Only One

By Gail Lewis and Sharon Peterson

Sarah Tanner was about to turn eighteen which meant she would be forced to fulfill a commitment of marriage made by her Mormon father. To escape a terrible future as one of many wives, she runs away to make a new life in the city. Caught in a storm she falls victim to the elements. Saved by a stranger, handsome Jordan Eversly, Sarahs misadventures have only just begun. She finds herself falling for Jordan but discovers that parliament has passed a bill abolishing polygamy. Would she be Jordans choice now that he could have Only One wife?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483608105

Gail Lewis

Sharon Peterson and Gail E Lewis live in Ontario, Canada. Although they have been writing separately for many years in the form of songs, poems and screenplays, Only One is their first novel as a mother-daughter team. Look for more thrilling adventures in their future releases.

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Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Peterson and Gail Lewis.

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-4836-0809-9

             Ebook       978-1-4836-0810-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Rev. date: 03/16/2013

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER Thirteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Dedication

This novel is dedicated to Martha Hatfield without whose encouragement this story may never have been completed. And a special thank you to Gary Lent and Dave Lewis for their continued support.

CHAPTER ONE

Thunder crashed across the northern skies, but Sarah found a strange comfort in the noise and the crackle of lightening as it brightened the window. The flashes of bright light periodically brought into sharp relief the slant of the ceiling in her tiny bedroom in the farmhouse attic. It was just enough light to fill the shadows and allow her to make her way to the top of the stairs that would become her first steps to freedom.

Though others might complain, Sarah welcomed the dreary weather with a smile of satisfaction. For weeks she had patiently waited for just such a night. No one suspected her intentions and therefore would assume that she was fast asleep, tucked up in her warm bed, beside her sisters. But she had lain quietly awake, listening to the raindrops dance on the rooftop. Until no one stirred at the first rolls of thunder which confirmed her belief that the other girls in the room were soundly asleep. Listening to her sisters even breathing, careful not to wake them, she slipped quietly from her bed.

Familiar with the placement of each piece of furniture, which consisted only of bare necessities, just three small cots and the two old dressers, she picked her way around the room taking great care not to bump into anything.

Aware of the creak of every floorboard she would need to avoid, she tiptoed-danced softly from the room and down the stairs. From behind the loose board that covered the cubby hole under the stairs, she tugged the bundle containing the bits and pieces of clothing and food that she had been ferreting away. Things she felt necessary for survival, a bit of cheese, some dry bread, matches and her best dress. She almost faltered but with a final glance of trepidation and a renewed sense of determination, she stole out into the pouring rain, the cold and the dark.

Within minutes she had reached the edge of the forest that bordered the farm. Already her dress was soaked and clinging heavily to her body. She hadn’t considered the many layers of her woolen skirts and realized only now how badly they would hamper her progress as she tried to pick up her pace. But her will was strong enough that even in the well worn, hand me down, too big boots, she doggedly ran, stumbling in the darkness through the mud, the pine trees and undergrowth.

Trying to concentrate, having to feel her way almost blindly, a sudden crackle of lightening startled her. She fell. Instinctively her hand went out to break her fall, catching on a broken branch and tearing the skin. She paused to examine the wound and though not serious, it was dripping blood on her already soiled bodice. As she looked up from her hand, lightening flashed again creating a silhouette of the farm house.

What was she doing? Out here in the wind and rain soaked and now bleeding when she could be safe and warm back in that tiny attic room. A room some would say was not much bigger than a crawl space with its slanted walls and made-to-do furniture. Where every night she and her sisters crowded each other for space to sleep, yanking the covers from one another for warmth. Where there was love and laughter. She could turn back now, before it was too late. No one would ever know of her plan. But, thinking again of the reasons she had devised the plan in the first place and how those very reasons were about to change her whole world, she believed she had no recourse. So as the shadows once again infringed on the image of her homestead, she pulled herself to her feet, turned around again and ran ever deeper into the forest.

