Tulip
A novel of love and vengeance
By Alice L. Lumbard
Written with a remarkable sense of place, Tulip tells the tale of a poor, fun-loving family, a woman scorned, and a shaman’s vengeance.
Central Asia, 1880’s. A field botanist stumbles across the rarest of tulip flowers growing in a shaman’s garden. She’s willing to sell him a bundle of tulip bulbs but first he must eat one, then make love to her (the side effects are useful, yet supernatural). After arriving in Holland, the valuable bundle goes missing. Convinced a poor, crippled dock worker is the thief, the botanist goes in hot pursuit. But when he fails to return, his son asks a constable to investigate. When the constable meets up with the dock worker’s wife and the couple’s teenaged daughter a curse is unleased, and the seven people collide in the most intimate and heart- wrenching of ways.
Coming of age, marital love and loss, and the consequences of finding treasure make Tulip an intense yet satisfying debut novel.
Excerpts from the book
And that’s when she feels them.
The wicked, wicked tulip bulbs.
She’s forgotten all about them. She’s been wearing a sack of tulip bulbs on her belly for so long, really most of the day, that they have become a part of her body. She removes her apron and hangs it on a hook near the fireplace. Curiosity gets the best of her and she takes a single tulip bulb from the apron’s pocket.
The bulb is about the size and color of an apple, but the shape imitates that of a strawberry, especially the tip. Her hunger pains revive with a vengeance. The enticing glow temps her to eat it.
Without overthinking it she peels off the remaining bits of the papery tunic. But her training as a gardener kicks in and she wonders if the bulb might still harbor diseased foreign soil. So, just to be safe, she dips it in the pot of hot water, washing and rinsing it clean. Then, without overthinking it, she bites the tip right off, and chews it right up.
Really just trying it, seeing if it might be good.
Her eyes travel to the ghostly glow of the white sails of the windmill. Next to the ancient structure an old oak tree stands. The branches form a skeletal foreground against the gathering clouds. Two large birds, eyes glittering an evil yellow, perch on the branches near the crown of the massive tree.
Letty frowns at her sinister thoughts. A skeleton? Why would she even think of that? She’s never thought of a skeleton before in all her life and can’t imagine what has caused the upsetting thoughts now. And what kind of birds are even that big? She’s sure she’s never seen their like before. And they seem to be looking directly at her. She shivers, the hairs on her arms and back of her neck stand up on their own. Its not normal, not at all.
At the dock in Holland, on the river Maas, deckhands finish the job of off-loading cargo from the hold of a large merchant sailing ship equipped with the latest model of the supplemental steam engine. The ship has recently returned from the Indian Ocean via the man-made wonder called the Suez Canal.
Jacob Vandermeer, the word-renowned botanist, exits the ship, crosses the dock, and stops beside the stack of crates the deckhands have assembled. Out of habit, he looks to the sky and then at the crowns of the nearby trees for the pair of Himalayan vultures that have been his constant companion since he took his leave of the lovely Lotus and her secret valley of tulips.
Sure enough, the creatures are nearby, perched on the top branches of an enormous weeping willow. In fact, the vultures are looking down on him as if he were about to die and become the next bloody meal.
Windmill with birds in background
The spin of the woman’s prayer wheel is different, the exact opposite of the rotation of all the other prayer wheels in the valley. And that change makes her prayer wheel selfish, and in that sense truly evil. The backward spin adds an extra note of an entirely different pitch, the sound still that of sex, but unnatural enough that the ancient Deities are drawn like flies to the source of the sound.
About the Author
The author shares a home with a dog, a cat, and her partner of twenty-two years, Tim Batey. They live near the little town of Quilcene, Washington. The majestic Olympic mountains provide the backdrop for her simple home, the saltwater beach just a mere mile away.
Reading has always been her number one pastime, traveling by pick-up truck and commercial fishing vessel a close second.
She credits an intense conversation with the author and professor, Jack Cady, and a community college proof reading and editing class with giving her the confidence to write the novel TULIP and seek its publication.
Tulip is her first novel, and she is currently working on her second.