Romance: Mail Order Bride "The Ideal Bride" Clean Christian Western Historical Romance (Western Mail Order Bride Short Shorties Series) (184 page)

Chapter Four

Life on the Shaw property was unlike anything Alice had ever known.  She had lived what she considered to be a relatively full life up to that point, and still none of her past experience had prepared her for this next chapter of her life she had chosen to embark on.  She quickly discovered that, just as with the marriage to Travis that never quite happened, she had failed to consider what life might be like after she made her move.  She had never even been to a ranch, let alone thought of what it might be like to live on one.  On top of that, she hadn’t really thought through what it would be like to be living with a man she was set to marry whom she had never even met. 

Alice hadn’t ever been on a ranch before, let alone spent a significant amount of time on one.  Somehow she had convinced herself in those feverish nights before her departure that nothing about it would really be all that different, but she quickly realized that was not quite so.  Life was different in every possible way, including the fact that there were many new faces to learn and people to get to know.  And one of those people, one of those strangers, was to be her husband.  What an awful time to find herself shy for the very first time in her life!  Being social had always come second nature to Alice and although that had come to a grinding halt when she had found herself so unceremoniously jilted, she had assumed that things would return back to normal once she recovered a bit.  That had not proved to be the case and unfortunately she seemed the least able to overcome her personal baggage with Bradan. 

Bradan Shaw, the man she was to marry, seemed to be a man she was almost completely incapable of interacting with without her face heating up with a radiant blush and a feeling of complete and utter foolishness.  It was the way she had felt when he had first spoken to her.  It was the way she had felt when he had taken her hand and helped her up into his wagon before chucking her bags into the back with little regard to whether or not they contained any valuables.  Her first instinct was to cry out in indignation but fortunately she was able to stop herself.  She was not in her usual habitat and she did not know this man.  She didn’t know anything of what she found around her and, if anything, she should just be grateful for the fact that Bradan seemed so far to be a friendly sort of a man. 

It was at that moment that she began to pray.  She prayed for the entire length of the trip to Bradan’s farm, hardly hearing a word he spoke to her.  She prayed that she would be humble, that she would be kind and forgiving.  She prayed that she would be what she should be and not what the world and its folly tempted her to be.  She prayed many things without ceasing and hardly spoke a word.  By the time Bradan had taken her hand and helped her back down out of his wagon, she wasn’t sure that she had actually spoken to him at all, not once on the entire ride.  Even after having lived on the ranch for almost five weeks, Alice was sure that she could have counted the number of times she had spoken to Bradan on one hand.  Even thinking about it made her feel sick to her stomach.  She couldn’t understand why she was being so disagreeable, why she was being so unresponsive to all of his attempts to get to know her.  It was like she was willing him to do away with her just the same way that Travis had.  Travis, who she had learned was completely penniless and had thrown her over for a girl with more money that even Alice herself had access to and a family with less breeding and therefore less concern over his own.  It wasn’t that she thought Bradan was a villain as well, not necessarily, but her faith in the rougher sex had been badly shaken and she did not believe that he was
not
a villain either.  It was a questions she wrestled with daily, one that haunted her and kept her up at nights.  She was aware that she was becoming a mere shadow of the girl she had once been, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how to undo the damage.

“You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on you, child!  Come along with me now, you hear?  Come along with Mrs. Patterson and she’ll help put your mind at right again.”

The sound of the motherly and always comforting Mrs. Patterson drew Alice out of her steadily darkening thoughts and she smiled up at her.  For what must have been the hundredth time she thought to herself how grateful she was for this woman’s presence in her life.  She hadn’t learned all that much about her, even in five weeks, but she was sure that if it weren’t for her things would have been much harder on the ranch. 

“Do you hear me, dearie?  It’s time to get up and outdoors!  Can’t just it in your room and mope the whole day long.  No sense or health found in a plan like that.”

Alice opened her mouth to protest but then thought better of it.  Mrs. Patterson was right.  Moping was exactly what she was doing and it wasn’t going to help her secure her future here.  So she stood and smiled wider before following the kindly woman outdoors.  She winced in the strong sunlight she was not yet used to and was even more grateful than she had already been when Mrs. Patterson handed her a wide brimmed straw hat to shade her eyes and her delicate skin.

“You’ve a fair complexion, much like me daughters back in the homeland.  You’ve got to watch skin like that or else it’ll burn straight to a crisp.”

“Daughters?” Alice asked in surprise, hoping very much that her interruption wouldn’t stop the woman from talking about her far away Ireland home, “I didn’t know you had daughters.”

“That’s right.  You remind me of them, that you most certainly do.  I suppose it’s part of why I’ve got a soft spot for you.  Part of why I’ve been thinking of ways to bring you back to the land of the living.”