How much time had passed she couldn’t say. How long before she dared to slow her pace? Her hand throbbed, but worse than that, fatigue and tears threatened to compound her growing discomfort. Sarah didn’t dare waste precious minutes to catch her breath, there was no time to stop for a desperately needed rest. Not just yet. So on she ran.

She trudged on though the rough undergrowth, stumbling over fallen branches and catching on brambles. Now her legs were scratched and bleeding, long auburn hair stuck to her lovely face, so pale in the moonlight, the strands at times rendering her nearly blind. She chose to ignore them. The night was pitch-black dark and the forest so dense, she couldn’t see more than two feet in front of her anyway. What little light the moon was able to produce could not penetrate deep enough through the clouds and trees to show her the way. So she was forced to depend on the intermittent flashes of lightening.

To her benefit, in her eighteen years on the farm, she had traveled this old rutted path frequently. Especially when she was able to take walks alone. An opportunity that didn’t come often with all the young ones constantly clinging to her skirts or wanting her to read them stories or play games with them in the yard.

Her destination on this stormy night was a little old shack she had discovered off the beaten path, up in the foothills, some months ago. It had been practically obscured by brush and trees and as ramshackle as it was, it now represented a safe haven. She had known it might necessary for her to make this stop in a race she was compelled to win. She had kept the secret of her discovery from everyone, so Sarah felt this was the safest place to rest and wait out the remainder of the storm.

According to the scheme she had hatched, if she could only reach the cabin before dawn and hopefully remain undiscovered until morning, she could rest and collect her thoughts. She would dry her things and review in her mind the map she had memorized in nearly perfect detail from the atlas she used to teach the children. It was a fair distance to Blaine, the closest major city, which was her destination, so getting lost was not an option.

With these thoughts to egg her on, she moved forward with renewed energy convincing herself that the new life she had dreamed of for the past few months could actually become reality in the not too distant future.

Her idea, when she finally arrived in the city, was to simply change her name. She would find a paid position and generally lose herself, and hopefully her old identity. In a city with the hustle and bustle of the many people, she felt sure no one would ever find her.

Having been up since dawn doing her regular chores on the farm, and now bleeding and soaking wet from the rain, she desperately needed sleep when she reached the cabin. Sarah knew she dared not, it would be too risky. With the sunrise she would be discovered missing if she wasn’t present at breakfast. Then the whole community would be alerted and out searching for her. Even in the rain, her trail could be picked up and she would be found and forced to return home. Though naturally, her hope was that the rain, mud and water would wash away all traces of her route once she left the beaten path.

Sarah believed she had no other choice. If she remained in the Mormon community, she would be expected to live by their rules. For Sarah, this meant accepting the husband her father had chosen for her and for the very first time in her life, she was not prepared to honor his wishes. Though he was strict, she loved him dearly but she could not abide by the fact that she was going to be thrown into a marriage to a man of her father’s choosing. Not her own.

Outwardly, her father would express how deeply he was concerned for her well being and that she needed to be found and brought back home for safety sake. Initially, he might even actually assume that something tragic had befallen her. Someone had to have kidnapped her. But deep in his subconscious, if he knew his daughter at all, he would know the truth? That she had run away.

Right here in this storm, Sarah was not at all concerned about what her Father may tell himself or other people, no more than she was interested in marrying this man, Jordan Eversly, whose name she’d only recently heard again. That was solely her father’s idea. He had insinuated that she was already well past marrying age. But how could he believe that she would willingly consent to marry a man she had never met? A man she had in fact, seen only once for mere minutes through the window of their living room when she was only a very young girl.

To add insult to injury, her father had also made Sarah painfully aware that this same man had already agreed to take two other women from the community to wife. Let Eversly have the widow Betsy Holmes and her two young brats. Let him have Wauneta Blanchard the dowdy old maid that no one else wanted, and a dozen more if he so chose. Sarah certainly had no desire to become a willing addition to his harem. She knew what it would mean for her to be the youngest wife and she would have none of it.

