Homecoming Girls
Authors: Val Wood
| Homecoming Girls |
| Val Wood |
| Random House (2010) |
Synopsis
Hull, 1874. The beautiful, mysterious Jewel Newmarch, adopted as a baby, turns heads wherever she goes - her exotic looks point to her origins far away from the streets of Hull. Even at her cousin Elizabeth's wedding, she is the belle of the ball. But as she looks on at the happy, newly-married couple she feels a restlessness and intense longing to know her own roots. And so she decides to return to her birthplace in America, taking the bride's twin sister Clara as her companion. In discovering the mysteries of Jewel's past the girls realise that this is a life-changing voyage of discovery for both of them, as they learn important lessons about family, friendship, love and home. But most importantly, love...
Val Wood
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Epub ISBN 9781409010661
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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Valerie Wood 2010
Valerie Wood has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780593066997
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For my family with love, and for Peter
Also by Val Wood
THE HUNGRY TIDE
ANNIE
CHILDREN OF THE TIDE
THE ROMANY GIRL
EMILY
GOING HOME
ROSA’S ISLAND
THE DOORSTEP GIRLS
FAR FROM HOME
THE KITCHEN MAID
THE SONGBIRD
NOBODY’S CHILD
FALLEN ANGELS
THE LONG WALK HOME
RICH GIRL, POOR GIRL
For more information on Val Wood and her books, see her website at
www.valeriewood.co.uk
A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
Chinese proverb
Books and information for general research:
Hawgood, John A.,
The American West: The Revolution in Western Transportation
, Frontier Library, Eyre & Spottiswood, London, 1967.
Sheehan, James Joseph,
History of the Town and Port of Hull
, John Green, Beverley, 1866.
And the free dictionaries by Farlex and Wikipedia for general information on Han Chinese and Old St Mary’s Cathedral, San Francisco.
In the mid-nineteenth century there had been great poverty and distress in the port town of Hull. Cholera, typhus and malnutrition killed off many inhabitants, opium addiction was rife and there were mutterings from the abandoned poor who considered that they suffered much injustice at the hands of the rich and more fortunate. Those amongst them who concluded that they needed to eat and work in order to stay alive and keep a roof over their heads eventually gave up complaining when hunger and apathy sapped their energy.
In those days, two young women on the brink of starvation in a final desperate act took control of their own lives. One, normally quiet and reserved but with a yet undiscovered inner core of steel, became a beacon of hope as she railed against oppression and inequality and spoke up for the rights of herself and others like her; whilst the other, hungry and deprived, succumbed to the lure of a life of comparative ease and became the mistress of a rich and married philanderer.
The consequences of these naive young women’s actions were to stretch out for twenty years or more, touching the lives of many and even reaching the shores of America, which for some wasn’t quite the land of opportunity – the Eldorado – it was meant to be.
Into this New World a child of mixed parentage was born; of her Chinese mother nothing was known except that she too had escaped from oppression, and about her father there
were many questions but few answers. It was to the old town of Hull that the child was returned.
There were many who were curious about her, and wondered about her ancestry. Residents in the port town were used to foreign sailors, brown and weathered, speaking languages that they couldn’t understand, whose only English words were
girls
or
room
. Seamen might occasionally come across a Chinese cook, but rarely did people of that nationality arrive in this eastern harbour. Sometimes women were smuggled off the ships, young pretty women, their faces pale with fear, who, speaking with Germanic or Scandinavian accents, begged to be taken back home.
But never young women like her. Rich, beautiful, and with a cool enigmatic glance which defied interrogation.
Oriental
, the gentry whispered as they speculated. They knew her father, of course, or once did, for he was long dead. The Newmarch family was well known in the town, not only for their wealth, but for their industry and charity, and she was part of it. Her family and close friends knew what little there was to be known, but for the rest she was shrouded in a cloak of mystery and intrigue and many stories were told about her. Over the years the tales faded into obscurity as she was accepted as part of the community, until strangers arrived and asked about her, and then they began again, increasing in exaggeration and veiled insinuation.
March 1874
Jewel watched her cousins from across the floor of the state ballroom in the Royal Station Hotel: Elizabeth, married for only an hour, golden-haired, elated and vivacious beside her new husband; on her other side, her twin, Clara, almost but not quite her double, palely serene, but, as Jewel knew well, anxious and fearful at the thought of having lost the sister who for twenty years had been an inseparable part of her life.