How The Victorians Loved (A Pair Of Clean & Wholesome Historical Romances)

By Joyce Melbourne and Doreen Milstead

Message In A Bottle - A poor and lonely Victorian woman eking out her living in Brighton by making seashell jewelry finds a message in a bottle on the beach and vows to find the man who wrote it.

Mail Order Bride: From Liverpool To A New Life With The Farmer In California - A woman from Liverpool with an enormous talent for painting and a huge love of cats decides to go to Bakersfield California and become the wife of a farmer, even though she is very young. She meets another young woman, another artist like herself, who creates Chinese calligraphy art. At first, she doesn’t tell her husband because her father destroyed all of her paintings when she was a child, but when she does, he becomes very proud of her, but suddenly disappears for several days and she gets worried.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Hart
• Release date: Aug 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310373114

Joyce Melbourne

Joyce Melbourne lives in Southern California with her husband, numerous animals, and an unkempt garden, which she loves. She's been interested in romance and all of its sub genres for many years.

Book preview

How The Victorians Loved

(A Pair Of Clean & Wholesome Historical Romances)

By

Joyce Melbourne & Doreen Milstead

Copyright 2015 Enduring Hope & Love Press

Message In A Bottle

Mail Order Bride: From Liverpool To A New Life With The Farmer In California

Message In A Bottle

By

Joyce Melbourne

Synopsis: Message In A Bottle - A poor and lonely Victorian woman eking out her living in Brighton by making seashell jewelry finds a message in a bottle on the beach and vows to find the man who wrote it.

She sat on the damp rock, two bags of seashells tied to the belt of her ragged third-hand dress, water sloshing at her feet. Blue eyes watched the distant throngs of people on the long pier that stretched out from Brighton Beach, its sandy boards full of merriment and people who could eat when they wanted and play when they wanted. It was a different world than Sarah’s.

A very different world of money and luxury that Sarah would never know. Indeed, had never known.

For the better part of the last three years, she had gathered these shells, large ones, small ones and broken ones. The broken ones were her favorite, because they were the most like her, the story of her life at least, broken, lonely and thrown out for waste by the mighty force of water that now stole at her worn shoes and dirty feet.

But overall, Sarah was thankful. Thankful that she was alive and well, thankful that she had her little handmade shell jewelry and trinkets to sell in the market, thankful that those people she now watched would feel sorry for her and buy them. Thankful that she made enough to buy a crust of bread or a fish or a sweet treat for her own birthday.

Thankful for it all.

While the pretty people on the pier came to Brighton for leisure and recreation, Sarah eked out her very meager existence from what nature gave her for free - the shells. Her unique talent for jewelry making was a blessing, and for the last two years, her goods had become a favorite for these people. She saw her necklaces and bracelets adorning their chests and their wrists.

Everybody has a purpose and a place - Sarah was fortunate to have this purpose and this place.

She stood and the shells clicked together in their canvas-bag homes. It was time to move on down the beach before the sun began to set, showing off its beauty and grandeur over which the rich would marvel, but by which she closed out her day. Tomorrow would be the same for her, and the next day afterward would also be.

Life running in circles and going nowhere. That was Sarah’s world.

The tide was almost fully in by the time she rounded the short curve the sea carved out along the rocks. She stepped gingerly over the small, pointed rocks of the last leg of her journey back to her ramshackle little living quarters two blocks from this mighty torrent of salt and water and waves and beauty, long her home.

Something clanked behind her, the noise of glass hitting rock. Sarah turned quickly fearing that a glass had broken and the pieces might cut through the thin soles of her donated shoes. Wedged between two rocks lay a dark bottle, a wine bottle probably, with the cork tightly pressed into its pouring hole. There was something inside it, though she couldn’t tell what it was.

Gingerly, Sarah plucked the bottle from the strong grasp of the rocks and lifted it to her face. The something on the inside was a piece of paper with writing on it. She smiled to herself. A true message in a bottle, the romantic and endearing thing that people spoke about and writers wrote about. But that few ever found. A sense of optimism and hope flooded her soul, and Sarah felt immediately bound to the bottle as if answers were there, though she didn’t know the questions.

She carefully stuck the bottle in one of the bags around her waist and made her way home, thrilled that the day had rendered something out of the ordinary on which she could focus her attention, at least momentarily.

Back at her home, Sarah made herself wait to open the bottle, her eyes straying to it often as she sat about making her meager dinner of sardines and pickles. She sat at the small, old wooden chest she had found on the junk pile at the pier and made it her dining table, the rickety straight chair, a gift from a long-gone friend, creaking underneath the weight of her child-sized body. As she ate the small fish with her fingers, placing each bite on a cracker wedge, her mind roamed and wondered at what words she would find on the paper inside the dark bottle.

Would it simply be someone’s name and date? Had the writer penned a plea for help years and years before that went unfound and unheeded? Did the person who took the time to prepare the bottle still live? Were the words on the paper some historical event being recorded for posterity? Sarah realized that the bottle was a tangible thing, but the paper could hold many things - emotions, wishes, hellos, directions - a myriad of things.

But, she forced herself to eat slowly and delay the answers to what she was wondering. It was very, very seldom that such entertainment had come her way, and Sarah wanted to prolong the discovery of the mystery.

Finally, after delaying herself in every imaginable way, Sarah sat on her bed, knife in hand, and proceeded to unset the cork in the bottle. By the time she had pried it loose in several pieces, its life was over, tens of pieces lay at her feet on the floor. She wondered if the writer was also in little pieces beneath the surface of the earth - dead, silent, gone.

It took some tender convincing for the paper to be extracted, though rolled tightly, one corner of the paper had spread and acted as a hanger to make it difficult to remove from the tiny hole that had shielded it from water and time. She unrolled it very carefully and with great pomp and circumstance - suspending the satisfaction of her curiosity. The handwriting was well penned, obviously coming from a hand that had learned things, knew things and felt things, much the same as Sarah. Her eyes scanned the lines and returned to the first word, reading