Welcome Today's Featured Author
Jane Fairchild!!!
!
The Stagecoach Bandit's Mail Order Bride
Catherine
Reardon enlists the help of Miss Pinkerton to help find her a better
life and travels west to meet the man who will become her husband.
Questions about her husband's identity and encounters with the fiendish
robber baron Black Jack Maynard throw her future into doubt. Can
Catherine overcome the odds, defeat the bad guys and live happily ever
after?
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Teaser:
“And I said to myself, I said ‘Maybelle Prim’, you put that pistol down before you shoot another suitor!” The young woman with the pouter pigeon bosom and the seagull mouth hadn’t stopped talking since the stagecoach left Dunbar’s Creek that morning.
Catherine sighed, curling and uncurling her toes inside the boots that were tucked firmly under her seat. It had been a long journey even to get to this point, and she still had at least a day or more to get to Crosstie. She clutched her reticule a little tighter, recounting its contents one more time: A letter of introduction from Miss Pinkerton, the letter from Mr. Ezekiel Farnsworth requesting Miss Pinkerton aid him in finding “a woman of good character and good health” to join him on his prosperous farm out west. “I can provide references upon request,” it said, and this earnestness had touched Catherine’s heart.
Many of the requests Miss Pinkerton received for brides were terse, even demanding, scrawled and scribbled on torn pieces of brown wrapping paper, old bills, whatever paper was to hand, and stained with tobacco juice or whisky—tough letters from tough men, as Miss Pinkerton had told her. Mr. Farnsworth’s letter was on costly paper, clean and unsmudged. His handwriting was clear and precise, not an error crossed out or errant drop of ink. Mr. Farnsworth was plainly a gentleman. Of all the requests Miss Pinkerton had chosen to show Catherine, Mr. Farnsworth was clearly the best and safest choice.
The hems and seams of her skirts were weighted heavy with the coins sewn carefully into them. Tightly cinched between her shift and her corset were precious bills—the last of the money from Mr. Daguerre and all that she had in the world.
Maybelle Prim was still nattering away, not realizing or not caring that the other three passengers in the coach—a man with dark and languorous eyes carefully balancing a top hat on his knee, a frail and elderly woman tatting lace from a large reticule, and Catherine, herself—weren’t paying any attention to what she was saying.
The man in the top hat had begun glancing out the window with increasing frequency and distress as Maybelle blathered on—perhaps contemplating his escape out the window.
Catherine had the sudden vision of his pin-striped trousers and shiny shoes flailing as he threw himself out the window and escaped the chattering. She would wave her lace-edged hanky prettily and he would surely jump to his feet and doff his top hat, as the stagecoach left him behind in a swirling, yet blissfully silent, cloud of dust.
Catherine choked back a laugh into her hanky. The top hat man glanced her way, and catching her eye, shared a smile of quiet of amusement.
The stagecoach jolted and bounced along, the rattling of the wheels, the pounding of the horses’ hooves and the creaking of the coach itself had long since faded into clamorous background noise, a constant murmur in her ears. Her elbows hurt where she frequently banged into the side of the coach, her other arm ached where Maybelle continually grabbed it in unnecessary alarm, and her nether regions had plain gone numb from sitting on them so long.
The top hat man now stared directly out the window with intensity, the old woman placidly tatted her lace and Maybelle continued to babble. Not a single one of them showed any signs of needing to use the necessary. Catherine gritted her teeth and shifted uncomfortably. She thought longingly of the chamber pot stowed under her seat. If the passengers had all been women, surely communal understanding and sisterly goodwill would mean she could attempt to use it while the coach was still in motion. With the top-hatted man there, clearly that option was out of the question. And she would not be the one to bang on the wall and ask the driver to stop again. She would not.
Instead, she stared down at the tips of her boots just peeping out from her skirts. They were new—a parting gift from Miss Pinkerton, who supplied all her ladies with a pair of sturdy boots and a thick and voluminous shawl as a parting gift to start out their new lives.
It was then that she realized the tophatted man’s shoes across from her were not the highly polished and fine shoes she’d imagined so comically sailing out the window, but rough boots, thickly polished to hide their wear and so at odds with his beautiful suit and hat.
The coach lurched violently to the side. Catherine braced herself in alarm.
“Oh, I do believe that wheel used to belong to us,” the top hat man said calmly, pointing out the window at the wheel bouncing merrily away into the underbrush. The coach lurched again, tossing Catherine directly into the top hatted man’s arms, who threw up his arms to catch her in surprise.
The horses screamed as the driver slowed the coach as fast as he could. The carriage tipped ominously, before it came to rest haphazardly near a copse of trees, not far from a sparkling brook. Catherine scrambled out of the top-hat man’s arms, who smiled bemusedly first at her, then at the others.
“Ladies, it seems we’re about to enjoy a leisurely lunch.” He opened the door, dropped down the step and gracefully descended. “Really, I couldn’t have chosen a better spot, myself.”