Perhaps it was unfair of her to have these thoughts about her father. He was a good man but in her mind Ben Tanner had already seen her two older sisters married at very young ages. Married them off to men who already had two or three wives and as many as ten to thirteen kids in the house to feed and be cleaned up after.

Not that any of the Tanner girls were strangers to that standard. Each of their days growing up had been spent helping to raise their own younger brothers and sisters. Trying to help keep up with the house work, the piles of laundry and still attend the many church meetings demanded of them each day, not to mention twice on every Sunday. All these things were rules of their religion, she didn’t resent her Father. He didn’t see any wrong in the things he had also been brought up to believe in and the codes he and his family lived by. The rest of the family had no problem with his ways.

Because she had been raised in the same manner, Sarah sometimes felt guilty that she didn’t think she could feel the same love for another woman’s child that she would for one of her own. Admittedly, she loved each and every one of her siblings but they were all her fathers’ children. That was brotherly love, not motherly love. But to pretend that it didn’t bother her to chase after some other woman’s children was beyond her emotional comprehension.

Her birth mother had died when Sarah’s youngest brother Aaron was born. She grew up calling her father’s other four wives ‘Mother’ and was fifteen years old before she realized the difference between the Mothers and her mother. The other children had done the same, so when Sarah was old enough to talk it had simply come naturally. No one ever bothered to correct her, for in their eyes they each were her mother.

Her objections, she conceded, were probably misplaced. It was the way of life she had been taught since the day she was born. The religion they lived by allowed men to take multiple wives, and though most stopped at three, some, such as her father, had married as many as five times.

Recently, when she had questioned one of her mothers about this practice, she had been read a passage from the Book of Mormon, the family bible. It enables every woman the opportunity to have a righteous husband, enjoy the blessings of motherhood, and fulfill the measure of her creation. The book was closed and it appeared no other explanation was considered necessary.

Was Jordan Eversly so righteous? How could Sarah be certain that this was her destiny like her father said when he announced that this marriage for her had been prearranged years previously? Was it possible to grow to love this man enough to bare his children, live in his household and yet share him with other women? How could any woman know all these things if like Sarah, they hardly knew the man to begin with? Sarah was aware that most young women in the community were allowed to choose a husband, why had she not been given the same option?

Sarah leaned against a tree and gasped for air, all these things swimming through her head. Her outstretched arm was braced against a low hanging branch for support. She was tired and wet but her resolve never weakened for a moment. Her determination never faltered. As she started off again, her thoughts wandered into the future. She was going to create her own destiny.

Her father would say she had gleaned too much information from the people she met outside the Mormon community. The vendors in the market place, children not from the community who had been allowed to attend the village school. People who she was not supposed to associate with, let alone take advice from.

Oh, the stories she had read from books she had sneaked into the house under her skirts and secreted away. Stories of love, and life in the big cities. Stories of adventure and intrigue and of happy endings. Regardless of what ideas and feelings these stories had created in her mind they touched her heart and now she could not come to terms with all that was expected of her. There was a different life out there. A better life, a life with much more meaning than marriage, rearing children and the Church. But if Sarah remained in the Tanner household, by the age of eighteen, there would be only one life left open to her. The one that would include marriage to Jordan Eversly!

And at the end of the summer she would turn eighteen. At least she could take some solace in knowing that her father had allowed her to wait that long. Some of the girls in her community had been married as early as the age of thirteen or fourteen.

Her father knew she had been offered for, but also knew that she was an asset to his household for now, so there was no need to rush her into marriage as he had the other girls. She wasn’t a widow, she wasn’t homely, she hadn’t been tied to her home to care for an invalid parent like the other two women her prospective husband was taking into his household.

