Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) (17 page)

“Anders is dead,” she whispered.

“I know,” he informed her.

“How did you find out?” she questioned him.

“Bill told me,” he replied. “The sheriff told him the whole story. So as to let him know he won’t have to testify after all. And I won’t, either.”

She couldn’t restrain herself any further. She flung herself against him, her arms encircling his ribcage, and she buried her face in his neck. “I’m a widow,” she declared.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“I’m not married anymore,” she remarked.

“No,” he acknowledged.

“We can be together now,” she exulted.

“How do you figure?” he asked.

She separated herself from him and studied his face in the lantern light. “Don’t you want to be with me?”

“Of course,” he admitted.
“But how?”

“I don’t know,” she stammered, “but at least now we can be. Aren’t you happy about that?”

“There’s nothing to be happy about,” he stated flatly. “We can’t be together now, any more than we could be together before. Where would we live? What would we eat? How would we keep from freezing? The only thing keeping us from freezing now is my position here and your position in the house. If we changed anything, we’d be just as dead as Anders. If we tried to be together, George and Matilda would throw both of us out on our ears. Use your brain, girl.”

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I just care so much for you! I can’t believe there’s no way for us to be together.”

He embraced her again, his voice soothing. “I care for you, too, but you have to be reasonable. We have nothing. Outside this ranch, we are nothing and we have nothing. Unless you have your own money stashed somewhere that I don’t know about. I didn’t think so. I’m poor, and if you aren’t George and Matilda’s daughter-in-law, you’re poor, too. We have nowhere to live, and without this job, I have no money. That’s the way it is. We just have to keep on doing what we’re doing now. So you’re not married any more. Well, that’s a step in the right direction, but it won’t get us together. You go back to the house now, and stop thinkin’ about me. I can’t do anything for you now, and seein’ you like this is just torture for me, because I want you and I can’t have you.”

“I know!” she whimpered. “It’s torture for me, too, but I can’t help it. I just had to see you!”

“Okay,” he gave her one more decisive squeeze before he let her go. “It’ll be alright. Just try to keep your spirits up. We’ll be alright, one way or the other.”

She wept into his shoulder until her sobs subsided. Then, she retreated to her room, where she cried afresh into her pillow. This time, she grieved for Anders, for her own hopes for her so advantageous marriage, and for the family she thought she had joined. She remembered with chagrin, her gratitude, when reading George’s letters to her, that such a prominent family, with such a well-established social position, would consider her for a daughter-in-law. She remembered her illusions about how they would celebrate holidays and family events together, reveling in their several relationships, and how these interconnections and joyful occasions would expand and perpetuate into the coming decades with the addition of children to the family. Her own position as mother to these beloved and welcome children would cultivate her own status, until she attained the rank of matriarch in her own right. She surveyed the destruction of those dreams, littered and desecrated around her feet, with devastating defeat. She experienced more acute pain at the loss of these illusions than at the loss of her own parents. She invested this hope with far more hope and preconceived confidence than any other concept of family she entertained before, and the bitter reality stung her heart.

Penelope did not descend to breakfast the next morning. She couldn’t stand the sight of George or Matilda, Mrs. Wallace, or even of Caleb. Each represented a shattered dream, a disappointed aspiration, and each in its own way impressed upon her the futility of hoping for anything ever again. She refused to open her curtains to let the light of day brighten her room, and only the novel sound of wheels driving up to the house in the early afternoon induced her to peek out to see who it was. George and Matilda met the vehicle at the steps. Instead of the buggy Penelope expected, a clapboard wagon pulled to a stop at the porch and the driver hopped down. Then she recognized his tall frame and the determined angle of his shoulders. She also recognized the dark shape stretched out in the back of the wagon, as well as the horse tied by the bridle to the back of it. Most of all, she recognized the polished leather shoes and the tweed cuffs of the pants sticking out the end of the wagon bed. She quickly closed the curtain so she wouldn’t see them unloading the body, but not before George, observing the wagon drawing to a halt in front of the house, took one look at the body and turned his back on it. Finally, Matilda departed again, so that the business of coordinating the disposition of the body devolved to Bill Olsen. After a few words with the sheriff, he led the wagon and horse away out of sight of the house.

