{"product_id":"faith-and-betrayal-isbn-9781400034734","title":"Faith and Betrayal","description":"In the 1850s, Jean Rio, a deeply spiritual widow, was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. Traveling across the Atlantic by steamer, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon, Rio kept a detailed diary of her extraordinary journey.In \u003ci\u003eFaith and Betrayal\u003c\/i\u003e, Sally Denton, an award-winning journalist and Rio’s great-great-granddaughter, uses the long-lost diary to re-create Rio’s experience. While she marvels at the great natural beauty of Utah, Rio’s enthusiasm for her new life turns to disillusionment over Mormon polygamy and violence against nonbelievers, as well as the harshness of frontier life.  She sets out for California, where she finds a new religion and the freedom she longed for. Unusually intimate and full of vivid detail, this is an absorbing story of a quintessential American pioneer.“An authentic American epic. . . . A harrowing and heartbreaking tale of the Old West that we have not heard before.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A great, often scary American story.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rich in the history of the time and redolent with strong personalities, Sally Denton’s newest book is a compelling look at a slice of America through the lens of an unlikely pioneer.” –\u003ci\u003eSanta Fe Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As taut as a mytery and as lucid as journalism, \u003ci\u003eFaith and Betrayal\u003c\/i\u003e is both intimate and epic.”–\u003ci\u003eThe New Mexican\u003c\/i\u003eSally Denton is the author of American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857; The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder; and, with Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947--2000. She received Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, a Lannan Literary grant in 2000, and, for her body of work, the Nevada Silver Pen Award of 2003 for distinguished literary achievement. Her award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and American Heritage. She lives with her three children in New Mexico.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e“Worth a Long Walk to See”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeptember 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at  five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps  quietly for the next several hours. “Had a good night,” Jean Rio  records in her midwife’s notebook. (“The baby grows nicely [and] all  seemed to enjoy themselves,” she notes nearly a month later, after the  mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated  births like Mrs. Ayer’s are trials, the mother usually moaning and  screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final  agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests  and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her  hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent  fortitude—hemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed,  or stillborn babies—a bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test  than any battle faced by a man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dress—now stained—for  another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she  removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set  in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the  raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem  a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected  grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The  rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare  references these days to the past that the rings echo. “Clear and  lovely as a spring morning in England,” she writes. “This summer was  worth a long walk to see.” How long a walk it has been, what a dramatic  journey full of trust and betrayal, faith and disillusion, defeat and  triumph, loss and gain! None of her new friends and neighbors in this  rural hamlet can imagine it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnly the rings and her obvious refinement and intellect, partially  obscured by her unpretentious bearing, give a hint of the stark  contrast between her past and present. Once she wore the finest gowns  of European couture—a wardrobe so vast it had taken nearly an entire  wagon to transport. Here she dresses in homespun. Once she performed  the classics of song on the stages of Paris and London. Now she  performs the exhausting rites of life and death, work no woman of her  former station would have deigned to do. Most dramatically, once she  was a prize convert to a powerful faith. Now she lives as a discreet  fugitive from the betrayal of all that brought her here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChapter Two\u003cbr\u003eA Wine Cask on the Channel\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTumbrils filled with entire families rolled along the cobblestone  streets of Paris toward the guillotine amid howls and screams. All day,  every day during 1792, the killing device was busy, corpses piling up  faster than they could be disposed of. More than forty thousand people  went to their deaths in those small carts. The decapitation was swift,  taking less than half a second from the blade drop to the rolling  head—the guillotine was “an instrument adopted by the Revolutionists  for the more scientific and humane beheading of the condemned.” Almost  all the members of the Rio family from Lamballe, Brittany—renamed  Côtes-du-Nord by the revolutionary government—were among them. “Hourly,  the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men,  young women, tiny children—until the day when it would finally demand  the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen,” as one fictional  account put it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEntire generations were eliminated, as victims of all ages were placed  facedown on a bench. “The mechanism falls like lightning; the head  flies off; the blood spurts; the man no longer exists,” Dr.  Joseph-Ignace Guillotin once explained to a nervous audience. The  instrument, however, wasn’t always that efficient.