Isolde (eBook)

Walter Eastwood (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
460 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-6248-4 (ISBN)

Infos

After losing her husband, family, and her father's business, Isolde must rebuild a world for her and her daughter. The church, law, and royal family work to dismantle her success, and enemies lurk in every corner to watch her fall. Will she transform her father's dismantled distillery into Ireland's greatest whisky producer? Will she and her daughter ever find safety and love again?

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The saga continues. Isolde is a young woman left alone in a manscape of greed, lust, and an unforgiving church. Her husband and family disappeared from the face of the earth while her father's unique distillery was mysteriously dismantled in a blink of an eye. Traveling alone with her daughter across ancient England searching for her husband in Hogs Breath, she learns that they are alone and desolate. Failing to locate her family after the death of her father, she returns to Wexford on the Island of Ireland to rebuild the broken distillery with the help of the twenty-four able bodied men her father left to protect her. With an impressive brain, willful determination, and a warrior-like attitude, she battles the church, the law, and the royals who all want what is hers. She is the only person alive who knows how to make her father's highly valued whisky, a product that men of these times would gladly kill to possess. Antagonists appear at every turn, from mason leaders to Vikings, and Isolde must combine every possible resource to survive.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1

Isolde

This could be the end of it all. As her men died around her, Isolde fought off the angry Viking leader bent on raping and killing her. She refused to scream, denying him any additional pleasure from his brutal attack. Memories of a similar assault just a few years ago exploded in her mind. In that time, she was saved at the last moment by the man who would come to be her future husband. But her savior then was not here now. He was lost somewhere in time three years ago. Disappearing with him was the rest of her family, a mystery she had yet to solve.

Her husband, Barrett, had vanished, along with his father, King Athelstan; his mother, Queen Aelic; and his younger siblings. After the death of her father, she returned to Hog’s Breath only to find herself and Patricia alone. It was then she had embarked on a vain and desperate search for her family with no closure. Not a soul in Hog’s Breath knew of their whereabouts. At nearly the same time, she had lost all those she loved, including her father. Add to that, her father’s distillery mysteriously disappeared as if by magic, and everything Athelstan had provided them was gone. All the nuts and bolts, the kettles, the cookers. Everything that had made it possible for Papa to build their unique facility had disappeared; she should have seen it for what it was—an omen.

In her search for Barrett and his family, Isolde later found that it was the same in Hog’s Breath. Tons of farm machinery and brewing equipment furnished by Athelstan had disappeared into the void. Also gone were the breeding animals and teaching materials Athelstan had given them, without which it would be impossible for both breweries to function. These building materials had, over time, transformed the backwoods village into the dominant economic capital of Mercia. This included the huge steel container in Aelic’s backyard that had brought Athelstan to Hog’s Breath. It had been relocated there from where it had first appeared the day Athelstan had arrived outside the village proper and where he had defended himself from several groups of men in the employ of the local magistrate soon after his appearance. The site was located near Hog’s Breath’s where the Mercian economic revolution began.

Soon after the mysterious vanishings of family and brewery in Wexford, Isolde had returned to Hog’s Breath to solve the mystery surrounding her missing mate. What she found was a vacuum in leadership that had sent the kingdom Athelstan had created into a tailspin. It became clear to Isolde that some members of the village were blaming their situation on her, the only outsider left. She had to begin the process of ensuring her daughter’s future and not become an obstacle to her own success. So, to avoid offending future buyers of her whiskey, she gave up the search for her family and returned home to Wexford to rebuild her life. She needed to restore her father’s business from the ground up; she could not abandon her daughter’s birthright. She also needed something to fill the emptiness left by the loss of her husband and his family.

There were no long-drawn-out divorces or weeks and weeks of tears after the death of a loved one. Not in this world. You were expected to be up and on your feet in days. That’s just how people coped with these kinds of tragic events that were all too common in the twelfth century. There was putting aside life’s woes and forging on. Following her unsuccessful three-month investigation, Isolde returned to Wexford to begin her life without Barrett, which she did in grand fashion.

