleming lays the foundation to a classic historical series, a saga that fires the imagination and stays with you for a long time after you read it. This is an important book, but also a delightful read, as the pages seem to turn of their own accord.”
—Margaret Truman
“What a stunning book—two dramatic and powerful women, radically different yet bound together by love, heritage, experience, circumstance, in a blazing tale that plumbs morality as brilliantly as it illuminates a crucial part of the American past. A tour de force.”
—David Nevin, New York Times bestselling
author of 1812
“Tom Fleming has created an inspiring tale, a Gone With the Wind set in pre-Revolutionary America!”
—Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize—winning columnist
“The historical details that run through the saga are marvelous and fascinating. That the central characters are strong women who are anything but victims, resonates with the 1990s, particularly to women readers.”
—Sybil Downing, author of
Ladies of the Goldfield Stock Exchange
“Remember the Morning is a wonderful American panorama! I read it with admiration and delight. Thomas Fleming brings the Colonial period of our country’s history to full life—this is a learned, passionate, and completely absorbing novel.”
—Max Byrd, author of bestseller Jefferson
“At a time when so many writers are chasing the latest fads and trends, Thomas Fleming continues to re-create the incomparably fascinating story of the American past as it really was. In Remember the Morning he gives us the violence and elegance of eighteenth-century Manhattan, and the loves, loyalty, and treachery of those who lived along the upper reaches of the Hudson River. Remember the Morning brings to life a world of passionate characters, dramatic confrontations, and climaxes steeped in emotional truth.”
—Charles Bracelen Flood, author of
bestseller Lee: The Last Years
“Remember the Morning is an outstanding saga about the triumph of the human spirit.”
—Wendi Lee, author of The Overland Trail
“Remember the Morning is good history as well as entertaining fiction. Thomas Fleming’s sensitive portrayal of eighteenth-century life, his knowledge of place and people, and his ear for cadences of speech are unsurpassed. Any reader wanting to feel, to hear, to know Colonial America might well start here.”
—Thomas P. Slaughter, author of The Whiskey Rebellion
“A rollicking moral melodrama with an intriguing pair of heroines.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Infused with Fleming’s thorough command of history and his stereotype-smashing insights into the psychology of ambitious, conflicted young people, this historical saga is a marvelously fresh reinterpretation of an era.”
—Library Journal
“Fleming has created a grim, compelling tale of historical adventure amid rapacious imperialism and wholesale treachery.”
—Publishers Weekly
AFTERWORD
In the fall of 1867, Jeremy Biddle journeyed to Bowood to visit Caroline Kemble Stapleton. She listened with barely disguised disdain to his proposal to write a book about her and George and John Sladen and the era through which they had lived. “Do you seriously expect me to trust you?” she said.
He told her she had no choice. It was her one chance to tell the story, her final opportunity to win a modicum of fame. The word brought a contemptuous tightening of that proud mouth. She had no use for the petty fame a writer can bestow. Yet she could not entirely resist the lure of the word.
She agreed to work with him, if he promised to let no one see the book until all of her currently living descendants, including her grandsons (Jonathan’s sons) Rawdon and George Stapleton (the latter born in 1863), died.
Jeremy agreed to the bargain. What else could he do? It was a test of his avowed devotion to George Stapleton. In retrospect, it was a fortunate agreement. In return Caroline gave him access to her diaries and letters. He felt free to use material that he would never have dared to expose to public view in his prudish century.
The Principia Foundation is proud to publish this volume in its continuing series on the history of the Stapleton family in America.
James Kilpatrick
President
The Principia Foundation
Notes
1 This was almost a half year’s salary for a workingman.
2 A kind of vest with long sleeves.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WAGES OF FAME
Copyright © 1998 by Thomas Fleming
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
eISBN 9781466821453
First eBook Edition : June 2012
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 98-23446
First edition: September 1998
First mass market edition: August 1999