“I--I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“But you do, child.  You know it and I know it too.  The thing that brought you here, it wasn’t just a quest for adventure.  There’s a sadness and it’s a sadness I’ve seen.  It’s a sadness I know.  I’ve felt that way, run from my own demons.  The best way I ever learned to rid myself of them was to make myself feel useful again.  Does that sound like something you might like to try?”

Alice nodded.  She had no words and she wouldn’t have been able to speak even if she had.  She had never in her life felt such a singular understanding coming from any person.  It felt like a weight being lifted off of her shoulders and at that moment she knew that she would do anything this woman advised her to.  Which, as it turned out, happened to be gardening on this particular sunny day.  She had never gardened in her entire life but somehow it seemed to be just the thing she needed. 

There was something about being out in the sun and feeling her own sweat, something about using her own body to do something good that helped her to feel more right than she had in a long time.  As she worked, she listened as well.  She listened to Mrs. Patterson talk to her about Bradan and how he had come to the west to begin with.  He had come as a boy with parents that were from Ireland as well and he had loved the land immediately.  He had loved the land so well that when his parents had both passed away when he was only seventeen, he had taken it upon himself to keep the place running.  She listened for a long time to the sound of Mrs. Patterson’s voice and when she finally went inside again when the light began to turn to dusk she felt a peacefulness beginning to settle inside of her.  Those fears she had been carrying with her since before she had even arrived didn’t feel quite so real now. 

She was starting to see that she could really have a life in this place and as she washed the dirt off of her blistering hands she thought to herself that it might be a really good life, too.

“Well look at you all covered in the earth.  I don’t believe I’ve seen you this way before.”

“Oh!  Oh dear, I’m sorry, I’ve taken over your kitchen without any thought to the mess I’d be making.”

“No!” Bradan laughed, leaning casually in the kitchen’s door frame with a warm smile in his eyes, “Please, no, don’t feel sorry.  I’m glad to see you looking like this might be your home.  I’d begun to wonder if it might not happen at all.”

“I’m sorry about that as well.  Perhaps, well, perhaps I owe you an explanation about that.”

She wanted to tell him at least some of what had happened to bring her here, despite the fact that the very notion of doing so was terrifying to her.  She thought she might just do it, too, but before she had time to she saw that Bradan was walking towards her with that smile still lighting up his eyes.  She felt her heart stop beating in her chest and, for a moment, she wondered if she might be coming down with some kind of illness.  It took her a few seconds to realize that it was not illness.  It was her body’s response to this man.  In all of these weeks she had been so consumed with herself and her thoughts that she hadn’t stopped to really take notice of who and what Bradan was. 

After listening to Mrs. Patterson all afternoon, however, she felt as if her eyes were open for the first time.  He was a strangely beautiful man, his lanky body and Irish coloring, but it was more than that.  There was a kindness to him.  She felt that.  She supposed it had been there all along, that goodness, she just hadn’t been able to see it.  She had come dangerously close to letting her past rob her of her future and she knew that was not a mistake she was willing to make.  As he came closer and closer to her she found herself wondering for the first time since her arrival when their actual wedding would take place.  After being left at the altar it seemed that part of her had lost interest in being wed without even realizing it.  But now that she had begun to reanimate she knew that she wanted this life.  Yes, she was afraid, but she wanted this life with Mr. Bradan Shaw and when he reached his thumb out to brush a wayward bit of dirt off of her face she inhaled quickly, forcing herself to look him in the eyes.

“No, miss, you don’t owe me anything of the sort.  I’m glad to see your spirits lifting, though.  I am mighty glad to see that.”

“They are lifting,” she said quickly, wanting him to see the potential for happiness that she was suddenly seeing, “believe me, they are.”

“Good.  That’s good.  I did come in here for a reason though.  Not just to interrupt you.  I needed to tell you that I’ve got to go away for a little while.  Just a quick trip, only a few weeks.  I was wondering if maybe when I return, maybe you might want to start talking about a wedding.  If you’re agreeable to the notion.”

“I am.  Yes, I believe that I truly am.”

Chapter Five

Alice had never been so restless in the whole of her life as she was in those almost three weeks between Bradan’s leaving and his return to the Shaw ranch.  Life had its way of taking funny turns and Alice was beginning to learn that it had a tendency to go down before it went up.  Still, the waiting felt like a torment to her.  The last thing she had expected was to come to the realization that she really wanted a marriage with Bradan but once she
did
realize it she wanted to move forward as quickly as possible.  So naturally, the way that life did, things took their unexpected turn and Bradan disappeared.  She knew that wasn’t truly what he was doing, business was business, but her impatience made it feel that way.  She developed a habit of haunting the front yards of the ranch, walking along the fence line like an animal waiting for its humans to return.  Mrs. Patterson would distract her with their gardening and with teaching her to cook (according to her, every wife should know how to cook at least a few things, a belief that was very different from the way Alice had been raised but was nevertheless appealing), chuckling all the while.

“What is it that you find so funny now, Mrs. Patterson?” Alice would ask with the petulance of a child.

