The Mysterious Mail Order Bride by Amanda Davis

Author:Amanda Davis [Davis, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Pines Sweet Romance

5

The conditions in the orphanage where five-year-old Victoria had called home were deplorable. There were rats and fleas in every corner of the crumbling structure which housed hundreds of children from all walks of life. Food was both scarce and inedible, the nuns unflinching and the strap not spared for even the smallest infraction. Sickness and cries ran rampant through the echoing building and Victoria was often plagued by nightmares that she would wake and the child sleeping at her side would be deceased. It happened far more than she cared to think about, but the horrors were inescapable.

Victoria could not recall what had become of her parents. Even in her adulthood, she had nary a vague recollection of who they had been. Whether she was abandoned as an infant purposely, or left due to their deaths, young Victoria had managed to forsake that aspect of her life, as though she knew inherently that she could not waste her inner strength on the past. The nuns provided her with no answers and asking only led to certain punishment. For a lively, fighting spirit like Victoria Rainier, beatings were frequent, almost commonplace, and the child grew to despise the very people meant to care for her.

When Victoria was ten, she heard rumors of the terrifying orphan train, a locomotive packed with helpless children and sent across the countryside to be left in the wilds of the west.

It was not until she was much older that she realized that the trains were meant to find proper homes for otherwise hopeless cases. But, by then, she had already escaped the place of her darkest hours and retreated to the streets of New York where she became a street urchin like so many others, avoiding capture by the Children’s Aid Society.

The escape itself had not been difficult, the nuns far too occupied with the overpopulation to heed the comings and goings of one small girl. It was remaining alive on the rough streets of New York City which Victoria found the biggest challenge.

While she found a small group of like-minded children with whom she stole and begged for pennies, she also knew they could not be trusted and would just as quickly steal from her as they would a finely dressed man on the street.

They were a haggard bunch, far beyond their years, dirty and lice-infested. Life on the street was not much better than in the orphanage, but the beatings were fewer and only at the hands of older boys who demanded what they had and took it with force.

She was ten and six when she finally realized that she would perish in a New York alleyway, unloved and forgotten. Victoria knew if she wanted a real chance to survive, she needed to move west, away from the cesspool she had always known.

Without a word to any of the other urchins, Victoria jumped on a cargo train, hoping it would take her far from the impending cold of winter. The train stopped in Ohio.

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