Joy that Long Endures is the second of the Irish Blessings series of historical novels that began in Cheyenne with Walls for the Wind. The series tells the stories of Irish immigrants set along the tracks of the new transcontinental railroad in Wyoming Territory.
A former iron man for the Union Pacific, Devin Cavanaugh labors day after day to transport loads from the little railroad town of Bryan 100 miles over dirt trails to South Pass City. He wants only one seemingly unattainable thing: to be his own man.
Dulcinetta Jackson, taught from childhood how to profit from the dreams of desperate men, wants the one thing denied her by her life of fabulous wealth: the place bestowed on those accepted in respectable society.
What happens when very different people with different ambitions team up to gamble on achieving their dreams?
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A former iron man for the Union Pacific, Devin Cavanaugh labors day after day to transport loads from the little railroad town of Bryan 100 miles over dirt trails to South Pass City. He wants only one seemingly unattainable thing: to be his own man.
Dulcinetta Jackson, taught from childhood how to profit from the dreams of desperate men, wants the one thing denied her by her life of fabulous wealth: the place bestowed on those accepted in respectable society.
What happens when very different people with different ambitions team up to gamble on achieving their dreams?
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Walls for the Wind is the first novel in the Irish Blessings series.
Can an angel survive Hell on Wheels? When Kit Calhoun leaves New York City with a train car full of orphans from the Immigrant Children’s Home, she has no clue she might end up as adoptive mother to four children in rip-roaring Cheyenne, Wyoming. At twenty-two, Kit has spent most of her life in the Children’s Home. Now she acts as one of America’s first social workers, serving as liaison between the home, the courts, and the children of the streets.
Kit has little doubt she is easing the plight of the homeless children, until the transcontinental railroad begins to span the country and she is chosen to accompany orphan trains to distribute city children as fast as the rails are laid and farms are carved out of former Indian lands. Eastern cities are overrun with homeless children, their parents sick with consumption or dead of accidents and disease. The farmers who take in the children are required to sign a pledge to clothe, feed, and educate them in return for their labor. Is this distribution of urban children to rural environs beneficial, as the churches that sponsor the dissemination insist? Kit begins to have misgivings.
Family ties are deliberately broken so that single children will have a better chance of being placed. Even so, Kit swears an oath to a dying woman that she will keep her son and daughter together. But when their train passes beyond the last settlements in Nebraska, Kit is left with no other choice. Hannah and Helmut, and teenagers Connie and Thomas, become Kit’s sole responsibility.
The first time handsome Patrick Kelley lays eyes on Kit inside the Casement Brothers store where he works in Julesburg, Colorado Territory, he wants her for his own. But circumstances, and a spectral-looking demented gambler as well as Kit’s certainty no one in his right mind would want her cobbled-together family, conspire to keep them apart. When Patrick and Kit and her brood ride Hell on Wheels into Cheyenne, they’re all forced to leave behind everything they knew and find ways to survive and thrive in the raw new American West.
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Can an angel survive Hell on Wheels? When Kit Calhoun leaves New York City with a train car full of orphans from the Immigrant Children’s Home, she has no clue she might end up as adoptive mother to four children in rip-roaring Cheyenne, Wyoming. At twenty-two, Kit has spent most of her life in the Children’s Home. Now she acts as one of America’s first social workers, serving as liaison between the home, the courts, and the children of the streets.
Kit has little doubt she is easing the plight of the homeless children, until the transcontinental railroad begins to span the country and she is chosen to accompany orphan trains to distribute city children as fast as the rails are laid and farms are carved out of former Indian lands. Eastern cities are overrun with homeless children, their parents sick with consumption or dead of accidents and disease. The farmers who take in the children are required to sign a pledge to clothe, feed, and educate them in return for their labor. Is this distribution of urban children to rural environs beneficial, as the churches that sponsor the dissemination insist? Kit begins to have misgivings.
Family ties are deliberately broken so that single children will have a better chance of being placed. Even so, Kit swears an oath to a dying woman that she will keep her son and daughter together. But when their train passes beyond the last settlements in Nebraska, Kit is left with no other choice. Hannah and Helmut, and teenagers Connie and Thomas, become Kit’s sole responsibility.
