For Richer, For Poorer

By Heidi Wessman Kneale

The Deveraux line is famous...for a family curse. The rich must marry the poor or lose their prosperity. Peter Baring is the last of the Deveraux and sinking slowly into poverty. But will marriage to his icy business partner save him?

Beatrice Nottham dreams of leaving Earth for a fresh start. But only married couples are allowed to move off-world. Marrying a man she's unsure she loves will solve that problem...but at what cost?

When Beatrice visits England to research her branch of the Deveraux family tree, she meets Peter and sparks fly. Both question everything they ever believed would fulfill their dreams. If they dare to be together, will the Curse follow them beyond the stars? The answer to breaking its power could lie in the heart of a crumbling tapestry...if they have the courage to try.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781628306330

Heidi Wessman Kneale

Heidi Wessman Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. She specialises in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Romance. When she's had enough of reality, she opens a book.

Book preview

Inc.

Praise for Heidi Wessman Kneale

What I like about Kneale’s writing is that she executes it well.

~Paul Mannering, author of Asif!

~*~

[Heidi Kneale’s] got an energetic voice, and a good sense of humor...

~Miss Snark (aka Janet Reid)

~*~

...Kneale succeeds in reversing reader expectations in more ways than one.

~Chris Butler, The Fix: Short Fiction Review

~*~

Heidi Kneale has so much imagination. She’s one of the best I’ve seen.

~Anne Wingate, author

For Richer,

For Poorer

by

Heidi Wessman Kneale

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

For Richer, For Poorer

COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Heidi Kneale

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Contact Information: [e-mail]

Cover Art by Angela Anderson

The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

PO Box 708

Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

Publishing History

First Faery Rose Edition, 2014

Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-633-0

Published in the United States of America

Dedication

For Their Ladyships, Lady Sarah and Lady Amy.

Families are forever.

The moment Beatrice Nottham’s foot touched English soil, something clicked within her heart. Even amid the crowds of people at New Heathrow Skyport and the yards of steel, concrete, and smartglass, her soul—for the first time in, oh, years—felt free.

She did it. She’d flown all the way to England, despite everyone’s naysaying—especially Rupert’s, her fiancé.

A wave of vertigo flushed over her as if she stood on a cliff. A nagging voice in her head that sounded remarkably like Rupert’s muttered that she was mad. She’d flown all this way to chase some insignificant little detail of information.

Beatrice shook her head and lifted her suitcases, singing sotto voce, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. She kept that up until the nagging sound was drowned by the press of a different world around her.

So many people! Their accents were mismatched, some plummy and round, others nasally loud with their dipthongs that didn’t sit right in her ears. Their words sounded foreign unless Beatrice concentrated. Only then could she recognize their speech.

The English sounds, the English smells, the flow of her fellow travelers buffeted her. They had a way of crowding together, yet not touching, as if to accidentally brush up against another traveler would suck some of their vital essence away. She wrinkled her nose as one particularly fragrant man, a traveler gone too long without a shower, skimmed in front of her. The funk of his smell lingered in her nostrils until she left the Skyport.

Outside, fog enveloped her, cool, moist, wispy. It was not the smell of rain, but of smoky exhaust. It clung to her. Gone was that smell of greasiness which seemed to cling to the walls and pavement back home. Instead, it was replaced by a mustiness—not unpleasant, like old book smell—that spoke of not years or decades of history, or even centuries. Instead, it spoke of millennia. She stopped outside and looked up. The sky was overcast, more a bright fog than brown smog. It gave a hazy, other-worldliness to the air around her.

People moved about her, avoiding bumping into her. It was not like New York where she had boarded the spaceplane. There, people bustled each other about, insulted that there should be someone in their way. Here, this was a more polite dance, as if they didn’t dare insult each other by intruding. Even the sound of the crowd was different, the step of their feet against the pavement, the whoosh of traffic—mostly taxis and trams, and the gentle murmur of low conversation.

While the trams, the people and the language of the flickering web adverts that scrolled their way across screens could have been from her home country, Beatrice could feel the, the Englishness of it all. She could have been one of them, for all appearances—her dark hair slightly frazzled by the humidity, her figure the gently rounded one of a woman used to the comforts of home. But her heart, her thoughts and her dreams were distinctly American, as was her impulsiveness.

So now she stood on English soil, her only links to the country was an entry visa on her passport chip, a few nice emails from some country vicar on her handheld computer and lots of angry ones from the fiancé she abandoned to… to what—?

Outside the airport Signal Jamming Area, she pulled out her handheld—sleek, silver and easily portable. Should she turn it on? Would there be messages from Rupert on there? Would he have forgiven her for arguing with him (over money, of course)? Had he calmed down over the fact that she’d gone behind his back and spent some of the money (her money—she’d earned it) on a spaceplane ticket to England and didn’t tell him until she was about to leave for the skyport?

Beatrice and Rupert were supposed to get married—or so the plan went—as soon as they earned enough money to leave this planet in the Off-World Immigration Program. This silly little trip, as Rupert put it, would set them back financially at least four months.

Hardly. Maybe four weeks, if that. Still, a delay was a delay.

There were beautiful worlds out there, discovered in the early 21st Century as space travel became feasible, to be explored and settled. Lovely new worlds—pure, clean and uncrowded—awaited married settlers and families with viable skills… if they could afford the expensive space fare. And it wasn’t just the money. It was a one-way ticket. Settlers left Earth forever, never coming back. Even communication over such a distance was arduous.

Beatrice so wanted to go. A new world meant new opportunities. But there was one thing the new world wouldn’t have—Beatrice’s ancestral history.

She looked at her handheld, silent and dark. The small machine held tens of thousands of genealogical names along with their hatches, matches and dispatches, generations of Beatrice’s ancestors, some lines going, as her Grandmother put it, all the way back to Adam.

Well, at least a thousand years.

Was it so important to her? Sure, a few questions plagued some of the lines. Not all answers could be found in the shared records of the family history centers. But were those answers so important that Beatrice had to flee the States in pursuit of them? Why couldn’t she be happy with what she had?

So why did she up and fly over to England