Gathering Clouds: The Nethergate Trilogy

Ambition, conflict and cruelty vie for pride of place as the storm clouds gather about Nethergate Hall whilst America hurtles down the long spiral towards the maelstrom of civil war. Silas Killcaid, the cruel, vicious and vindictive overseer to the Nethergate Tobacco Plantation, maintains his iron grip upon the slave community and later too, even upon the last of the ill-fated Masters of Nethergate. The story explores the stresses within the slave community, its loyalties, and its betrayals and the ingenuity of individual slaves to create their own freedom. It reveals too, the bonds which can exist between Master and slave and the helplessness of the slave when facing a white man’s justice. It highlights the dignity and integrity achieved by some, which transcends even their servitude. The story revolves around the bond of brotherhood between George the Master’s son and Matthew, a bastard slave brutally and forcefully fathered by George’s uncle with Ruth, a beautiful young mulatto slave girl, who is the personal slave to Mary, the first Mistress of Nethergate. That bond is tested to the point of death, when Matthew escapes and is accused of murder, but then has to shelter the slave girl lover of George in his secret hideout in the depths of the bayou. All this takes place within the wider conflict between Yankee and Confederate. The tale reaches its climax with an attempt on the life of Killcaid at Nethergate and the imminent exposure by the enigmatic Confederate Colonel Gladstone, in the household of Henry Bragg in New York, of the secret shared between Ruth and Mary. This acts as a springboard to the second book in the trilogy.