The first time handsome Patrick Kelley lays eyes on Kit inside the Casement Brothers store where he works in Julesburg, Colorado Territory, he wants her for his own. But circumstances, and a spectral-looking demented gambler as well as Kit’s certainty no one in his right mind would want her cobbled-together family, conspire to keep them apart. When Patrick and Kit and her brood ride Hell on Wheels into Cheyenne, they’re all forced to leave behind everything they knew and find ways to survive and thrive in the raw new American West.
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At the turn of a new century, changes unimagined are about to unfold.
THE WOMAN: Kidnapped by the Apaches, a Mexican woman learns the healing arts. Stolen by the Utes, she is sold and traded until she ends up with the Piikáni. All she has left are her skills—and her honor. What price will she pay to ensure a lasting place among the People?
THE MAN: Raised in a London charitable school, a young man at the end of the third of a seven year term of indenture to the Hudson’s Bay Company is sent to the Rocky Mountains to live among the Piikáni for the winter to learn their language and to foster trade. He dreams of his advancement in the company, but he doesn’t reckon the price for becoming entangled in the passions of the Piikáni.
THE LAND: After centuries of conflict, Náápiikoan traders approach the Piikáni, powerful members of the Blackfoot Confederation. The Piikáni already have horses and weapons, but they are promised they will become rich if they agree to trap beaver for Náápiikoan. Will the People trade their beliefs for the White Man’s bargains?
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THE WOMAN: Kidnapped by the Apaches, a Mexican woman learns the healing arts. Stolen by the Utes, she is sold and traded until she ends up with the Piikáni. All she has left are her skills—and her honor. What price will she pay to ensure a lasting place among the People?
THE MAN: Raised in a London charitable school, a young man at the end of the third of a seven year term of indenture to the Hudson’s Bay Company is sent to the Rocky Mountains to live among the Piikáni for the winter to learn their language and to foster trade. He dreams of his advancement in the company, but he doesn’t reckon the price for becoming entangled in the passions of the Piikáni.
THE LAND: After centuries of conflict, Náápiikoan traders approach the Piikáni, powerful members of the Blackfoot Confederation. The Piikáni already have horses and weapons, but they are promised they will become rich if they agree to trap beaver for Náápiikoan. Will the People trade their beliefs for the White Man’s bargains?
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From opposite sides of an ocean, two people wounded by the Great War are fated to meet and try to rebuild their lives.
First a war bride.
Francesca Sittoni was brought against her will to America by the husband she never loved. Now she finds herself alone — widowed, pregnant, and with a small daughter to support. Terrified of being deported back to the impoverished Tyrolean mountain region of her birth, Francesca answers an ad placed by Wyoming rancher and former doughboy Kent Reed.
Then a mail-order bride?
As their contracted year together passes, Francesca begins to ask if she is cook and housekeeper to Kent…or a secretly sought mail-order wife as her sly old neighbor insists. Only Kent Reed, burned by mustard gas and his spoiled former wife’s desertion, knows his heart’s true desire when it comes to the beautiful immigrant woman now living in the uncomfortably close quarters of his small ranch house.
Alethea Williams explores the powerful pull of love and endurance through this tale of heartache, romance, and overcoming hardship. Set in the final homesteader days of Wyoming, Willow Vale is the story of two strangers struggling with their own past who slowly begin to hope that they can meld their lives together into a new family.
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First a war bride.
Francesca Sittoni was brought against her will to America by the husband she never loved. Now she finds herself alone — widowed, pregnant, and with a small daughter to support. Terrified of being deported back to the impoverished Tyrolean mountain region of her birth, Francesca answers an ad placed by Wyoming rancher and former doughboy Kent Reed.
Then a mail-order bride?
As their contracted year together passes, Francesca begins to ask if she is cook and housekeeper to Kent…or a secretly sought mail-order wife as her sly old neighbor insists. Only Kent Reed, burned by mustard gas and his spoiled former wife’s desertion, knows his heart’s true desire when it comes to the beautiful immigrant woman now living in the uncomfortably close quarters of his small ranch house.
Alethea Williams explores the powerful pull of love and endurance through this tale of heartache, romance, and overcoming hardship. Set in the final homesteader days of Wyoming, Willow Vale is the story of two strangers struggling with their own past who slowly begin to hope that they can meld their lives together into a new family.
Buy links:
Kindle
Amazon
Barnes & Noble