Mail Order Annie - A Historical Mail Order Bride Romance Novel (Mail Order Romance - Book 1 - Benjamin and Annie) (4 page)

             
“You are very considerate!” Anne blurted out.

             
“Nonsense!” Moran retorted. “I wouldn’t presume upon your dignity by having it any other way! That would be no way to treat a bride!”

             
“No, really!” Anne gushed. “Starting the supper cooking before you left to come and pick me up, and now this! You really are a kind man!”

             
“It was nothing!” Moran insisted, staring down at his plate, discomfited. “Any other man would have done the same. It’s the only decent thing to do.”

             
“No,” Anne marveled, “I don’t think any other man
would
have done the same. You give yourself too little credit.”

             
“Never mind about that,” Moran mumbled into his food, and took another bite of the biscuit.

             
The conversation dwindled, and they both ate in silence after that. After the meal ended, Moran dragged his chair over next to the stove and started meticulously cleaning his pistol, while Anne cleared up the table. Moran pointed out three pails of water in the lean-to, and Anne once again took note of his advanced thoughtfulness for her, but this time she said nothing to avoid embarrassing him further. She heated the water on the stove, washed and put away the dishes, and then briefly tidied up the room before bringing a chair over to sit opposite Moran in front of the warming comfort of the fire. In vain, she racked her brain to think of something to talk to him about, but each time she second-guessed herself and kept her peace. She wished she had some knitting or sewing to do, and then she remembered Moran’s socks.

             
“Give me your socks to mend,” she told him, and fetched her sewing kit from her valise. He smiled contentedly at her as he slipped one sock off. She took it back to her chair and bent her head to thread her needle.

             
Now the silence that descended over the cabin contained the blessed harmony of a contented couple busily pursuing their occupations together in the evening quiet that precedes sleep. At the same time, a distant boom of thunder echoed through the valley, and the gentle patter of rain on the shingles of the roof blanketed the scene with another dimension of close intimacy.

             
“Are you sure that you’ll be warm enough, sleeping out in the barn?” Anne asked, glancing up from her work.

             
“I’ll be warm enough,” Moran asserted. “You needn’t worry about that. It may be wet outside, but it isn’t all that cold. I’ll keep dry. That’s the main thing.”

             
Again, the peaceful stillness, muffled by the steady purr of the rain on the roof, cast the whole cabin into a benevolent glow of domesticity. The two sat across from each other, engrossed in their separate tasks, until Moran put aside his gun and rose from his chair. “I’ll go to bed now,” he declared. “Good night to you, Miss,” he nodded formally. “I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well.”

             
“Good night, Mr. Moran,” Anne stood up from her chair with him. “Thank you very much for everything.”

             
“You call me Benjamin,” he corrected her.

             
But Anne shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she argued. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe in time I will.”

             
“Never mind,” he moved toward the door.

             
“Wait!” she exclaimed, retrieving his sock. “You’ll need this.” She handed him the darned sock, which he pulled over his foot and stuck into his boot. “I’ll do the others tomorrow.”

             
“Very well,” he agreed. “There’s plenty of time. Good night, then.”

             
“Good night,” she returned. “Sleep well.”

             
He dashed into the rainy night, slamming the door behind him and leaving Anne alone in the lantern light.

             
After he left, Anne put away some of the things from her trunk before tending to the fire and preparing herself for bed. When she knelt by the bed to say her prayers, she remembered Moran, and she wished vaguely that she had suggested before he left that they say a prayer together. But just as quickly, she dismissed the idea as too presumptuous a suggestion for their first night together. Maybe as they grew closer, she might bring up the possibility. She lay in bed in the dark, huddled for warmth under the quilt, hardly daring to think back on the events of the day. Instead, she listened to the increasingly persistent rhythm of the rain and the creaking of the pine trees as they swayed in the wind overhead, until she fell into the bottomless obliteration of exhausted sleep.

             
She woke in the dark of the cabin, and momentarily struggled to remember where she was. She fingered the soft, worn fabric of the quilt top, and only when she heard the haunting rush of wind in the tree limbs outside did she remember the day before with the shudder of a nightmare passing into the mists of memory. She crawled out of bed, threw around her shoulders the woolen shawl hanging over the bedpost, and groped her way through the dark to the cabin door. She lifted the latch and opened it, but the pre-dawn world outside afforded no additional light to the cabin’s gloomy interior. The starlight gave just enough light for her to find the matches and set the lantern glowing. Then she dressed and restarted the fire in the stove. By the time the sky lightened and Moran appeared at the entrance to the barn, Anne had put the rest of her belongings away, hanging her dresses on hooks near the bed and setting a few personal trinkets on the shelf, and had a batch of griddle cakes piping hot on the stove.

