Becoming Princess Eden: Book One: How They Met (Seahorse Island 1) Read online

  BECOMING PRINCESS EDEN

  Book One: How They Met

  by

  Lisa Lee

  A Seahorse Island Novel

  Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Lee

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 978-1-7326290-0-4 (EBOOK)

  ISBN 978-1-7326290-1-1 (PAPERBACK)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Jennifer Zemanek/Seedlings LLC

  Editing by Christina Schrunk

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing October 2018

  Published by Lisa Lee

  Chicago, IL

  [email protected]

  www.LisaLeeWrites.com

  Table of Contents

  ONE - Eden, Unplanned Journeys

  TWO - Gideon, My Brother’s Keeper

  THREE - Eden, School Days

  FOUR - Gideon, The Fruit of Sin

  FIVE - Eden, Adjustment

  SIX - Gideon, A Price to be Paid

  SEVEN - Eden, Halfway There

  EIGHT - Gideon, Atonement

  NINE - Eden, History Lessons

  TEN - Gideon, The Return of the Prodigal Son

  ELEVEN - Eden, Friendly Fire

  TWELVE - Gideon, Line of Succession

  THIRTEEN - Eden, Rescue Me

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

  Excerpted from “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats

  “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

  Bible, Matthew 10:16 (KJV)

  ONE

  Eden, Unplanned Journeys

  My mother used to say that the only constant in life is change. I would nod like I understood, but I really didn’t. I loved my life in Sunny City, New Jersey. Nothing ever changed, but I never wished for change. My father would occasionally teach me history that wasn’t approved by Saved America’s Bureau of Patriotic Education, but those lessons only made me grateful for the relatively easy life I led. Unfortunately, for me, one sunny day in September, everything changed.

  The day started pleasantly enough. My mother and I were baking cookies with my two best friends, Mary and Eliza.

  “Eden! Stop eating the cookie dough!” my mother admonished.

  “Sorry, it was just a taste to make sure it was sweet enough,” I said.

  “It’s sweet enough,” my mom said, but she dropped another spoonful of applesauce into the batter anyway. The price of sugar had gone up again, so we made do with the applesauce we’d made the day before.

  I was smiling in anticipation of eating warm, sweet cookies as I mixed the dough, when I heard hard footsteps on the bricked walking path that led to our front door. I was puzzled because the mailman had just left, and the footsteps did not have quite the same even rhythm of my dad’s footsteps. One side pressed a little harder on the ground than the other. There was a pause, and then I heard the doorbell ring.

  My mother wiped her hands on her apron patterned with bright red cherries and red trim and went to open the door. “Finish mixing and start putting the cookie dough on the sheet. I’ll be right back.” She inspected herself briefly in the mirror above the key table before opening the door.

  “Good Day, Mrs. Edwards. I’m Chief Home Inspector Mark Brown. I’ve come to do an inspection,” a male voice said.

  I was immediately filled with a sense of dread.

  I was born two years before the Saviors’ Revolution, a revolution precipitated and won by a group that saved America from itself. I was taught that in the past, to be an American meant you had certain freedoms. Everyone had the freedom to practice whatever religion they saw fit. Women could live alone and had the right to vote. They could even be unwed mothers. The group called America’s Saviors believed those freedoms to be false choices, choices not sanctioned by the one true living God. I never could find the biblical basis for all of Saved America’s beliefs, but I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to point this out to anyone.

  After the revolution, the new Saved America had hired thousands of inspectors to enforce the new government’s home morality rules. Inspector Brown was one of those selected to inspect homes in our small town. He now led a team of Sunny City agents who issued tickets with monetary fines for moral infractions such as an unclean house, unapproved literature, or a rebellious spirit. Not surprisingly, most homes were issued tickets. How else would the inspectors get paid? Still, no one dared protest too loudly. Too many unpaid tickets or major-cause infractions would lead to being branded an untouchable. Never had I been home during an inspection. My parents always arranged for me to be somewhere else when the inspections occurred.

  Looking across the kitchen into the living room, I had a good view of our guest. Inspector Brown was a deceptively mild-looking man: medium height, medium build, neutral tan-colored suit and tie, brownish eyes and hair. The brown hair only had a few gray hairs. If a person was given a picture of him and then asked to describe him with their eyes closed, they would be hard-pressed to come up with any distinguishing features. His mild sartorial choices did little to ease my discomfort.

  I looked at Mary and Eliza, but they seemed to notice nothing amiss.

  “Oh! Please come in.” My mother was using her determined bright voice. “Someone was just here about a month or so ago.”

  “Yes, I like to do random follow-up inspections. I’m sure you have nothing to worry about, Mrs. Edwards.” Inspector Brown smiled a most insincere smile as he continued to contaminate our house by walking further into it.

  “Oh, how lovely. Cookie baking!” Inspector Brown came to stand behind us girls as we continued putting measured bits of cookie dough onto the waiting baking sheets. He moved a little closer to me and seemed to be looking over my shoulder. I could feel the heat from his body. His cologne was so sharp it felt like someone had taken a stiletto straight through my nose and into my now-aching head.

  He moved even closer, surprising me. I dropped my spoonful of cookie dough on the table instead of the baking sheet. Mary and Eliza looked at us, their spoons paused midair.

  “Shall I show you the house, or do you want to tour without me in your way?” my mother interjected. I had never heard her voice so bright and brittle.

  “You know, I don’t think I need to see anything else today,” Inspector Brown said as he ran a finger down my arm. “Perhaps you should dress your daughter more modestly, Mrs. Edwards. It is one of the more important virtues. Don’t you agree?”

  I was wearing a pale-blue short-sleeved summer dress fastened with red heart-shaped buttons down the front and finished with red scalloped trim around the neck and hemlines. I was thirteen and starting to fill out, so the dress was slightly snug across my chest and hips. It was warm in the kitchen, so I’d taken off the cardigan I had worn earlier.

  The inspector’s words made me feel ashamed and smeared. Inside my heart, I could also feel a
nger gathering like clouds before a storm. My anger scared me, and I focused my eyes straight down to the table and prayed silently in my head for him to leave.

  “Yes, of course,” my mother replied. She told me to go and change as she walked Inspector Brown to the door. Apparently, he only had time to inspect me and not the house.

  As I went upstairs to change, I noticed my mom did not ask if he wanted tea or coffee. She usually offered guests something, wanting them to feel welcome in our home. Maybe that was just the case for invited guests. When I came back downstairs, dressed in a loose-fitting brown dress and sweater, Inspector Brown had left.

  My mother looked at me and said, “I have a headache. I’m going to lie down.”

  Surprised, I looked after her with my mouth hanging open.

  “Is your mom ok?” Eliza asked, her warm gray eyes filled with concern.

  “I guess,” I replied, wondering if I should go up and check on her.

  “We’re not supposed to be unsupervised,” Mary said primly as she finished putting the last spoonful of cookie dough on her baking sheet.

  I winced a little. I liked Mary as a friend, but sometimes I felt that she liked rules more than she liked people.

  “What do you want us to do? Call our mommies and daddies and tattle on Mrs. Edwards?” Eliza asked sharply. “Besides, is that really the most important thing right now?”

  I didn’t want to talk about Inspector Brown. “Let’s just finish baking so you’ll have cookies to take home,” I said. I wanted to say words that would put my friends and me at ease with each other again, but worrying about my mother and Inspector Brown prevented me from formulating the right ones. In the end, we sat silently as the cookies baked, Mary and Eliza exchanging wordless glances. Despite the delicious aroma of baking cookies, the happy contentment of the fall afternoon had all but disappeared from our sunny kitchen.

  After Eliza and Mary left with their brothers who came to walk them home, I started to clean up and put the remaining cookies away. My mother came down when I was almost finished.

  I wanted to ask her about Inspector Brown’s visit, but she was wiping down the already clean kitchen table and chairs quite briskly. The table was long and thick, made of repurposed cedar wood, and could withstand her vigorous scrubbing. When she got to the chairs, however, I feared the chairs might splinter from the force with which they were being rammed back into their proper place.

  My mother could be quite cutting when she was angry, so after the cookies were put away, I busied myself with watering the pots of thyme, mint, and rosemary hanging next to the window by the kitchen sink. Then I heard a strangled sob and turned around sharply.

  My mother was crying, her head in her hands and her shoulders heaving. I was at a loss and more than dismayed. I was still a child and didn’t want my mother to prove fallible.

  I went over and hugged her from behind, my cheek resting on her back. She sighed, and some of the tension eased out of her. But when she turned to face me, her eyes were sad and her demeanor a little wilted.

  “Honey,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  So, we walked. We walked down our block and over walking paths of the Sunny City Gardens. Normally, I loved the gardens. They were meticulously groomed, like old English gardens, with row after row of tamed greenery that was somehow serenity-inducing. There was nothing I liked better than to find a quiet space in the gardens to be alone with my thoughts. Of course, I was never truly alone for I always had a chaperone—usually my mother—and there were always other serenity seekers in the park as well. It was more like companionable solitude.

  Today, though, the beautiful gardens with their lovely floral scents and flitting birds and buzzing bees only served to highlight my inner anxiety. I was almost angry that the usual pleasure I found in the gardens had been stolen from me by Inspector Brown.

  As I walked with my mother, I waited for her to say something that would make everything all right, that would explain Inspector Brown. My waiting was in vain. My mother led us to a sturdy bench under a thick tree with a huge canopy. Both of us sat. I rested my head on her shoulder, and she put her arm around my shoulders.

  “Your father and I have decided you should go away to school,” she said.

  I jerked my head up and looked at her like she had two heads. I had always been homeschooled by my mom. She didn’t even let me do Sunday school without her until I was eight. Now, five years later, she wanted to send me away to school?

  “I don’t want to go away to school,” I replied, more confused than defiant.

  “I don’t want you to go either, but I think—we think it would be best for you. We considered sending you last year, but we agreed to send you for the fall term coming up. You are almost old enough to be married,” she replied.

  “No one gets married until they are at least sixteen, and that’s only if they have to,” I retorted.

  “The legal age of marriage is fourteen with parental consent,” she said. “You are too young to understand how deeply a man’s soul can be corrupted by evil. Trust me when I say that if Inspector Brown wanted to marry you, he could, regardless of your age. Most likely, he will . . . he’ll . . .” she stuttered. She took a breath and plunged ahead. “He’ll treat you as his wife without actually marrying you and accuse you of the sin of enticing him.”

  “But that would make me a . . .” I said, stunned.

  “Exactly,” my mother replied.

  “How will going away to school stop him?” I asked.

  My mother’s eyes slid away from mine. “Because the school we’ve chosen doesn’t allow men in at all. Not even to work at the school. They have good security.”

  “But what about when I come home?” I asked, wondering if all my family vacations would be spent looking over my shoulder for Inspector Brown.

  “No, I will come to visit you, and we could meet up with your father off campus.” But she still wasn’t looking at me when she said it. “Do you remember Ruth and Ruby?”

  I nodded. They were girls from the neighborhood who were a couple of years older than me, so while I had spoken to them in passing, I hadn’t had any prolonged conversations with either of them. They were brown girls like me, born before the revolution and adopted afterward. I hadn’t seen them or their parents for a while. “Did they move?”

  My mother replied, “No one here has seen them recently. They were taken in the middle of the night, and the last anyone heard, they were in Untouchable City.”

  I gasped in shock. I had never actually been to Untouchable City, but I had heard the name whispered about in such horrified tones that I imagined the city as some kind of dirty gray hell, filled with despairing, unrepentant sinners.

  “For what? They seemed like nice girls.”

  My mother just shook her head. “They didn’t just seem like nice girls. They were nice girls. Their only crime was that they couldn’t fight Inspector Brown.” I noticed that my mother lowered her voice and looked around cautiously when she said Inspector Brown’s name. “Their parents didn’t have a lot of money.”

  “Well, we’re not poor,” I said.

  “But we’re not rich,” my mom replied. “Fortunately, your Aunt Adeline has agreed to pay for your schooling. Isn’t that a blessing?”

  “Yes,” I answered automatically, still stuck on the fact that my parents wanted to send me to school.

  “Speaking of blessed,” my mother said, her real smile returning a little. “Give me your purse so I can put your pocket money in it.”

  Before I could pout and say I could put money in my own purse, my mom handed me back my purse and was standing up, signaling an end to our conversation. I sullenly followed as she walked, resenting being treated like a three-year-old and confused about the whole conversation.

  I expected my transition to school to be as well-managed as all other aspects of my life. A master to-do list would be written. Clothes selected, washed, ironed, mended as needed, and neatly folded. A third-hand
set of tan and light-beige luggage pulled out from the closet. A church “send-off” where all the members of the church said a prayer for my safety and well-being.

  I loved our church, even though I had to admit that I loved the socializing and potlucks as much as, if not more than, the sermons. Since sugar had been ridiculously expensive the past few years due to a sugar cane disease, special church events were normally the only times I was privileged to enjoy treats made with real sugar.

  So, I was surprised when my mom walked us to a very expensive dessert and ice cream parlor and told me to order what I wanted. Unfortunately, devouring spoonful after spoonful of chocolate ice cream distracted me from noticing the oddity of the situation. My mother never splurged, not ever. But today she sat with a funny little smile on her face and asked me if I wanted another cup of ice cream. As I debated whether it would be too gluttonous to say yes, in walked my Aunt Adeline.

  “Eden! Clarissa! So lovely to see you both!” We rose from the table and exchanged hugs and air kisses—an affectation of my aunt’s.

  “What are you doing here?” my mother asked.

  “Just came to get—Oh! I forgot my wallet in my car. I’ll just get it and come back. Eden—you want to walk with me?”

  I looked at my mother, who nodded yes. I grabbed my blue-jean purse out of habit—my mother always lectured me if I left my purse—and followed my aunt. Out in the parking lot, Aunt Adeline had parked her small two-seater between two big vans that weren’t exactly minding the lines.

  “I hope they don’t hit your car getting out,” I said.

  “I hope not either. Eden—can you go to the right and reach in and get my wallet? My hips won’t fit through as gracefully as yours will.”

  I rolled my eyes and moved as my aunt had instructed. Before I could react, the side door on the van behind me opened and large rough hands grabbed me about the waist and mouth and pulled me into the van. I heard my aunt gasp, but then the van door slammed shut.