When Hope Sank

When Hope Sank is a 2024 Christian historical romance novel written by Denise Weimer and published by Barbour Publishing. Part of the Day to Remember series of novels with the plots including different historical disasters, When Hope Sank centers upon the April 27, 1865, explosion of the Sultana steamboat.

The story opens in mid-April 1865. Lily Livingston works at River Rest, the inn of her uncle Thaddeus (Thad) Livingston, with her twelve-year-old brother Jacob; her twin brother Hampton died at the Battle of Prairie Grove in 1862, while her father was killed during the burning of Hopefield (Crittenden County) in 1863, with her mother dying shortly thereafter. River Rest is located at Mound City (Crittenden County) on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River across from Memphis, Tennessee. One night, delivering a round of whiskey to the back room, Lily overhears a man named Alex LaFleur (aka Frenchie) announcing plan to blow up a steamboat and kill hundreds of “paroled Yankee prisoners.” Given her Aunt Susanna’s Confederate loyalties, she says nothing about what she has overheard.

When the Sultana explodes, among those who flee the ship are Union surgeon Lieutenant Cade Palmer and his childhood friend James Caldwell, both of Ohio. The Livingstons head down to the river to retrieve survivors and bring them back to River Rest, and Lily blames herself for not reporting the conversation she overhead. She dives into the river and manages to save Cade and James, who are clinging to a door. But, among his other injuries, Cade’s right hand is grievously injured, risking his future as a surgeon, and with the local doctors delayed by so many casualties, he has to instruct Lily on setting his index finger. However, with Lily’s cousin Beth openly hostile to the Union soldiers, Cade struggles to accept Lucy’s good intentions toward him: “Even if she’d supported the Confederacy, their shared belief in God should bridge sectional allegiances.”

Cade and Lily grow closer as she works to nurse him back to health, and she gives him her Bible to read, but that same day Cecil Duke returns. Duke, the former captain of a group of partisans who joined up with General Sterling Price’s failed invasion of Missouri, wants to wed Lily. Lily is not very interested in him and wants to follow her dreams of working as a seamstress. She goes to Memphis to visit a friend, Sarah Goodson, who had her own shop there, only to find that the shop is gone, and visiting the hospital, she also learns that Cade’s friend James has died. That same day, Aunt Susannah learns from Beth that Lily has been sewing for Union soldiers and forbids her to have anything to do with them, including Cade.

Lily learns from Cecil that Alex LaFleur is recruiting former soldiers to harass Union shipping and insists upon reporting this to the Union provost marshal, Liam O’Henry, who takes her information but also reassures her that there was no evidence of the Sultana having been sabotaged. Later, Lily finds a coded message at the inn, and Cecil tries to force himself upon her, only to have Cade, now able to walk on a crutch, intervene. Cade identifies the message Lily found as a Vigenère cipher. Later, after spending time in prayer in his room, and realizing that he had chosen to pursue medicine when he had really been called to the ministry, he accidentally uncovers, hidden beneath a floorboard, a wooden cipher wheel engraved with the letters CSA. He shows Lily, and they try a few possible keywords and phrases before praying over the matter, after which Lily remembers LaFleur uttering the phrase “Free Arkansas,” and this produces the phrase STL MAY SIX NOON LADY JANE. It seems to indicate an attack upon the steamer Lady Jane, bound for Memphis from St. Louis the next day.

On the way to share their discovery with the provost marshal, however, Lily is made unconscious with ether and taken captive by LaFleur. Cade, with the help of Thad, who has secretly been helping Union forces, relays the message to the provost marshal. Under Thad’s questioning, Beth acknowledges passing along messages and warning LaFleur about Lily’s discovery. When Lily wakes, LaFleur informs her that he intends her to be one of the prostitutes he manages; when he attempts to rape her, Cecil, who had been following, breaks in to save her but is shot; the shot attracts the soldiers, but not before LaFleur gets away with Lily.

Cade and Timber Sutton, a friend of Cecil’s, manage to board the New Republic, LaFleur’s steamboat brothel, where Cade kills LaFleur and rescues Lily, reinjuring his right hand in the process. Afterward, Cade proposes to Lily, offering to take her younger brother Jacob with them to Cincinnati, where his brother works as a silk importer, thus providing her with opportunities to start a business as a seamstress. She takes along Mika, a freed slave who worked at River Rest alongside her mother, Martha. As they pass the wreckage of the Sultana, Cade prays aloud, “committing to God the families of all those who had perished in the waters below as well as those now steaming their way to a brighter future.”

For additional information:
Denise Weimer Books. https://www.deniseweimerbooks.com/ (accessed October 31, 2024).

Weimer, Denise. When Hope Sank. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 2024.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas