A young journalism graduate, becomes a speech writer for a Senator during a hotly contested Presidential contest between a woman Senator from California and her Republican opponent from North Carolina. He’s brought to London with his Senator for a conference on the European monetary system. His grandmother asks him to go to the small hamlet of Hamerton, a place she herself has not seen. Doing so he discovers a family, a family history that spans generations, and love.

Note from the author: The genesis for this novel was a four page framed document on my mother’s dining room wall. It was a timeline from my own great grandfather’s landing in San Francisco in 1873, through one generation in Nova Scotia, to Northern England where it was documented through the Peerage records over the generations to the year of 1170. This had been compiled sometime in the 1930’s long before any of the current methods were available.

Before my mother’s passing, I wrote this book for her as a fictional account of the family’s beginnings. The Hamertons are easily traced to Richard du Hamerton in 1170, but there had to be a beginning, so I wove one into the story. The novel is written around a acrimonious Presidential campaign that was being waged at the time. Mom was a voracious reader but objected to having to turn the pages of a manuscript. She only half suspected that I had used her personality, work ethic, and family values in creating one of the characters in the novel. This novel was not published prior to her passing.

Excerpt

The next morning at 9 AM, Rodney stepped out of the Mayfair’s lobby and onto the stone landing that separated the entrance from the sidewalk. In less than a minute, a boxy black cab pulled up to the curb in response to the desk clerk's call. Rodney, as soon as the black sedan stopped, bounded down the step and into the cab.

"Yer for the airport, then?" asked the cabbie, more to confirm that Rodney was the correct fare than to ascertain the destination.

"That's right.” As Stoner closed the door, a man walking past the cab bumped into a woman, spilling his load of packages on the sidewalk near the rear of the vehicle. Rodney could see the back of the man's head as he fumbled under the rear tires of the taxi.

"Hold on," shouted Stoner as the driver was about to flip the meter. "I forgot my directions and my map. Wait please. I just have to run to my room."

"Bloody Yank," muttered the cabbie as Rodney disappeared into the hotel.

"Taxi!" shouted a man from across the street. Dodging traffic, the man ran in front of the cab and slid into the passenger’s seat, closing the door behind him. “Take me to Henley's on Whitover Street, please."

The driver hesitated only a second before answering, "Right on, guv.” A bird in the hand was a good proverb, especially when it applied to fares. He could be stuck at the airport forever before he got a fare back into town, whereas short hops were much more lucrative. The hotel could phone for another cab. He started the meter and took off down the street.

"Damn," said Rodney as he came back out of the hotel and saw that the cab was gone. After looking first toward the right for another cab on the crowded street, he went back to the concierge and had him call another.

Rodney had chosen the airport to rent his car because it was on the way to the hamlet of Hamerton and because it would relieve him of the chore of driving through the maze of downtown London on the wrong side of the road. He planned on taking the underground back to the Mayfair.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, joining the flow of heavy traffic, Rodney heard horns honking in response to a traffic snarl a few blocks ahead. To his disappointment, the cab in which he was now driving was a newer model, without the grace or style or the porcelain roses in the side vases of the original black humpback vehicle. Rodney was in England for the first time and he wanted to soak up as much of the local color as possible.

As they edged forward, Rod saw first a column of smoke, then a shell of black metal, doors blown away, with the entire trunk section missing. A chill went up his spine as he looked at the remnant of the cab and saw that the small porcelain rose had somehow survived the destruction and was tilting askew past the jagged metal that had once been the passenger's rear door.