Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) (13 page)

“Come on, now,” he murmured, stepping closer to her. “You can’t go getting’ all worked up about it. She’ll be alright.”

“But where will she go?” Penelope moaned. “She’s been working here for twenty years, Matilda said. It’s the only home she has, really.”

“No, it isn’t,” Caleb contradicted. “She’ll go home to her own people, and she’ll stay there and be perfectly comfortable and welcome, until she finds another situation. She’s well known in this country. Any number of other ranches would be delighted to take her, and they’ll understand about Anders giving her the sack. Everyone around here knows about him.”

“I just wish there was something I could do,” she wailed.

“There is,” he assured her. “And you are. If you just help keep the boys fed until George or Anders finds another cook, you’ll be doing as much as anyone could ask and more.”

“And to think, I’m reduced to the status of a domestic!” she grieved. “Here I thought I was marrying into luxury and wealth, and I’m nothing more than a cook and a scullery maid, after all! It’s too monstrous to think about!” She felt the hot tears streaming uncontrolled down her cheeks, and the words flowed out her mouth without restraint. “Oh, I’m sorry! I know it’s such a terrible insult to you and to your mother! It’s just such a shock to me, to be thrown into such circumstances when I expected something so different. I wouldn’t mind working as a maid, if I received a proper wage and a bed in the servants’ quarters and the nights free to myself. But as it is, I have to share a bedroom with that lout, Anders, and cook the meals for his parents, and clean up the dishes afterward, and for what? So I can call myself his wife? I’m his slave. That’s what I am. I wish I’d never come to this accursed house!”

“Hey, now,” Caleb crooned as he took another step toward her. “Settle down. It’s not as bad as all that.
Just calm down now. You’ll shatter your nerves.” He moved in one final step, and wrapped his sinewy arm around her shoulders. He pulled her against him, and she cried into the thin cotton fabric of his shirt. “There, there. Get it all out. Once you’ve had a good cry, you’ll feel better. You don’t need to worry about me or Janet. You have enough to deal with on your own.”

His vibrant presence soothed her, and already, she felt the sobs diminishing. She shamelessly wiped her face and nose on the shoulder of his shirt, and she breathed his scent through his clothing.

“Now,” he resumed, when she lifted her face to his again. “Can you face going back to the house now?”

She nodded. “I can.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips. “That’s good. Now, run along. We both have work to do, and I can’t spend any more time in here without raising the boys’ suspicions.”

“I just hate to leave you again,” she sniffed. “I just want to be near you.”

“I know,” he confirmed. “It will be alright.”

“How can we be together, do you think?” she inquired.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t really see any way to make it work.”

“There must be a way,” she declared.

“How?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “
but there must be some way to make it happen.”

“Well, if you think of anything, you let me know,” he instructed her. “At this point, it looks pretty hopeless to me. Now that Janet’s gone, I’ll have to be even more careful not to get into trouble with Anders. I have to take care of my mother, now she’s lost her livelihood. And there’s no way to separate you from Anders. You’re married to him, and that’s for life. Even if we could figure out a way to be together, I have no way to support you. Not without this job. And even this job doesn’t pay enough for me to support a wife. Not that you could be my wife,
seein’ as how you’re already married.”

“Oh, stop it!” she screamed. “I can’t stand to hear you talk like that! At least just let me keep the hope that it could happen someday, somehow. I don’t know how, but at least leave me that one hope!”

He pursed his lips and withdrew from her. “Alright. You keep the hope, if that’s what you want to do, and I’ll keep an eye on reality. I have to get back now. I’ll go out this door and you go out that door. Just wait a few more minutes before you go.”

“Okay,” she consented. He pushed the door back, and a gust of icy wind blew into the barn, sending the dust cloud swirling through the sunbeams. “I’ll miss you,” she called after him.

He nodded at her and smiled, his hand on the door handle. “I’ll miss you, too, and I’ll be thinkin’ of you.”