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of the Rios, like thousands of others, had tried to flee—to  England, Belgium, Scotland, Holland, Canada, or the United States. At  least one small Rio girl would be delivered from the bloodbath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Paris in the summer of 1789, during the earliest phase of the French  Revolution—the “Great Fear”—a manservant long devoted to a wealthy  French couple from the Rio clan placed their infant daughter in a wine  cask. Thus concealed, the baby was smuggled across the English Channel.  Her parents and every known family member are believed to have stayed  behind, and to have become victims of the revolutionists. Once in  England, the guardian christened his tiny refugee with the name Susanna  Ann Burgess while providing her with protection in a new land. The  fabricated surname, according to family lore, denoted the bourgeois  roots of her family, though the reality no doubt was more complicated.  The two made their way to Scotland, to the Isle of Skye, where  relatives and royalist sympathizers embraced the child. They remained  in hiding as the London society press regularly reported on new  arrivals from France. The English response to the events taking place  across the Channel vacillated between horror and sympathy, trepidation  at the infectious revolutionary spirit, and base curiosity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSusanna would spend her childhood and adolescence in Scotland, her  guardian impressing upon her a deep hatred of all things French. This  was the story Jean Rio told her children and grandchildren about her  French and Scottish ancestors and her mother’s flight from persecution  to freedom. She apparently never imparted information about the origins  of her own middle name, Rio, perhaps embarrassed by the aristocratic  association.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the time of the revolution, France was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. Its society was divided into three classes. The First Estate—the clergy—controlled the press,  monopolized religion, governed the educational institutions, and owned  the choice land. The Second Estate consisted of the nobility, who were  exempt from taxation but held all high government positions. The Third  Estate was the class that encompassed the remaining 98 percent of the  population and included the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the  peasantry. Judging from Susanna Burgess’s entrée into elite, if not  noble, society in Scotland, her parents were most likely either  nobility or part of the educated upper middle class that sympathized  with the Second Estate rather than the masses. With the Third Estate  uprising on July 14, 1789, which destroyed the Bastille prison, symbol  of royal tyranny, nobles and members of the upper bourgeoisie fled for  their lives. The early-twentieth-century novelist Baroness Emmuska  Orczy immortalized the flight in The Scarlet Pimpernel: “Men in women’s  clothes, women in male attire, children disguised in beggars’ rags. In  various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to slip through  the barriers, which were so well guarded by citizen soldiers of the  Republic.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSusanna would be one of thousands of French émigrés to England during  the last decade of the eighteenth century, a time when open boats laden  with refugees often navigated the stormy Channel in darkness. Many,  like Susanna, were babies entrusted by their doomed parents to lowly  retainers who had no price on their heads. “The English never ceased to  wonder at the degree of devotion manifested by the servants of the  French émigrés, greatly admiring their unalterable attachment to their  masters,” according to a twentieth-century British scholar of the  period. While the identity neither of the servant nor of Susanna’s  parents is known, it is assumed her parents and all of her siblings  were executed during the Reign of Terror, which started less than two  years after Susanna’s flight to Scotland. When Napoléon rose to power a  decade later and announced he would welcome back his nation’s exiles,  Susanna and her guardian chose not to return.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe themes inherent in Susanna’s escape from Jacobin France would  eerily be echoed in her daughter Jean Rio’s life: privilege,  persecution, flight, liberation, and concealment. Susanna was born into  a family of privilege and forced to escape when the social order  collapsed. Jean Rio was moved to flee by a different kind of  oppression, what she saw as spiritual bankruptcy. In the end, they both  found refuge in hiding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1809, at the age of twenty, Susanna Ann Burgess married a well-to-do  Scotsman named John Walter Griffiths, four years older than she and  descended from Scottish aristocracy. John’s father could trace his  roots back several generations in London, with family christenings and  marriages recorded for centuries at the same historic church. John’s  mother, Jane Rio MacDonald, was of the landed-gentry MacDonald clan on  the Isle of Skye, the MacDonalds having arrived in Scotland from the  southern Hebrides in the thirteenth century. Her middle name would seem  to indicate a relationship through blood and class lines to Susanna’s  French family. In 1790 Lord MacDonald, either a brother or a cousin to  Jane Rio MacDonald, built Armadale Castle on his 200,000-acre Highland  estate, where the famous Scottish Jacobite Flora Macdonald had\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emarried and where, in 1746, she had hidden Prince Charles Edward,  Bonnie Prince Charlie, from Hanoverian troops. “With a price of thirty  pounds on his head, he [Prince Charles Edward] wandered hungry and sick  from one sanctuary to another, endangering everyone who gave him  shelter,” one historian wrote. Flora Macdonald disguised him as an  Irish maidservant and facilitated his escape to the mainland. The  MacDonalds’ political and social circles included such luminaries as  Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, indicating that John Griffiths was  born and bred in a lofty world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile a scion of Scottish nobility like John Griffiths might have  fallen in love with and wed the supposed daughter of a fugitive French  servant, the class lines and social conventions of the time make such a  match highly improbable. The conjecture of genealogists and descendants  rests on the more likely scenario that John and his distinguished  family recognized Susanna as an aristocratic orphan and political  refugee, if not a distant Rio cousin. All involved would have kept such  a fact discreetly concealed in the still-charged atmosphere of the  Napoleonic years, when escapees from the guillotine might still be prey  to some settling of old scores.