Penelope wrapped her mind, her heart, and her body in the insulating wool of obscurity in her room, and she probably would have stayed there forever, had Mrs. Wallace not knocked on her door a few hours later.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” the housekeeper called through the door. “I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t important.”

“What is it, Mrs. Wallace?” Penelope barked.

“Please, Ma’am,” the housekeeper replied at the keyhole, keeping her voice low. “Please come, ma’am. I need you.”

Penelope muttered a curse of annoyance with that meddlesome woman and quickly straightened her clothing before she yanked the door open. Mrs. Wallace’s expression immediately sobered her. “What is it, Mrs. Wallace?” she repeated.

“Please, ma’am, come quickly!” Mrs. Wallace flew away toward the stairs, leaving Penelope no option but to follow her.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mrs. Wallace conducted Penelope to the door of George’s study, but she kept her hands clutched at her waist, making no move to turn the door handle. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I would never have done it otherwise. I don’t dare tell Mrs. West, and you’re the only one left.”

“What’s going on?” Penelope insisted.

Instead of answering, Mrs. Wallace nodded toward the door and ran away toward the kitchen. Penelope stared after her, confused. After she disappeared around the corner, Penelope knocked lightly on the door, more curious than alarmed. When no sound answered her from within, she seized the door handle herself and entered the study. She spied George in his favorite chair, gazing out of the window in exactly the same way she saw him many times before. The only indication of anything amiss came when she walked into his field of vision and he didn’t remove his eyes from the window. Intrigued, she crossed further into his line of sight. When she stood directly in front of him, his eyes still focused somewhere near her sternum, she noticed the unnatural stillness of his body and the absence of any movement in his chest, where the steady rise and fall of breathing should have been. Just to make sure, she laid her hand on his shoulder, and the eerie remoteness of the body sent a shiver through her arm. She yanked her hand away as though it had been burned. She stood there, frozen, staring at him. The only reaction she could think to have was to try to speak to him but each time the urge made her open her mouth, she realized the incongruity of it and closed her mouth again.

Finally, she left the study, closing the door behind her. She lingered in the front hall, trying to decide how to deal with the situation. Like Mrs. Wallace, she immediately discarded the idea of telling Matilda. Instead, she went out the front door toward the bunkhouse, where Bill Olsen met her at the door. In a few stuttered words, she communicated the news to him, and he returned with her to the house. In hushed tones, they conferred long enough to arrange to remove the body from the house. Bill brought two men up from the bunkhouse, and they took George off in the same direction they had taken Anders. Bill left Penelope to break the news to Matilda. She found her mother-in-law in the parlor, reading a book. Penelope remarked that Matilda wasn’t crying anymore, and she regretted introducing more grief into the overwrought lady’s life. She sat down on the same couch near her.

“Hello, my dear,” Matilda greeted her, laying aside her book. “How are you today?” Penelope marveled that these words represented the first conversation between the two women in many days.

“I’m just fine, Matilda,” Penelope began. “But I’m afraid I have some more bad news for you. I dread to tell you, after so devastating a blow as Anders’s death, but the fact is that we just found George in the study. He’s passed away, as well. Bill and Charlie and the other men have just taken him out and are going to lay him to rest alongside Anders.”

Matilda worked her fingers together in her lap without looking up at Penelope. “I thought something like this would happen,” she murmured to herself. “I saw his face when they brought Anders home, and I thought he looked…I don’t know…stricken. I thought to myself then, he won’t recover from this. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly. I thought he would fade away without Anders. But I’m not surprised.”

Penelope stared at her, flummoxed. “Are you sure you’re alright? I’m concerned for you now. You’ve had one terrible blow after another.”

Matilda sighed and raised her eyes to her daughter-in-law, but only her mouth smiled. Her eyes registered the unfathomable sadness of a woman with no further cares in the world. “I’ll be fine, dear. You shouldn’t worry about me. Now that Anders is gone, most of my worries are over. I’m a widow with no children and no grandchildren. I have nothing left. I will keep living, but I have nothing left that can trouble me. I will simply persist.” She heaved another heavy sigh and stood up from her couch.

Still concerned, Penelope watched the older woman carefully as she walked across the room to the parlor door. She heard Matilda go out of the house, and Penelope observed her cross the yard to the bunkhouse, where the men were just leaving for the afternoon shift of their work. As Penelope watched from the parlor window, Matilda stopped Caleb in the yard and exchanged a few words with him before she re-entered the house and resumed her seat on the parlor couch. Penelope scrutinized her mother-in-law closely, curious about what she meant to do, but unwilling to question her too closely.

“Now, my dear,” Matilda continued, and Penelope recognized much of the same vitality returned to her aspect that she remembered from the first days after her arrival at the ranch and her marriage to Anders. “Tell me what I can do for you. You have had a series of terrible blows yourself, both real and figurative, and you are now a widow, too. What do you plan to do? Would you like to return to your home in Baltimore? I will arrange for the train fare, if you do. You shouldn’t be stuck in a mausoleum like this. Not now that this house is nothing more than a residing place for ghosts. You are too young for that. You should resume your old life and look forward to a future with other people in the same phase of life as yourself. Please, you must tell me what you want to do.”

The first thought that popped into Penelope’s head was Caleb. “No, I think I’ll stay here,” she decided. “I don’t know what I plan to do. I haven’t had much chance to think about it, but I think the best thing for me is to stay here. There’s nothing left for me in Baltimore, anyway. I’ll stay put until I figure it out. Maybe later, I’ll decide to leave, but not now. I mean, I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”

“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, dear,” Matilda assured her. “I just don’t want you to feel bound to the past. You’re no longer married to Anders. You should marry someone else.
Someone younger. Someone your own age, with whom you can plan a real future.”

Again, the shade of Caleb rose up before Penelope’s eyes, but she remembered his warning about the prospects for their relationship, and she kept her secret desires to herself. “I appreciate your concern. I will think it over, and we can discuss it further as time goes on.”

“Very well, dear,” Matilda agreed, and returned to her book.

Penelope, however, did not think it over. She enveloped herself in her wooly cocoon of solitude until suppertime when, in order to partake of that meal, she forced herself to go into the dining room and sit across the table from Matilda, the two empty chairs on either side of them offering mute testimony to their several losses. Matilda, on the other hand, seemed to rise from the mud of her own despondency. She not only bestowed her sad semi-smile on Penelope several times during the meal, but she also astounded her daughter-in-law by engaging Penelope in conversation. After supper ended, Penelope planned to flee to her room again but at the foot of the stairs, Matilda called, “Come into the parlor, please, dear. I want to talk to you about something.”

Annoyed, Penelope obeyed, but inside the parlor, she caught her breath at the sight of another guest there. “Janet!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“I asked Caleb to bring his mother here,” Matilda declared, and Penelope gasped again when she saw the young man standing on the other side of the room, his back to the window and his hands shoved into the pockets of his work pants. “We have a few things to discuss. Please, take a seat.”

Penelope dropped onto a chair, her mind whizzing so furiously her eyes refused to focus.

“You didn’t know this, my dear,” Matilda continued. “But Anders was not his father’s only son. George ran this ranch by himself for many years before he married me, and during the summer cattle drives, he and his men lived out under the stars with only their horses for company. After he married me and Anders was born, he continued to join his men on their cattle drives, so he stayed away
for several weeks every summer before returning home. In the early years, one of the men acted as cook for his men but after a while, George hired a young Shoshone girl from the local area to work as cook. In the usual way, he took a fancy to this girl, and in the absence of his wife to relieve his desires, he had a…how do you call it?...an indiscretion, shall we say?...with her. When he came home, he broke down in remorse and told me everything, but the deed was done, and later that year, the woman gave birth to a son. George felt quite adamant, and I agreed with him, that the girl should not be turned away on any account, so she continued to work for us. Once the baby was born, we brought her into the house and employed her as our housekeeper to give her a more secure living situation. And she has stayed here ever since. Until just a few days ago, that is. When her son reached working age, George gave him a job as well. He felt it was the only decent way to compensate them for his own transgression.”