After a long and stressful, yet extremely successful, three years, shite hit the meat pie as Norsemen once again raided Wexford, an event that had occurred several times over the last few centuries due to the village’s location near the sea on the River Slaney. It has been the way of Vikings for a millennium. The standard practice had always been that before robbing a village of its wealth, you killed off the men, then raped the women. So, when a band of Norsemen entered her estate, Isolde believed she would suffer a horrible rape before being killed, along with all the women on her staff. Patricia, her daughter, would be kept alive, only to become a slave, then later a wife of one of these heathens. That thought gave her no comfort as the ugly Viking neared. A flash of brilliant white rage blinded her with anger at Barrett because he was not there to save and protect her. The old thoughts that had haunted her early years alone were of her family and how they had abandoned her and Patricia.

Her second child was born in the fourth year after Barrett and the rest of the family had vanished. Brodder was an old, rather odd name passed down through her new husband’s Norse ancestry. Not in any position to argue for a Christian name, she had accepted it. In her mind, she chose to think of him as Brin, a name she’d always fancied. A year after their harrowing meeting, she had agreed to marry him, becoming a sort of queen, wife of the self-proclaimed king, and there was not a soul on the island who would argue over his title, due to the size of his band. She had come to terms with her reality, which was that this new man in her life would be able to protect her, her daughter, and her son, along with their distillery, keeping them safe from outside forces.

Sixteen years later, her second husband had taken over her father’s distillery, handling sales and delivery—a job she had done for her father when he was alive which, for a girl in any century, was difficult, and if not for her guards would have been impossible. She had, from the beginning, learned all she needed to know by helping her father in the brewing process and hauling kegs of whiskey around the island, which afforded her the opportunity to see towns and villages beyond Wexford.

After reconstruction, her operation was now the largest in the land, as others were trying to mimic her recipes and success. A few men, who were important workers in the distilling process, had left her employ to start their own companies. In total, seven family-run businesses were now producing whiskey. No one person outside of the proprietor knew the whole process, so those attempting to copy Isolde’s methods often came up short. They had stolen her recipes but had problems from the get-go, resulting in inferior products. Keeping the many steps in the process to herself afforded her a simple copyright. In going out on their own, a few of the ingrates inadvertently combined the bad with the good alcohol causing disruptions in many a man’s gastric system. Even so, quite a few chose to continue consuming the foul-tasting shite because it was cheaper and always available. Due to the side effects, including death, after drinking the methanol-rich brew, its cost to the customer was greatly reduced.

To be sure, her Norse king had a variety of skills beyond killing and pillaging neighboring hamlets—an industry that eventually became a troublesome burden to her and to him as well. In the long term, he modified his behavior and became a model citizen, no longer practicing his old Norse ways. But his size and overpowering demeanor might have been why pub owners often bought more barrels of whiskey than needed. Competing brands were an insult to her, and sometimes barrels of them ended up mysteriously broken, spilling their innards over the piss-drenched, foul-smelling alleys.

Even after all these years, Isolde reserved a small amount of anger at the two men she’d called her husband. One had abandoned her and her child, and the other, by necessity, she’d accepted as her mate. In time she wondered why she fretted over the giant’s intrusion into her life, and she’d even learned to love him. And although Barrett had left her and Patricia to cobble together a life, every time she was alone with her daughter, she always forgave him.

Within a day of Bob’s visit at the bowling alley, completely ruining a great line, which sounded familiar, three members of Athelstan’s clan readied themselves for one more trip through time. If they were lost to time, she reasoned, her youngest children would be better off orphaned in the future than in the past. Bob assured them that this trip would be easier and simpler than Athelstan’s solo trip had been.

The three years Barrett had spent in the future were astonishing and kept him from thinking too much about his past life, but he still missed Isolde. Since Bob had given them a chance to collect her and their daughter, and because of their new assignment and what looked to be an easy fix concerning the directives from the EGC, he’d spent the last few weeks sporting a broad grin.

In his parents’ home, two of the time travelers were readying themselves for their journey into an unsure past. Barrett, though, was hunkered down in the church’s genealogy library, once again studying the old collection of names. He had gleaned much information from the billions of names stored in the largest collection of family histories in the world through which he’d frantically searched for Isolde. He’d gone over the history of just his mother because Athelstan’s up-line did not yet exist; after all, his heirs were now in the future. Through his investigation, he’d come to believe that the records he had found in earlier searches, which suggested his daughter, Patricia, had married into the Kennedy clan, were wrong. Memories that had been lost, anecdotal writings, which included names and associations that were just not true, were nevertheless passed on to others who believed the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.12.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-6248-0 / 1667862480
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-6248-4 / 9781667862484