Constance Emmett was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in the lower Hudson Valley by a family of great readers. It was natural that she became a great reader and even a child writer. Her studies and career as a biologist took time and attention away from her writing completely, but after viewing a televised interview of novelist Sarah Waters explaining that she’d written Tipping the Velvet because she wanted to write what she wanted to read, Constance began writing on weekends and has published three novels to date. Constance’s fiction incorporates her love of origins, particularly her own ancestors. She creates characters who experience dislocation, but have the resilience common to all survivors, often finding redemption. She lives with her wife and their dog in the rural foothills of the Berkshires, Western Massachusetts. Constance holds dual American and Republic of Ireland citizenship.
I am the secretary of the Pudding Hollow Cemetery Association (the governing body of the Pudding Hollow Cemetery, one of the two non-town-owned cemeteries in Hawley, Massachusetts). If the position sounds sedentary, it is only partially so. I spend a lot of time on my feet, walking around the cemetery with the schematic of the graves, probing plots for unheralded occupants, and measuring, marking, and placing flags at the veterans’ graves.
The cemetery dates from 1771, when the resident colonials living in these hills did not care to carry the caskets of their dead very far. Every gesture in those days required backbreaking effort by woman, man, and beast. It’s a tiny cemetery, situated on a hill, too steep and too small to farm. Tucked into the surrounding hills that are a lush green in the warm months, aflame then quenched into a muted brown each autumn, and white and gray during the long winters, it is always beautiful.
It is very quiet in our cemetery, except when the field below is being mown. Mostly there is only birdsong to disturb the silence, but often there is nothing but the sound of the wind. The air is nothing short of delicious, like silk in your lungs; clean and sweet smelling. It is a place for the living as much as the dead, and as I move myself around sorting the rows of headstones into some sort of grid, I find that the special quality of the quiet has entered me; a peaceful intruder.
Our family members are buried there, and my wife and I will join them, nestled together in between our mothers. I am aware that I will join them, that I will move from life to join the dead in this cemetery. Being human, I can’t quite imagine it, even though I am certain it will come, as it has and will for everyone.
Still, I am happy rambling around the place I know very well now, comforted to see the family names of friends and neighbors, saddened to read the names of men and boys who left New England to join the Civil War, and were shipped back to this small and quiet place.
There are Revolutionary War veterans in the cemetery, but those headstones are now illegible and list like aged teeth.
When I first visited this cemetery, I thought of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, Our Town. In Act III of the play, the dead in the Grover’s Corners cemetery speak to one another, and one of them, the young protagonist, Emily, wants to go back to her life for a day, just a day, to recapture her lost life. The dead warn her not to go, that it won’t be what she hopes for, but she goes. Emily’s visit to the day of her twelfth birthday is agony for her because she can’t go back, of course, and she asks in anguish what we all ask, what we all wish we would do:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?
The Stage Manager, who serves as Greek Chorus, answers:
No. Pause. The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.
I am reminded of Emily’s question every time I visit our cemetery and always leave vowing to realize my life while I live it -- every, every minute. Being neither a saint nor a poet, I fail.
To find out more about Constance Emmett’s historical thriller, keep scrolling.
Title BOUND
Author Constance Emmett
Genre Historical Thriller
Publisher Next Chapter
Book Blurb
In 1775, three young, indentured servants cross the Atlantic into a land bracing for revolution. They find brief sanctuary along the Hudson River, as new loyalties form amid forbidden love and the first sparks of war. But after a death at sea follows them ashore, accusations shatter their peace, forcing them to make impossible choices between survival and truth. As the revolution spreads, quiet acts of courage and a love that defies the rules of the age offer them a chance at redemption. But at what price? A richly atmospheric, suspenseful adventure set in the American Revolutionary War, Constance Emmett’s BOUND is a story of love lived in the shadows, and the cost of claiming one’s own life when the surrounding world denies it.
Excerpt
The ship’s more acute roll and pitch brought Harry out of his reverie. After his first taste of fine brandy or whiskey, he’d no idea which, Harry shook himself free of thoughts of Somerset and His Honor’s estate. He left the sleeping Richard and arrived up on deck in time to see the fingers of England and Wales falling back into the distance to slip off the earth. I may never see England again. Tears stung as he filled his lungs with the salty air. But perhaps Old Carter was right—I may find opportunity in America. I’ve made myself plain to Richard Lloyd, so maybe he’ll leave me be. I’ll see he does, the bugger.
Watching the afternoon settle as they sailed west, he ignored the cold and sat looking at the sea, sheepskins from Richard’s cabin wound around him like a shawl. Out of the corner of his deep-set blue eye, he saw the small woman who’d accompanied them from the estate. He gave her no encouragement. She kept her distance and hid when a sailor approached Harry with a plate and a tankard.