He helped each lady carefully down out of the tipping coach as the driver scrambled up to the coach’s roof to unload the basket of provisions stowed there. The ladies spread out a blanket and their food, while the driver and rider glanced around them nervously and hurriedly crammed their own dinner into their mouths. The rider kept one hand protectively on his shotgun, fingering the trigger thoughtfully even as he ate.
“I do declare,” Maybelle Prim pressed one hand to her bosom, “they’re so nervous, they’re making me nervous
“Oh don’t you fret, honey,” the old woman soothed. “We’ll be up and on our way in no time.”
Maybelle tittered nervously. “What are they so anxious about?”
“Judging by those strongboxes up there in the luggage rack, I’d guess robbers and bandits.” The top hat man nodded at the coach as he sliced a bit of cheese with a vicious looking knife. “From the looks of them, I’d guess this coach is carrying a great deal of money.”
The passengers ate their lunch and chatted, watching with equal parts horror and amusement as the driver and rider became increasingly frustrated and began shouting curses and slurs at each other and the recalcitrant wheel.
Maybelle, as it turned out, was on her way to Crosstie Springs as its new school teacher. The top-hatted man, who introduced himself with a grave bow as Reginald Bottomsly, was in the employ of a railroad tycoon, mapping out and negotiating territory for new rail lines. The old woman had been east to say goodbye to her dying sister and was returning to her husband and home in Crosstie.
“Family,” Catherine choked on her bread, when it was her turn. Her new husband would soon be her family, wouldn’t he? “I have family in Crosstie.”
About Jane Fairchild:
Jane
Fairchild spent her childhood reading the Little House On The Prairie,
watching Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Dallas and trying to get her cowgirl
boots on the right feet. She loves horses, has an irrational hatred of
cows and though she is a native New Englander, she dreams of living on a
ranch in Montana.
Social Media:
Twitter: @writerfairchild
Wordpress: janefairchild.wordpress.com
Interview With Jane Fairchild:
- Can you tell us a little about your books?
The Pinkerton Brides is a series of interconnected stories that can be read in any order. It is a love letter to those of us who always wanted to know what went on behind Laura and Almanzo’s bedroom door. I’m lucky enough to be co-writing them with an amazing writer (and good friend of mine), Cecilia Walker. She and I worked together on the prologue, “An Accidental Match: The Mail Order Bride.” Cece wrote book two of the series, a delightful story called “The Reluctant Father’s Mail Order Bride.” We also have Kiki Meyer working with us – she’s a tremendously talented writer, who’s written book three in the series, “The Cavalryman’s Mail Order Bride,” and she’s already hard at work on another! I wrote the fourth book, “The Stagecoach Bandit’s Mail Order Bride.” We are always scribbling away, so there will be several new installments in the near future.
- How many books have you written? Which is your favorite?
I’ve written several books, here and there, under different names, but this is my first Western. I’ve had such fun with it!
My favorite is always the one I’m writing. If I don’t love the story, I don’t waste my time writing it.
- Do you work with an outline, or just write?
The writing process always starts for me with a flash about something important in the book – it comes to me like I’m watching a movie - I see the whole scene, and I capture that as best I can. Everything else just comes as I’m working my way from the first sentence to that scene. Most of the time, I write the end of the book first, then start at the beginning and write my way to the end. I can’t write scenes in piecemeal – I have to go pretty much in order.
For this book, The Stagecoach Bandit’s Mail Order Bride, it started with the title — I went for something slightly preposterous that might intrigue a reader. Not many people would want to read “The Really Boring Person’s Mail Order Bride,” so I went for a title that sounded a little bit unusual — like something I would want to read. Then it was a question of figuring out how I could create a successful romance between a supposed “bad guy” and our heroine. Once I’d figured out that ‘hook’, I wrote the ending of the book, and then went back and started filling in the other details and scenes leading up to it.
- Do you have a favorite spot to write?
I do! I have a chair with some really comfy pillows, and a good lamp nearby, and a little table with my laptop and notebooks (I tend to write a lot by hand) and some pens.
- Do you have a favorite food or drink you must have nearby when writing?
I rarely eat while I’m writing – but I usually drink coffee, or wine, depending on what time of day I’m writing.
- Do you listen to music while you write?
Not usually, unless I’m stuck on a scene. If it’s music that I love, I usually wind up singing along, and that’s not conducive to writing… I wind up with song lyrics stuck in the middle of sentences!
- What books did you enjoy as a child?
Everything! I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, Elizabeth George Speare, Madeleine L’Engle, but also Louis L’Amour, John Jakes and James Clavell (I was a rather precocious reader!)
- What is your favorite thing to do when you're not writing?
I love to knit. I’m not very good at it, but I love to do it. I make mostly scarfs and shawls and things that don’t really have to be any particular size. If you’d like a warm and snuggly, yet slightly amorphous but mostly rectangular blob of knitting, I’m your girl.
- What are you working on next?
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