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe patrician Rio family dated back to the late sixteenth century in  the renamed Côtes-du-Nord. Sparsely populated by nobles, priests, and  peasants, the region was virtually devoid of the rising middle class.  Its inhabitants were passionately loyal to the Catholic monarchy, an  antirevolutionary stronghold. Entrenched Catholicism dating back to the  fourth century fueled a zealotry and isolationism that kept the  nobility out of touch with the object of the revolution. The area would  come to symbolize some of the most ruthless reprisals and cold-blooded  massacres perpetrated by the revolutionaries. “The worst excesses were  committed in the provinces,” historian Christopher Hibbert writes of  the bloodshed. “In several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at  work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were  slaughtered wholesale.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Rio family had greatly diminished by the end of the eighteenth  century, and in the nineteenth century only a handful of Rio births  were recorded in France. The name became so rare that it could soon be  traced only to an extremely wealthy Rio clan in rural Chard, England,  and to the family of Susanna Burgess’s new mother-in-law on the Isle of  Skye. Genealogical records and documents relating to Susanna Burgess  give her birthdate only as “about 1788” and contain no further details  as to place of birth, baptism, or pedigree.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen, on May 8, 1810, Susanna gave birth to her only child, she chose  an anglicized spelling for her daughter’s name—Jane instead of the  French Jeanne. Eventually the name would become Jean. The Rio name,  pronounced with a long i and sometimes spelled “Rioux,” would be  carried forward when Jean Rio’s firstborn son would include the name in  that of each of his eight children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn and Susanna’s daughter, Jean Rio Griffiths, would be baptized in  London at the St. Lawrence Jewry, an impressive structure built in the  twelfth century and dedicated to the martyr who had been roasted alive  on a gridiron in third-century Rome. Rebuilt in 1670 by the great  English architect Sir Christopher Wren, it was adorned with gold-leaf  chandeliers, Grinling Gibbons carvings, and a window commemorating its  pre-Reformation preacher, the martyred St. Thomas More. The rituals  performed in this imposing edifice, a flagship of the Anglican  establishment, would shape and dominate the first forty years of Jean  Rio’s religious and spiritual life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJean Rio was born near the Jewry, in the district where William the  Conqueror had relocated Jews in the eleventh century, and she would  grow up an only child in the neighborhood of the Jewry and in the  shadow of London’s Guildhall, the center of city government since the  Middle Ages and during her lifetime a massive library. Though an  intellectual life was largely reserved for males in the England of her  youth, Jean Rio’s prosperous parents—both highly educated—afforded her  every opportunity for learning. Professors of music came to their home  to teach her to play the harp and the piano. She was granted an early  education and she became an avid reader at a time when girls of her  class were ridiculed for intellectualism. “As a rule, when girls had  left school they were thought to be wasting time if seen reading,”  wrote one of Jean Rio’s British contemporaries. “They were allowed to  spend their superfluous energy in fancy work, and ridiculous wax-flower  making, without molestation; but ‘put down your book,’ and ‘don’t waste  your time that way,’ were common expressions.” Perhaps owing to her  parents’ Scottish ancestry, books were a valued part of Jean Rio’s  life. Early on, “reading and writing became embedded in Scottish  society,” according to historian Arthur Herman. In Edinburgh “there  were six publishing houses in 1763, for a city with a population of  only sixty thousand.” She was educated in the English classics and had  the good fortune to live at a time when four of the greatest British  novelists were women. The fictional spheres of Jane Austen, George  Eliot, and Emily and Charlotte Brontë were representative of Jean Rio’s  own rarefied world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike reading, music was considered appropriate for pubescent girls as  what a nineteenth-century writer called “the least thought-inspiring”  avenue to “soothe the savage breast.” Commonly, parents of this era who  dissuaded their daughters from highbrow pursuits and development  fostered by books thought it “no waste of time,” as one observer noted,  “for them to spend two or three hours a day at the piano.” Eventually  Jean Rio studied at a conservatory, though we don’t know which one. Her  career as a singer and pianist then took her to concert halls in Paris,  Madrid, and Milan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOther than her emigration diary, which was written as a letter home to  a close friend, as well as brief remarks in her later midwife’s  notebook, no additional examples of her own writing are known to exist.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304130564325,"sku":"NP9781400034734","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400034734.jpg?v=1767726662","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/faith-and-betrayal-isbn-9781400034734","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}