The Quivera Trail

by Celia Hayes

Overview

The Quivera Trail is intended as a sequel to the Adelsverein Trilogy, as it picks up in 1875, with Dolph Becker courting and marrying a young Englishwoman, Isobel Lindsay-Groves. Isobel has several problems, the first of them being a domineering and cruelly judgemental mother, and the second, that she has made a dreadful hash of her debut year and failed to marry – marry well, or marry anyone at all. She is plump, socially inept, loves dogs and horses, and wishes wistfully for a quiet and modest country life. Dolph Becker is the answer to a prayer, for he offers all that … but the price for escape from a gilded world of privilege and the casual malice of her mother and Society … is to marry a man she barely knows, and follow him to Texas.

Accompanying Isobel on the journey to her new home in Texas is Jane Goodacre, her personal maid and confidant. Jane, the daughter of a small country shop-keeper, also has ambitions – and talents that she hardly suspects. The limitations and expectations for a young working-class woman in Victorian England weigh very heavily on Jane, although she does not realize that … until she and her lady mistress arrive in Texas.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148454960
Publisher:	Watercress Press
Publication date:	10/25/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	538 KB

About the Author

I grew up in a far suburb of Los Angeles, the oldest in a family of four children, the offspring of a research biologist and an artist in stained glass, which eccentric family experience formed the basis for my memoir "Our Grandpa Was An Alien" (Booklocker, 2004).
After earning a professionally useless degree in English Literature (California State University Northridge, 1976) an un-slaked taste for adventure, foreign travel (and a regular paycheck) led me to enlist in the United States Air Force, where I trained as a radio and television broadcast specialist, and served for twenty years in places as various as Greece, Spain, Japan, Korea, Greenland and Ogden, Utah, in a wide assortment of duties and pleasures which included midnight alt-rock DJ, TV news anchor, video-production librarian, radio and television writer and producer, production manager, tour guide and driving a bright orange Volvo sedan from Athens to Zaragoza, Spain, accompanied only by a small and cranky child. I retired from the Air Force in 1997, and began working for various small firms in San Antonio as an office manager, administrative assistant and executive secretary.
In 2002, I was bored with all that, and became a regular contributor to the military-oriented weblog, "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Brief" (now "The Daily Brief") at writing essays and commentary on matters historical, personal, political, cultural, literary and military. One thing led to another, and I got hooked on writing historical fiction, bringing out "To Truckee's Trail" in 2006; that's the story of the first ever wagon-train party to bring wagons over the Sierra Nevada, which marked the opening of the California Trail. I currently live in San Antonio with my daughter and an assortment of dogs and cats, and travel within Texas doing lectures and talks about my novels.