Novel Title: Disquieting
Time Setting: 1887
Genre: Historical
Minimum Word Goal: 90,000
Timespan: January–March
Locations: Roseburgh1 & Emerald Wood2, Oregon
Main Characters: Matthew Heath, Vera Elkin
Background Information:
The youngest of three sons and seven children, Matthew was born about three weeks early owing to the tragic death of his oldest brother, which prompted his mother into early labour that, along with the difficulties of bringing him into the world, nearly claimed her life as well.
She survived, but was nevertheless weakened by the difficult birth and her grief at the death of one of her precious children, which made her an easy victim to the cold that she caught when Matthew was three months old.
As a result, Matthew was sent to his youngest maternal aunt who’d had a baby around the same time he’d been born until he no longer needed milk, at which time he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, where his other siblings had been sent following his mother’s death.
The summer before his second birthday — much to the shock and even scandal of the community — Matthew’s father remarried a young woman who’d recently moved to the town in Indiana which he served as a Methodist pastor from Maine, with whom he went on to sire ten more children.
Of these ten children, only six survived past their fifth birthdays, and all six of those were daughters, which left Matthew and his brother — who was five years his senior — as the only sons his father had.
Early on, it became clear even to Matthew that his father meant to make pastors out of him and his brother, which was something his brother quickly proved to have an enthusiasm for, taking up preaching in the streets of the growing town they called home as a teenager, before deciding to take the train to nearby towns to preach there as well.
Matthew wasn’t particularly interested in preaching, in part because the impassioned way his father preached terrified him much of the time, and so put less effort into preparing for the pastorate than his brother.
When Matthew was thirteen his brother, being eighteen, left for England — their father’s homeland, from which only he and one sister had emigrated years ago — to attend the very same seminary their father had attended. Before he could complete his first year of studies, Matthew’s brother took ill and died, which immediately shifted his father’s hopes of having his footsteps followed in squarely onto Matthew.
In addition to wanting Matthew to become a pastor, it became evident that his father also expected him to be exactly like his brother, which prompted Matthew to take the train to nearby towns just to have some time away from his father.
As a result, he ended up meeting a Baptist pastor who was very different from his father — and not just because of the generally minor differences of belief between Methodists and Baptists — being a man who was gentle and thoughtful, as well as not inducing fear in Matthew when he became impassioned, unlike his father.
Courtesy of the pastor, Matthew learned that, despite having attended church all his life, he wasn’t actually a Christian, and he was actually prompted to repent and become one as a result of the pastor’s teaching, as well as eventually coming to believe that he was, in fact, called to be a pastor — but definitely not a pastor who was in any way like his father.
Since his father was a very strict Methodist — to the point that, when Matthew’s youngest older sister fell in love with a Baptist and wanted to marry him, she was disowned — Matthew did his best to prevent his father from realising that he wasn’t inclined to be a Methodist pastor, which led to his being sent, as his brother, to the Methodist seminary in England.
In England, however, Matthew discovered that his many paternal relatives weren’t nearly as strict as his father and aunt — indeed, they revealed that his father and aunt had left England in disgust at the fact that the rest of their family weren’t as strict as they were — and was given much help by them in going to a different seminary, following which he returned to Indiana.
Shortly after his return Matthew was informed by a member of the Baptist church whose pastor had led him to repentance and faith, and who had become a mentor to him thereafter, that a Baptist church in a nearby town was in need of a pastor, prompting him to look into taking on the role.
At the church, Matthew ended up meeting a lovely young woman by the name of Jael — who was, in fact, so lovely that he stumbled through his sermon because he was distracted by her — and after accepting the position to be the church’s pastor, he pursued courtship of her, which was granted by her father.
Before they could be married, however, Matthew’s sister who’d been disowned died in childbirth, which sorrowed Matthew greatly as she’d been his closest sibling in age, and the two had always been close friends.
Nevertheless, a little over a year after his sister’s death, Matthew was married to Jael by the pastor who’d mentored him, and a year after that Jael became pregnant, giving birth to a son they named Azriel.
Two years later Jael conceived again, enduring another long pregnancy of bedrest and nausea before she gave birth to a daughter.
The birth of their daughter was more difficult than that of their son, and Jael died rather swiftly afterwards, which devastated Matthew, who named their daughter Keziah, which was the name they’d agreed on for a daughter beforehand.
Losing his wife took a severe toll on Matthew, to the point that he felt it would be best for him to resign from the pastorate of the church than to leave the congregation waiting for however many months — or maybe years, he wasn’t sure — it would take for him to recover enough that he could preach again.
Over the ensuing months, Matthew quickly found himself being hassled by his father, who meant to marry him off to a good Methodist girl as soon as possible, despite the fact that no other people Matthew knew who had been widowed thought it was a good idea for him to go rushing into another marriage like his father had.
As a result, Matthew decided that he needed to put a more considerable distance between himself and his father, eventually concluding that San Francisco would be suitably far enough away.
