Runaway Heart

Runaway Heart is a 1993 historical romance novel written by Tena Carlyle and published by the Zebra Books imprint of Kensington Publishing Group. The novel features a number of Arkansas locations, in addition to real-life figures such as former governor Powell Clayton and Judge Isaac Parker of Fort Smith (Sebastian County).

Runaway Heart opens in the summer of 1881, with Jonquil Rose Trevain on the family farm at Prater, near Murfreesboro (Pike County), witnessing three men attack her mother and then ransack her home, searching for the deed to their property. Jonquil attempts to intervene, and due to infighting among the men, and the intervention of Gabriel, an older African American hired hand who lives on the farm, all three men are killed, as is Jonquil’s mother. Discovering that one of the men had a silver U.S. Marshals badge, Jonquil and Gabriel quickly bury her mother and the three men and flee the area.

By the following year, she and Gabriel are working for a traveling carnival. When the carnival is at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), she encounters Adam Coulter, a Pinkerton detective originally from Chicago, who is instantly mesmerized by her singing and banjo playing. Their attraction proves mutual, but she and Gabriel leave the circus that night to try their luck in Hot Springs (Garland County).

Adam travels to Fort Smith, by way of steamboat up the Arkansas River, with hopes of hearing news about the whereabouts of his missing brother Simon, a deputy marshal in Judge Parker’s court. There, he learns that Simon’s remains have been identified, and that when Simon was killed, he was working undercover, posing as a geological surveyor for Innes Ball, a railroad magnate laying track near Murfreesboro. Ball had been suspected of fraudulently overcharging the government, among other crimes. Adam offers to take up his brother’s work on the case, and Judge Parker tells him that a banjo-playing woman and a Black man might be suspected in the case.

In Hot Springs, Jonquil gets a job performing in a saloon, while Gabriel works as a bathhouse attendant at the Arlington Hotel. After weeks of searching for them around Little Rock (Pulaski County), Adam goes to Hot Springs, where he recognizes Gabriel and soon finds Jonquil. When the two leave Hot Springs, having stolen money from the saloon that refused to pay Jonquil, Adam follows them and presents himself as a promoter interested in advancing Jonquil’s career. He talks them into traveling to Eureka Springs (Carroll County), telling them he could get them more respectable employment there.

On their way north, Adam’s horse stumbles in a rabbit burrow, and Adam dislocates his shoulder. After resetting it, Gabriel leaves to buy medical supplies back in Russellville (Pope County), where he also writes and posts a letter to Keely Watts, his “special woman” back in Pike County. After they arrive in Eureka Springs, Adam briefs Powell Clayton on his exploits thus far; meanwhile, Clayton’s wife, Adaline, bumps into Jonquil and invites her to tea the next day. Adam struggles to remind himself that Jonquil may be a criminal: “Could Jonquil, his delicate rose, be the thorn that had pricked the life’s blood from his brother?”

Jonquil becomes a hit after her first performance at the local opera house, and she gets a steady job at the boarding house where she is staying. Meanwhile, Parker’s deputy marshals discover that Ball is Jonquil’s father and that he had destroyed evidence of Jonquil’s mother, Margaret, owning the Pike County land. After a picnic, Jonquil and Adam have sex and acknowledge their mutual feelings for each other, but they wake up to alarm bells and realize that part of the town is on fire. (Author Tena Carlyle has this fire occurring in 1882, but it actually happened in November 1883.) They rush to town to help with the effort. Later wandering through the fire-torn city, Jonquil is spied by a Reverend Cates, a parasitical minister who had regularly visited Jonquil’s mother, badgering her for the deed to her property (on behalf of Ball); he informs Jonquil that, contrary to her own beliefs, her father did not die in the Civil War but is alive and living in New York City.

Adam spends the night with Jonquil secretly at her boarding house, and in the morning he discovers among her belongings his brother’s pen and U.S. marshal’s badge. When Jonquil later overhears Adam talking to Powell Clayton, she flees town in a panic, catching a stagecoach to the south. Adam soon confronts Gabriel, who confesses everything to Adam and Clayton and then accidentally drops some uncut diamonds in his possession, which he had found on the Pike County land. (Diamonds would not officially be discovered until 1906, though State Geologist John C. Branner had found the area to have potential for diamonds earlier.) Gabriel also reveals that his female companion, Keely, witnessed the original attack back in Prater.

Adam catches up to Jonquil in Pike County and takes her and Keely to Fort Smith, but Jonquil refuses to forgive him his suspicions of her. Adam, meanwhile, travels to New York to lure Ball back to Arkansas. When he arrives in Fort Smith, Ball is arraigned on a number of charges. Jonquil and Adam soon reconcile, and in an epilogue, it is revealed that they are living in Eureka Springs, where he works as a lawyer, with a little boy named Simon, after Adam’s brother, and a daughter named Gabrielle, after Gabriel.

For additional information:
Carlyle, Tena. Runaway Heart. New York: Kensington Publishing Group, 1993.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas