Londoner, Mary Charles is transported to colonial Maryland as an indentured servant.
Chesapeake Harvest is the first book in Terry L. White's Chesapeake Heritage Series. It is the story of Mary Howard, a woman who was betrayed in love who finds herself transported to the New World as an indentured servant.
Mary is transported to the Eastern Shore of Maryland is a peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore and Washington, DC. Much of the area is wetlands, with some forests, open spaces and plagues of mosquitoes in the summer.
Mary learns to do all the work of the household and takes care of her mistresss and her adopted children, but she is not safe in this wild land, and is attacked by her fellow servant and bears his child. When her mistress, who adopted Mary's daughter, dies of fever, her master William Baron takes Mary for his wife. Mary accepts the offer of marriage, knowing it will keep her and her daughter safe in this difficult land, but she wonders if she will ever find true love.
The covers for the Chesapeake Heritage series were painted by Snow Hill artist Dawn M. Tarr
Excerpt
My name is Mary Charles and I sailed on the Godspeed from London on the thirteenth day of April in the year of our Lord 1643. It was a Friday. I was so excited to be free of my life on the streets of the ugly city, not to mention the stinking goal where I sojourned for a time, I was glad to be aboard a stout ship bound for the colonies.
Some may call me a whore, and blast them for it. I did what a woman does to keep herself from death in a hard and unyielding world. You think yourself better because your pockets jingle with coin and you see the world from the window of your fine coach? Think again. I simply did what I had to do to stay alive.
I was once among the privileged, but I succumbed to love and you see where it got me. My true love, or so I believed the scoundrel Edward Patty to be, brought me to this state—an indenture scooped up from goal and crowded into the hold of this stinking tub to spend five years of my life in something like slavery to whatever master would pay my passage at the end of the journey to the New World.
Compelling historical fiction that traces the life of a young English immigrant woman who travels to America at the turn of the century to start a new life for herself. Encountering danger, romance, heartache and tragedy, she strives to fit into a
A delightfully rare Historical Novel. 85% a biography of a spy, musician, mother and her neice trapped behind German lines in World War I. This background led to a diplomatic post in World War II. Aged 92, Vera disclosed her past life one year before
Ireland 1944.. A young man’s body is pulled from the River Lee. He’s wearing a distinctive silver ring that belonged to Paudy Daly, the eldest son of the notorious Mixer Daly. Why?