“Ye’ll see the coast of Cork to the north if it’s clear in a couple of days’ time—Cornwall tomorra, mebbe. Cold is always clear till dusk.” The sailor’s straw hat was tied under his chin, his broad feet bare and thick legs bare to his knees, where wide canvas pants took over up to a singlet and short jacket.
“Where? Which way?”
The sailor pointed. “North for Ireland, south for Cornwall. This way, that way, man! Do you not know north from south?”
“Where are we now?”
“Bristol Channel, the Severn Sea, heading for St. George’s Channel and the open Celtic Sea, but we’ll not reach it till tomorrow. Soon after we pass the Old Head Light of Cork, we’ll enter the North Atlantic, but that’ll be three days away now. You may see a beacon from the Irish coast sooner. It all depends on our weather. Ye’re not allowed up on deck after dark, mind, and if you’re caught by the night watch, there’ll be hell to pay. But you can look from the top of your compartment hatch. I’m off down the galley for me own vittles now.” He padded down the deck.
Harry sipped ale from the tankard and stared at the sea and the passing ships and boats. A fisherman on his small bobbing boat waved, and Harry waved back.
The small woman came closer. “I was called Kate at Hizzoner’s, and like yourself, I’m travelling with Alun. Called Kate by them, but me name’s Caitlín.”
Looking at her, he said, “I know you by Kate, Kate in the kitchen. But you’re called what now? I’m Harry.”
“Aye, it’s Caitlín.” She leaned down and spoke loudly, “KotchLEAN. I know who you are, you’re Harry. The man at the forge.”
She sat down next to him. “Can I have some grub? Please. Only me stomach is stuck to me spine, and there’s no supper going below. Not for the likes of me.” Small and sturdy, her complexion was fair, her eyes a light grey, nearly colorless, large, under dark brows. Raven black hair escaped from under the top of her enveloping woven yellow-brown shawl, etched by red lines. Shivering, she pulled the shawl tightly around her.
A violent pitch of the ship sent them knocking together like ninepins. The ale slopped.
Caitlín righted herself and said, “I knew the calm wouldn’t last. I’ve been on these seas before. What’d they give ye?”
“Ale, hard cheese and biscuits.” He handed her the tankard. “They’re not feeding the women?”
“At least ye didn’t spill all of it.” She drank from the tankard before handing it back to him. “No, I didn’t notice them handing ‘round what they give you.” They sat companionably on the listing deck and crunched the hard crackers. “Dear God, these are like rocks.” She moved the cracker from under a prominent canine to her back molars.
Caitlín stuck her feet out from under her long brown woollen dress and snowy petticoats. Harry envied her neat black boots.
“You’re with Master Richard Lloyd, then,” he said.
“Aye. I’d no choice, I’m bound to his father, like you, like Alun. Better the devil you know…though God knows what America’s like. I hear they’re all savages.”
“I’d no choice either.”
“I didn’t want to be sold on in England, nor go home to Ireland, bound as I am…”
“Ah, you’re Irish…that sailor told me we’d see Ireland in three days or so if the weather holds. Sheepshead Light in Cork.”
“I’d love a glimpse of Ireland. Even Cork.” She took another quaff of ale. “What’s in the big wood chest you’ve got down the hold?”
“My tools. I’m a toolsmith and furniture maker.”
“How does such a skilled man end up bound? Alun, too, but I know his story.”
“Mine’s a long story.”
“We’ve a long journey, so.”
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)
UNIVERSAL BOOK LINK: https://books2read.com/u/bw57zG
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9WGGHRS
APPLE BOOKS: https://books.apple.com/us/book/bound/id6761527949
BARNES & NOBLE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/search?q=BOUND%20by%20Constance%20Emmett
GOOGLE BOOKS: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=AcHNEQAAQBAJ
RAKUTEN KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/bound-275
BOOKBUB: https://bit.ly/4wffEeg
GOODREADS: https://bit.ly/4n5Z3VV
Author Biography
Constance Emmett was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother’s family landed after leaving Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Irish family stories inspired her Finding Their Way Home series: Heroine of Her Own Life and the sequel Everything Will Be All Right. Constance is at work on the third book in the series and is planning a sequel to Revolutionary War era Bound, published in 2026, also based on an ancestor, Henry Emmett, an indentured servant brought to Philadelphia in 1775. She lives in rural Massachusetts and is a member of the Historical Novel Society UK/NA (and Irish Chapter), the Irish Writers Union, Irish Writers Centre and Straw Dog Writers Guild.
Social Media Links:
Instagram.com/@constancedemmett
Bluesky Constancewriter.bsky.social
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.