“I love you,” she insisted, eager to prolong the conversation as long as possible.

“Okay, I love you, too,” he asserted. “Now, go. Get out of here. We can’t afford to talk any more. Not now.” With that, he exited through the door and slid it closed behind him.

The silence that descended on Penelope then brought with it the forlorn desolation of her intractable situation. She dropped down on the bench by the tack room wall and let her head loll back against the wooden partition. She waited there much longer than Caleb probably intended her to, and only the thought of her duties to arrange supper not only for George, Matilda, and herself, but also for the ranch hands, roused her to return to the house. Inside, she repaired to George’s study, where she knocked tentatively at the door before he invited her to enter. He reclined in a big wing-backed chair by a tall book shelf, smoking a cigar and staring out through the window at the bleak winter landscape.

“How are you, my dear?” the wrinkled man tried futilely to smile at her as he rose to welcome her in. “Please, come in and sit down. I’m sorry I don’t have any brandy or anything else to offer you. We could get it from the parlor, if you want anything.”

“No, I’m fine, thank you,” Penelope returned. “I just wanted to come and see you. I don’t need anything.”

“Very well,” he returned to his seat. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s about this business of Anders sending Janet away,” Penelope began. “The men out in the bunkhouse are in a stew because they didn’t get any lunch. She never had a chance to fix it for them, and they’re worried they won’t get supper, either.”

“I’m sorry about what happened to Janet,” George lamented, returning his gaze to the window. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. Anders runs the ranch. If he fired Janet, that’s his decision.”

“I understand that,” Penelope assured him. “But there’s still the question of the men’s meals. I don’t mind getting food ready for you and Matilda and myself, although I’m not too happy about the idea of washing up, but that’s the way it is. Feeding ten working men is another matter, and I’m not so confident I could do the job to their satisfaction or yours. You would do much better to get another cook sent out from town. Do you think you can arrange it with Anders? We can’t let the situation deteriorate any further than it already has. Just now, I spoke to Bill Olsen out in the barn about it, and he said that if you don’t make the necessary arrangements for the men’s fare, you would likely find yourself with no staff at all, and then the ranch will fall apart. You can’t afford that, and neither can Anders.”

“I realize all that,” George returned. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. Anders handles all the hiring and firing of staff around the ranch. That’s his responsibility, and his prerogative. I can’t stick my nose into it. If I did, it would only make the situation worse. If you really think you need to, you can speak to Anders yourself about it, but I wouldn’t advise it. The best thing for everyone would be for Bill to speak to Anders. Anders always listens to Bill, and he never crosses him, no matter what. Bill is the only person around here who has any sway with Anders, and if he’s worried about the men’s fare, he should tell Anders himself.”

“But aren’t
you
worried about it?” Penelope retorted. “Aren’t you worried about what will happen to the ranch, if the men aren’t fed and they leave?”

“Sure,” George admitted. “But what can I do? I handed all those decisions over to Anders years ago. I can’t take them back now.”

“But the ranch will fall apart!” Penelope pointed out.

“Maybe,” George conceded. “But it’s Anders’ ranch now. He’s my only son. If he squanders it, it’s his to squander. He’s a grown man. He makes his own decisions.”

“But what about leaving something to your grandchildren?” Penelope whined. “Isn’t that the whole reason you made such an effort to find him a wife? Don’t you see any reason to preserve the ranch for the next generation?”

“I admit that I’d like to pass something on to the next generation,” George confessed. “But everything’s in Anders’ hands now. I can’t take it back.”

“I think you would find that, legally, you do have the right to take it back,” Penelope observed. “You still own the ranch, don’t you? If you feel he’s behaving irrationally and irresponsibly, you could strip him of his responsibility and run the ranch again yourself, at least until you’re satisfied he’ll do a good job. You just have to stand up to him and refuse to let him control everything the way he does. It really is your decision.”