Owing to the First Transcontinental Railroad making travel to San Francisco quick and easy for Matthew, however, he also realised that it could make it quick and easy for his father to come visit him, so although he told his father he was going to San Francisco, he privately decided that he would find somewhere else to go in the area of San Francisco where he and his children could have the time and space he felt he, at least, needed to recover from his wife’s death without his father trying to marry him off to every eligible Methodist young woman his father could find.
Although born the third of five daughters and sixth of nine children to her parents, Vera is the younger of two daughters and third of only four children who are still living.
She was born in Oregon, where her parents met, as her maternal grandparents had taken the Oregon Trail west from Iowa in 1850, and her father had taken the California Trail from Vermont in pursuit of gold three years later, but had given up dreams of wealth on the journey because of all the deaths by disease and accident he’d helplessly witnessed along the way.
He’d sought out a medical school, but not found one, so had meant to just visit his sister who’d moved to Oregon with her husband before going back to Vermont to the same medical school at which his father had studied before him, but had ended up staying long enough to court Vera’s mother and marry her before pursuing his medical studies, after which they and the children they’d welcomed during his studies returned to Oregon.
Since the doctor in the town where they’d met and been married had died while her father had been studying, he took up the vacant practise in the town, and thus didn’t merely deliver all of his own children, but many nieces, nephews, and even some great-nieces and great-nephews.
Like their mother before them, Vera and her older sister were quickly renowned for their beauty and were, thus, the target of much masculine affection, which Vera’s outgoing sister relished in — a little too much at times — while Vera, being more reserved and also four years her sister’s junior, preferred to be anywhere else.
A young man who came to work in the local bank, and was from a long line of Massachusetts financiers, ended up winning Vera’s sister’s hand in marriage, and the two were married late in the summer after Vera’s oldest brother died at the age of nineteen in a workplace accident, the fifth and most recent of Vera’s siblings to perish.
Unfortunately it wasn’t until after Vera’s sister had miscarried all three pregnancies she had — the third rendering her unable to conceive again and nearly claiming her life, but not succeeding — that Vera’s family, aided by her oldest living brother having decided to follow his father and grandfather into the medical profession and gone to Vermont, learned that Vera’s brother-in-law, although from a family of financiers, had been disowned for a rampant gambling problem that he’d managed to keep hidden from Vera’s family.
It was suspected, but unproven, that Vera’s sister and brother-in-law had gotten into regular arguments about money in which her sister had been struck by her husband, and that these blows may’ve contributed to all three miscarriages.
In addition, he gradually cut off contact between Vera’s sister and her family so as to hide who he really was from them — including moving to Salem during his wife’s final pregnancy — to the point that Vera and her family have no idea whether her sister is still alive, forget what kind of health she might be in.
As the one who’d had the final say in approving the union, Vera’s father was deeply devastated by the discovery of his poor choice of husband for his daughter, and had no intentions of making the same mistake with Vera, thus he turned away many of the young men who sought her hand — not that Vera minded, as she couldn’t say that most of the candidates appealed to her.
When a young man who’d been rejected by her sister, and thus been denied her hand in marriage by Vera’s father, discovered that his sweetheart was in an unhappy and even abusive marriage to a gambler while he remained single and pining for her love, he reported the information to the town and managed to turn many people who had once been friends against Vera’s family.
Although none of Vera’s relatives turned against them, Vera’s parents decided to leave the town, heading first to Vermont to meet a young woman Vera’s brother had been writing to them about.
They remained in Vermont until the young woman had become Vera’s first-ever sister-in-law, following which the couple joined them in heading west, with both Vera’s father and brother seeking places to establish a medical practise.
Vera’s father ended up being directed by the doctor at Roseburgh to the small logging town of Emerald Wood, where he established a practise in which Vera, her mother, and even her younger brother functioned as assistants to him.
Since the town was populated predominantly by rough-and-tumble loggers, some of whom were old enough to be her father, Vera despaired of meeting a young man whom she would want as a husband.
Her spirits weren’t improved any by the fact that her sister-in-law — who was the same age as her — conceived and bore children to her brother, giving her her first nephews, as she wanted to be having children too, but she couldn’t without a husband.
Shortly after the birth of her second nephew, however, her hope was rekindled, as the aging owner of the local hotel’s young nephew arrived from New Hampshire to help him operate his hotel.
After her father enlisted his family in Vermont to vet the young man’s character and found it to be fully suitable and devoid of anything even remotely comparable to her brother-in-law’s gambling problem, prompting him to approve their relationship, Vera found herself enjoying the company of the handsome, charming, friendly, and overall wonderful Carlisle Pickford.
She was particularly ecstatic when, late in the summer, he asked her to be his bride, with their plans set for a wedding in the autumn of 1887, for which they have since been planning avidly, with plans to build a house in Emerald Wood near the hotel, in which to raise their children whom Vera is looking forward to — although she hasn’t named them and determined their birthdays like the gossips in town have done.
Pronunciations:
Jael: yaeehl
Azriel: ahzreeehl
Keziah: kehzayah
Carlisle: carlyle
1known in the present as Roseburg, the H was removed from the name in 1894; 2fictitious community
