Damned Without Cause

2016 | Fiction & Poetry

William is an honest hardworking agricultural labourer with strong family values and thanks God for his blessings. His beloved wife, Rachel, has given him four healthy children, Henry, David, John and Martha, an achievement in the Victorian era when miscarriages, stillbirths and even death of the mother in childbirth was not uncommon. And yet William has an uneasy sense of foreboding which has its origins in John's birth. His three boys, although they'd shared the same womb, couldn't be more different. Fate and providence is destined to be intolerably cruel and unkind to William and Rachel. Life is not easy for them in these austere times. William is lucky to have steady farm work and the support of an extended family, not least that of his father, Samuel, an old soldier who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. As a treat one day Samuel takes the children to a local horse fair, a trip that was to set in train a set of circumstances which would have far reaching consequences for all the family. That day Henry enlists as a dragoon, David has an epileptic fit and John's cruel nature is exposed.

The family struggle to keep David's epilepsy a secret, as the illness is regarded as a sign of lunacy, and the future seems bleak. But worse is to come as John's dark and evil nature starts to shape and control all their lives. The depth of his depravity has no limits.

Stephen Bloy (Author)