A Thorn in the Bush

By Frank Herbert

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Dune, a novella about a woman who suspects her neighbor is a spy about to reveal  her long concealed past.
 
Mrs. Ross is an expatriate American who has found a quiet life in the small Mexican village of San Juan, a place where she can be content, a place where no one knows the secrets of her shadowy past life. Until an ambitious American painter takes up residence in San Juan, attempting to depict—and expose—everything about the sleepy Mexican town. But he may have underestimated the lengths a seemingly harmless old woman will go to protect her secrets.
 
A Thorn in the Bush is one of four previously unpublished short novels written by Hugo and Nebula award winning author Frank Herbert. Early in his career Herbert moved his family to Mexico where he struggled to survive as a writer. Published posthumously, this novel came from those life-changing experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781614752844

Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know." His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

Book preview

Book Description

Everything of beauty must have at least one flaw in it. Otherwise people do not realize how beautiful it truly is.

Mrs. Ross is an expatriate American who has found a quiet life in the small Mexican village of San Juan, a place where she can be content, a place where no one knows the secrets of her shadowy past life. Until an ambitious American painter takes up residence in San Juan, attempting to depict—and expose—everything about the sleepy Mexican town. But he may have underestimated the lengths a seemingly harmless old woman will go to protect her secrets.

A Thorn in the Bush is one of four previously unpublished short novels written by famed Dune author Frank Herbert. Early in his career Herbert moved his family to Mexico where he struggled to survive as a writer. This novel came from those life-changing experiences.

Frank Herbert

Kobo Edition – 2014

WordFire Press

wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-252-3

Copyright © 2014 Herbert Properties, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Kevin J. Anderson

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Cover artwork images by Dollar Photo Club

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by

WordFire Press, an imprint of

WordFire, Inc.

PO Box 1840

Monument, CO 80132

Contents

Book Description

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Other Unpublished Frank Herbert Novels from WordFire Press

Other WordFire Press Titles by Frank Herbert

Chapter 1

But what if the young man is innocent? asked Don Jaime. He spoke in Spanish with a lisping Castilian accent, an affectation that marked him as a man of some daring among Mexican politicians.

Innocent! Mrs. Ross put all the scorn of her seventy-one years into the word. I tell you he is precisely like the other one! Her Spanish lashed at him, full of overtones from countless kitchen maids and with hardly a trace remaining of her native English.

But … but … Don Jaime sputtered at her as only the mayor of a small town can sputter at a rich land owner and valued confidante. You cannot come here and ask me to imprison a tourist simply because he reminds you of someone out of your past! Please? You cannot. His shoulders hunched in a Latin shrug. Emma, my dearest friend, we must remember that times change.

But young men don’t!

They sat in Don Jaime’s upstairs parlor, a plaster and blue tile room of austere furnishings. It looked out on Mexico’s Lake Chapala from the waterfront of San Juan. Afternoon sunlight, reduced to narrow ribbons by venetian blinds, wove a tapestry of glowing yellow across the room.

An immense black upholstered chair enfolded Mrs. Ross, dwarfed her. She had presented this chair to Don Jaime on his Saint’s Day ten years ago because she could not endure sitting in any of his other furniture. Every other chair in the house presented unexpected corners, painful edges and sloping planes that kept you ever on the alert against being slid off onto the floor. She was convinced that none of these pieces had been designed for human beings.

Mrs. Ross wore a blue silk dress and a small blue-feathered hat over her grey hair. She looked like a shriveled dowager duchess: sharp-eyed and slightly sunburned so that the effect was a little horsey. Her face presented balanced planes that still revealed some of the beauty that age had covered.

Don Jaime held himself severely upright in a high-backed teak throne. He was a lean figure in a black business suit of European cut. His face—long, narrow and with pinched-in cheeks—looked like the face of the crucified Jesus that hung in San Juan’s church. Although two years older than Mrs. Ross, he still retained the glossy charcoal hair of his youth.

On this afternoon there had been the long, slow ritual conversation: the inquiries about health, about mutual friends, the state of the weather, of the crops (both agricultural and tourist), and a discussion of a recent fishing tragedy at Solas farther down the lake in which a father and son had drowned. The son had been known to Serena, Mrs. Ross’s current maid of all work.

During all their talk there had been persistent mouse-like sounds in a nearby room: one of Don Jaime’s serving girls making work there to eavesdrop.

But now Mrs. Ross was down to the object of her visit. I know this young man’s type, she said.

"What do you really know about him?" asked Don Jaime.

Mrs. Ross’s nose twitched in irritation. His full name is Francis Andrew Hoblitt, she said. He comes from St. Louis. He is twenty-eight, unmarried, speaks little Spanish … and that poorly. I’m certain you’ve seen him around: a blond young man, always frowning.

And always carrying the drawing pad. With two motions of his hands Don Jaime hung the squared-off pad shape in the air between them.

The same. He lives in that little guest house that the Friesmans rent out. He drinks too much. He throws things … and he doesn’t like the new tax on foreign artists. He said vile things to the tax collector.

She did not add that Hoblitt, while in wine, had pinched Lolita Veras on the bottom. Hoblitt was altogether the kind of tourist who made Mrs. Ross ashamed of her countrymen.

Don Jaime nodded, averted his eyes. He had been a widower for thirty-six years, and his manner betrayed a certain watchful caution with women (although he had courted Mrs. Ross when she first arrived in San Juan in 1937).

The detailed information about Hoblitt did not surprise Don Jaime. Through her many tenants and employees, Mrs. Ross ran a first class spy system—almost as good as Don Jaime’s own. And he knew that an absolute requirement for anyone working in Mrs. Ross’s immediate household was the ability to relay every bit of gossip heard in the market square. Serena, the current maid, shone above all others in this capacity—a two-legged recording device who chattered endlessly at her work, telling everything she saw or heard, spicing it all with local superstitions.

Do you think this Hoblitt is a good painter? ventured Don Jaime.

Mrs. Ross dismissed Francis Hoblitt’s work with one word: Modern!

Don Jaime scowled, thinking now about St. Louis, a name he had just heard in connection with Hoblitt. Don Jaime knew that St. Louis was a place name in América del Norte, very likely a large city. His knowledge of geography went little beyond awareness that Mexico City (called simply Mexico in the local idiom) lay somewhere vaguely eastward—not as far as the Gulf, but nonetheless a boring trip in his twelve-year-old chauffeur-driven Buick. He knew that Guadalajara lay northward up the superhighway, and that the Pacific Ocean billowed endlessly off in the west. América del Norte—that bottomless source of rich tourists—remained a geography book picture: a green, yellow, brown and pink blob occupying an immense frozen area north of the Rio Grande—which was a Mexican river.

Perhaps it is evil to come from St. Louis, thought Don Jaime. A breeding ground of gangsters, possibly.

He said: You know St. Louis?

I’ve never been there.

Mrs. Ross resigned herself to a few moments of diversionary questioning, but she resolved not to be put off. This business of Hoblitt and Paulita Romera could become tragic, she told herself.

Don Jaime pursed his lips. St. Louis, then, is not near to Fairbanks? Don Jaime had been told the fiction that Mrs.