Sarah was healthy, vibrant, schooled and pleasant to look at, with her flowing auburn hair that cascaded in waves around her shoulders. Although her high cheek bones gave her face a heart-like quality, her chin hinted at strength and resolve. But it was her big blue eyes, so startling in contrast against her hair, which captured and held her image in the eyes of the beholder. Gazing into them, many a man would agree that the thing called beauty still existed.

Still looking for the tall blue spruce that would indicate that she was nearing the cabin, she looked up through the web of leaves for a flicker of moonlight. She needed to gain a sense of her whereabouts but could see only darkness and shadows. An owl hooted from high above, leaves rustled in the wind, but she much preferred the noises to dead silence. An element of fear about the choice she was making still lingered in the back of her mind but she kept pushing it away. The fear of her empty bed being discovered before morning was of far greater concern and not at all to be dismissed.

Forcing herself to go on, she pushed a branch away and began her fight against the beating rain once more. It couldn’t be far now. According to her internal compass, she should reach the shelter of the little cabin soon where it would at least be dry, if not warm.

Thunder rumbled relentlessly across the sky almost shaking the ground beneath her which may have deterred her had she not been so determined to defy any and all obstacles. The thunder was followed by the inevitable flashes of lightening, brightening what small spaces it could reach through the trees.

There! Sarah could just make out the shape of the roof, the little old shack was only a few more muddy yards away. She breathed a sigh of relief. Her own little bit of heaven, for if no one discovered her whereabouts before morning, she could continue her journey without that fear.

She could travel faster by mornings light, rain or shine. This would give her further assurance that no one could pick up her trail as long as they hadn’t been able to trace her steps thus far after this murky night. She had only to be sure to take the right direction from here. The territory beyond wasn’t quite so familiar, nor could she gauge the distance she would need to travel on through the forest to reach Blaine, while skirting the foothills of the mountains.

The furthest she had ever traveled was into Lyndon by the main roads and in a buggy by daylight. A trip the whole family made about once or twice a year to barter for necessities that could not be purchased in the community store. But from here and in the dark she wasn’t even sure where the main roads were. Lynden though, was not her destination, she would travel on to Blaine where she was confident she would find anonymity.

She stumbled up the overgrown cracked stone step to the cabin door at the same time fumbling for the broken latch. It swung open with little effort and she practically fell, exhausted, on to the hard, wood floor.

Brushing her wet, now lifeless hair from her face and eyes, she struggled to her feet and groped her way gradually across the room. She had been in this cabin often enough in the past few months to know where the small handmade table stood with its two little wooden chairs tucked beneath it. She had cleared the debris and straightened up what other sparse furnishings there were, memorizing where everything was situated for just this occasion.

Sarah hadn’t the slightest inkling who the cabin belonged to. She had seen no traces of an occupant since the day she fell upon it while wandering about picking berries and therefore had no fear of the owners’ untimely return.

There was a makeshift bunk against the back wall and a wood burning stove in the corner to the right. Even if she dared light a fire in that stove to dry herself and her clothes, the three tiny wooden matches she had stowed in her bundle, would be soaked beyond use. Besides, it was absolutely out of the question, the smoke might be detectible for miles even in the pouring rain. Sarah refused herself that luxury, she simply wouldn’t take that chance.

In the eerie darkness, she removed her wet things and hung them carefully over the two chairs, satisfied that she had done all she could. In the few hours before dawn she hoped they would be dry enough to put back on. It wouldn’t be practical to pack damp clothes in her bundle. She wanted to keep the one fresh dress she had carefully folded into her pack to change into once she reached the outskirts of the city. In the meantime, she could cover herself with the grubby old blanket she had laid over the cot when she was last here, and hope to chase the chills from her bones.

As her eyes became more accustomed to the dark, she could vaguely make out the shapes of the objects around her. She picked up the blanket, wrapped it tightly around her whole body. And though it smelled old and was rough against her tender skin it would keep her warmer. Telling herself she would only rest a while, she curled up on the old cot to