Nothing Keeps

by Helen Dunn

This tale begins in ancient China in the mid 1800's and revolves around a Chinese girl named Yue, who along with her widowed mother, has to flee from their small village due to an enemy invasion. To keep her daughter safe, the mother disguises her as a young man called Gan. After Yue/Gan opts to become the valet of an Englishman, Rev. Lord Lerwick, and leave China, she discovers how strange her employer is. When Gan & Lerwick's wife, Madeleine, fall in love - both their lives are in danger. Who is Lerwick, what are his terrible secrets, and can they survive him? He was making his way, followed by the women, through a maze of hallways to some stairs that led below the house. It was a section of the cellar that was never used to my knowledge. I had never been there, since the foods and wines which I fetched from time to time were in an entirely different area of storage, nor had I ever seen any of the servants go there. Staying in the shadows, nooks and crannies provided, I watched and listened discreetly, my puzzlement steadily growing as I followed behind them. Since there was no one in the house except Lerwick and myself, and I had been invited to join him, what reason was there for him to take them to the cellar? I suppose, for that matter, there was no reason for me to conceal my presence since I had been invited to participate, and yet somehow I felt it best to do so. There was a lock on the door to this area of the cellar and Lord Lerwick produced a key.

140 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 24, 2011

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Helen Dunn is the author of “Untamed Women of Yesteryear” published by L-Books – which received honorable mention by the Golden Crown Literary Society. She has also been nominated for Favorite Lesbian Fiction Historical – by the Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Awards group for 2011. She has written several anthologies and novels, as well as once writing a newspaper column. Helen Dunn grew up in an environment that was almost 19th century, living on dirt roads in houses that had no running water, and an ice box rather than a refrigerator with her mother cooking on a wood burning stove, while her father farmed with mules. Many of her writings have historical settings and paranormal elements in them.