             
Anne passed a pleasant breakfast with Moran that very closely resembled the supper of the previous night, and a coherent vision of their future life together began to materialize in Anne’s mind. After breakfast, Moran mounted his horse and rode away into the far northern end of the valley, leaving her alone all day. This time, she had to haul the buckets of water to clean the dishes by herself from the creek up to the cabin, panting and slopping freezing cold water down the leg of her skirts. After washing up the breakfast dishes, she swept out the cabin and made the bed. All the while, she repeated Proverbs 31 to herself, She repeated this verse all the while she worked, and found it fortified her significantly.

But her good intentions failed her when she looked and only found the firewood stacked around the back side of the barn. So she had no choice but to carry several armloads of wood to the cabin. She found some of the larger pieces obviously too big to fit into the stove, and she eyed the ax in the corner of the kitchen with unease. She could not even muster the courage to pick it up, let alone swing it in the direction of a lump of wood. She decided to wait until Moran came back. He could at least give her some direction on how to start, if she could swallow her pride enough to ask him to show her. Maybe if she asked nicely enough he might do the job himself. But even as this scheme entered her mind, she put it aside with the realization that, to continue here for any length of time, much less permanently, she must learn to chop the wood herself sometime.

             
She tried to force her mind to recite the Proverb again to induce herself to show some strength, but the thought of herself chopping wood sent her into a fresh wave of despondency. She turned her back on the ax and took her sewing kit and some more of Moran’s ancient socks out to the bench in the sunshine outside the cabin door. Even then, she simply sat, doing nothing, for a long time, desperately struggling to control her emotions and prevent herself from crying. Of course she knew how to cook and sew, as every woman did, but in her own hometown, where she lived her whole life, only the poorest scullery maids hauled water and wood, and only then after men chopped it to a manageable size. Even without chopping the wood herself, she had never worked so hard as she had this morning, just to heat the water to wash the breakfast dishes. In this depression, the voice of Webster Forsythe, with his promises of cooks and maids and hot baths drawn for her and meals set out for her on the table with a glass of wine at her elbow, came back to her like the whisperings of a hobgoblin in her ear. Do yourself a favor, she now repeated his words to herself. Get away from here. You’re a lady. You deserve better.

             
She tried to dismiss these temptations with a shake of her head. Wasn’t this the life Benjamin Moran promised her in his letters, that she had freely chosen? Hadn’t he warned her repeatedly throughout their long correspondence to prepare herself for a life of hardship and work, in which she could rely on no one but herself while he tended to his work? And what had Forsythe offered her? A place to stay until she made other arrangements, nothing more. Certainly he hadn’t offered to marry her, as Moran had, even after she told him plainly about her past.

             
She shook her head again, but could not banish the demon of persuasion from her thoughts. Neither could she induce herself to take up the tragically prosaic chore of darning a man’s socks. The prospect discouraged her too much. So she just sat and stared out at the majesty and drama of the valley before her, listening to the songs of the birds and watching the diving of the hawks out in the sea of grass between the cabin and the cliffs beyond. This pageantry of beauty made up for everything else. In losing herself in the artistry and spectacle of the scene, she could forget the notion of herself reduced to a status lower than a servant, lower than a peasant, perhaps even as low as a slave or an animal, a beast of burden. In forgetting, she wiled away a few hours until noon, when she bestirred herself to scrape together a bite to eat. After this, she felt better and completed the task of darning the socks, and the words of the Proverb came back to renew her spirits.

             
The passages relating to vineyards and households inspired her to make another more thorough inventory of the cabin and her own belongings after lunch. She determined what jobs needed doing immediately, and what more long-term projects she could undertake to make her own and Moran’s existence more hospitable. She took out her knitting needles and the few balls of yarn she brought with her, resolving to discuss with Moran the possibility of raising their own sheep. She would need a spinning wheel. She strolled around the cabin and inspected the area near its south wall for a suitable location for a kitchen garden. Then she went into the lean-to and assessed its contents with a discriminating eye, calculating in her mind the amounts of the various stocks and staples against her estimates of how much the two of them might consume in the course of the year. She must speak to Moran about what preparations to make for winter, what resources they could glean from the countryside, and what they could afford to buy in from stores or shops in the area. She still did not even know what those stores might be. If she and Moran married and—image it!—had any children, all these calculations and preparations would be expanded to include additional mouths to feed. She took cognizance of her own ignorance of this type of life. So much remained to learn. She should learn Moran’s business, how many head of stock he currently ran on his land, how much he sold them for and where, and all of his seasonal routines in case anything happened to him and she was forced to take over his work in addition to her own.