George smiled faintly, but didn’t remove his eyes from the window. “You’re a young idealist, aren’t you? I can’t. I’ve
tied my own hands, and I can’t untie them. Anders will inherit this ranch, if there’s anything left of it by the time I die. We just have to hope for the best. I’m only sorry I dragged you into this mess. It’s more than you deserve.”

The thought crossed Penelope’s mind that George hadn’t been completely honest with her about Anders or their ranching enterprise during his correspondence with her when she contracted to marry Anders, but she refrained from mentioning it now. Along the same lines, her comment to Caleb that she couldn’t undo her marriage brought another consideration into her thoughts. In the same way George still held a legal right to strip Anders of his management control over the ranch, she had a legal case to dissolve the marriage, because it was arranged and contracted under false pretenses and Anders might be shown to be in something less than an intact frame of mind. As quickly as these thoughts formed in her brain, she shelved them to the very back limits of her consciousness, where she hoped they would never see the light of day again.

She addressed the forlorn father, slouched and crumpled like a discarded marionette in his chair. “Very well, George,” she sighed. “I will either mention it to Anders myself, or I will tell Bill to mention it to him. Perhaps he went to town today to arrange to hire a replacement housekeeper, and she will arrive in time to restore the situation.”

“We can always hope,” George muttered.

Penelope stood up. “Is there anything I can get for you in here? I’m going to the kitchen now. I could bring you a sandwich or a drink of some kind, if you want.”

“No, thank you, dear,” George twirled his cigar between his fingers and didn’t look at her. “I’m fine. Thank you for coming to see me. You’re welcome to come and talk to me any time you want.”

“Thank you, George,” she returned, and left.

Penelope spent the rest of the day in the kitchen, scrounging around, finding things, acquainting herself with the stores of food and the workings of the big cast-iron stove, and cleaning up the dishes from lunch. By suppertime, she thought she had a pretty good idea of what to serve, both in the dining room and in the bunkhouse, and she assembled everything she needed on the table well in advance, so as to be ready when someone came up from the bunkhouse to collect their meal. Toward dusk, Charlie knocked at the kitchen door and took her parcels and trays with him to the bunkhouse with a curt nod of thanks, while she carried the cold meat and bread to the dining room. As before, neither George nor Matilda remarked on either the fare or the servant, but ate in obedient silence before drifting away. After finishing her own simple meal, Penelope left the dishes unwashed in the kitchen tub, intending to clean them in the morning. Though she visited with her parents-in-law in the parlor according to their custom, she plotted all the while how she would handle the continuing duties of cook and housekeeper. Unless something radical changed virtually overnight, she could be saddled with this job for the foreseeable future, and she could hardly serve either her parents-in-law or the ranch hands cold sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She thought about making a soup of garden vegetables and mutton bones the next day. If she rose early and got the fire lit, she could get the soup made in time for supper, and then perhaps turn her attention to the project of baking some more bread. They finished the current loaf for supper, so cold sandwiches would be out of the question for tomorrow anyway.

Even the simple tasks of slicing bread and cheese and putting them on serving trays, together with the scrubbing of the dishes in the tub, imparted a happy weariness to her body she didn’t understand, but the vision of herself as a domestic servant didn’t daunt her in the same way she expected it to. Her emotional breakdown in front of Caleb in the barn stemmed mostly from the irony of her marriage turned sour than from the depressing nature of its outcome. Maybe letting George and Matilda believe that the work didn’t suit her station as their daughter-in-law might induce them to act, but she doubted that. In any case, she could ill afford to look down on this work, so long as no alternative presented itself. So long as she found these duties thrust upon her, she would accept them with good will and perform them to the best of her ability, for the sake of the ranch hands and her parents-in-law as much as for her own peace of mind. Later, after another housekeeper took over and restored her to her rightful role of mistress of the house, could she allow herself to scorn this position and hold herself superior to it.