             
Suddenly she stopped herself in mid-thought. Here she was planning for a future of marriage to Moran, when she hadn’t even permitted herself to make a definite decision on that subject yet. At this realization, she shoved all her plans as far away from her as she could and swore she would not say a word to Moran about any of it for fear of giving him the wrong idea about her willingness on the subject of marriage. In light of Webster Forsythe’s warning about that other woman whom Moran had not married, she also schemed to do a minimum of work until after he married her. That would prevent him from taking undue advantage of her before providing her with the status and security of a wife. In this spiteful attitude, she stewed about the horror story Forsythe told her for the rest of the afternoon, until the sun began to slope toward the western horizon and she fired the stove to prepare the supper. She somehow managed to cook the meal using only those small pieces of wood that required no chopping, leaving the larger ones to the side of the box and hoping Moran would not notice the discrepancy.

             
While the beans cooked, Anne took another walk down to the creek to bring up the pails of water for washing the supper dishes. As she bent over to lower her buckets into the pool, she caught sight of her own reflection in the water and remarked for the first time at the divine clarity of the water in front of her. Setting her buckets aside, she first trailed her fingertips over the mirrored surface, then dipped her hand in and cupped some of the water to her lips. The icy liquid almost burned as she gulped it down. She had never tasted water so pure before, and she pondered the miracle of it as it dripped like quicksilver from her hand back into its bed. She squatted on the mossy bank, listening to its musical laughter as the water danced and giggled over the stones, and the trees sighed mysteriously in answer above her head. This magical interlude exceeded even the intense splendor of the valley itself in winning her heart to the idea of staying here forever. With this kind of serenity at her back doorstep, how could she fail to be happy here? She could come here every day to pray, to renew her spirits and drink her fill of heavenly peace. Indeed, she most assuredly
would
come here every day, probably more than once, in order to draw the water. With great reluctance, she filled the buckets with water and made her way back to the cabin to check on the food.

             
Moran returned as dusk fell over the valley, put away his horse, and greeted her amicably at the cabin door. “Another storm comin’ in tonight,” he declared.

             
“How can you tell?” Anne asked, in spite of herself. “It was such a beautiful day today.”

             
“Look over there,” Moran pointed out through the open cabin door to the upper rim on the valley to the north. “Look how black it is. Heavy thunderheads comin’ in, you mark my words.” He sat down at the table. “It’ll be another nice day tomorrow, after the rain falls tonight. I wonder if you might like a day out tomorrow. I could take you around to see some more of the valley, if you take a fancy to that sort of thing. It’s beautiful country, as you saw yesterday. There are some really extra special spots up the river in the canyon. We could take a picnic lunch and make a day of it. You could just relax for a day and get settled in here, after all your travelling. It might be the last chance we have to get out, what with winter comin’ on, and I’ll be taking the cattle down to the stock yards in Patterson in a few weeks, so you’ll be out here alone while I’m away.”

             
The color rose in Anne’s cheeks. “Thank you!” she breathed, remembering her joy and contentment at the creek. “I would love that.”

             
Again, Moran dazzled her with a beaming smile that made him almost unrecognizable from the frowning brute she thought she knew. “I thought you might.”

             
That night did not differ very much from the previous evening in terms of the supper fare or the activities that followed it, but Anne felt a deeper serenity in the simple routine of washing up and then sitting by the fire with her knitting needles and mending socks. She found herself singing softly to herself as she worked. Even the anticipation of the following day did not ruffle her tranquility, and she exchanged a few fleeting smiles with Moran across the circle of lantern light. When he rose to say good night, he lingered for a moment on the threshold, and his parting wishes escaped his lips with greater feeling and a softer resonance than the punctuated clip with which he had separated from her the night before. When the door closed on his silhouette into the starlit evening, leaving Anne alone with her own thoughts, her heart quickened at the memory of the gleam in his eye as he glanced at her mildly from his chair by the stove, observing furtively her at her stitching before hiding his eyes in his own work. This time, she did not stay up to put the room right before she banked the fire and climbed into bed. She pulled the bed clothes up over her head to hide herself from her own emotions and the images of the evening still flickering before her eyes in the impenetrable darkness. She even laughed to herself, and the sound of it struck her as alien and incongruous in light of her experiences since arriving on the train. Turning her notice to the shaking movement rippling through her body, she tried to remember the last time she laughed at anything. She could not remember. It must be long before she left home. Certainly she could not recall the last time she giggled so delightedly, like a schoolgirl at the attentions of a boy. She deliberately forced herself to turn her thoughts away from Moran and recall the stillness and relaxation of the pool at the creek to settle herself sufficiently to fall asleep.