“Why, you, my dear.  You’re what I find so funny.”

“I don’t see why.” Alice would mutter, only causing Mrs. Patterson to laugh all the more.

“Because I’ve never seen a girl change so completely.  From the most lethargic thing I ever laid eyes on to the most impatient.  It’s good.  It’s a good change and I’m mighty glad to see it.  But calm yourself dear, he’ll be home soon enough.  He’ll not ever leave you in the lurch, that one.  He’s got a good heart and he’s as strong as oak.  If you love him well, he’ll love you right back with everything in him.  You’ll see.  He’ll be home again before you know it.”

And she was right.  He was home again, after being away for just shy of three weeks.  His return wasn’t anything like she had expected it to be, however, not at all.  In her mind’s eye, when Bradan returned she would be out in the garden, or maybe just finishing preparing a nice hearty meal.  He would pull up in that same wagon he had delivered her to the ranch in on that first shell-shocked day and he would hop down off of it with that limber ease she had come to know him by; the ease of a natural outdoorsman completely in his element.  She would wave and give him her widest smile and he would grin in return before taking her in his arms in a warm embrace.  They would plan their wedding on the spot and then they would begin their lives in earnest.

In truth, his homecoming was nothing like that.  Nothing at all, not even close.  Bradan did not return on the afternoon of some sunny day full of smiles and stories of his business successes.  She was not in the kitchen or out in the gardens when he finally returned.  In truth, when Bradan arrived home it was not daylight at all and Alice was in the room that was hers until their wedding night fast asleep.  She would never be able to say what it was that caused her to wake.  Although she had suffered terrible bouts of insomnia for her first several weeks of living on the ranch, since she had taken up gardening and found her true heart again she had slept with the ease of a child.  But not on the night of Bradan’s return.  On that night, the air outside was full of a sharp chill and a wild rain that beat down upon the roof of the house.  Alice woke in her bed with a start, for a moment confused about where she was.  Had she somehow been transported back to that long night before the wedding that was never to be? 

But no, nothing as awful as all of that.  It was just a storm railing against the house the way a child in the midst of a full on tantrum was apt to rail against his parent.  Still, she felt a restless kind of a presence and found that it was something she could not shake.  She got herself out of bed and bundled herself in a blanket before opening her door and padding down the home’s seemingly never-ending hallway.  Something she had learned to love about being up in the small hours when everything was quiet and most of the people around her slumbered was how much easier it seemed to trust and follow her instincts.  There was far less questioning, far less talking herself out of things and attempting to adhere to some kind of logic.  When a little voice in the back of her head told her to make her way to the great room with the massive fireplace she had come to love, she listened to it.  There was no reason for her not to.  She simply did as it told and that room was where she came upon Bradan.  Bradan, the man she had been waiting for these three weeks and all of her life before that.  He was home again, a fact that filled her with joy, but he was not at all as she remembered him.  She could not see his face with the way he knelt beside the fire, but looking at his bent back she got the impression of a man who was badly broken.  Not in body, but certainly in spirit.  His head was bowed and his body shaking and after a few disoriented moments Alice realized that he was crying.  This man who had always seemed so full of joy was crying alone in the middle of the night.  She didn’t want to startle him but she could not stand to see him that way and so she hurried to his side, placing one tentative and questioning hand on his shoulder.  At her touch, he turned to look at her over his shoulder and she could see that his eyes were full of sorrow.  What could possibly have happened to him to make him look so defeated?   

“Bradan?  Bradan, what is it?  What’s happened?”

“It’s nothing, nothing to worry yourself about.”

I don’t think so,” she replied softly, sinking to the floor at his feet and forcing him to hold eye contact with her. “I don’t think that’s true at all.  It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“I don’t want to make my burdens yours, to cause you any more trouble than I may have already.”

“How do you mean?  I can’t think of any trouble you’ve caused me at all.”

“Not that you know of, not yet, but I’m sure you’ll think it’s trouble when I tell you that I can’t marry you after all.”

Alice felt as though her spirit had left her body.  This had to be some kind of a cruel joke.  This couldn’t possibly be happening to her again.  There was no way life would deal her such a terrible hand.  But from what she knew of Bradan, he was not a spiteful man and would not wish to cause her any pain without reason.  So then he meant it?  He was going to call off their wedding just as Travis had?  Alice wasn’t sure she could survive it.  She did not know how she could begin to pick herself up again after this final blow and she spoke without knowing if there was any real point in doing so.

“You don’t want me, then.  I see.  You don’t want me here.”

“No!  Oh Alice, no, it’s nothing like that.  How could you possibly think a thing like that?  How could you think that any man wouldn’t want you?”

“Because,” she said simply, her new heartbreak driving her to an honesty the two of them had not previously had. “This won’t be the first time a man has made that decision.  Before I came here I was to be wed but on the day of my wedding my betrothed left for another.  I suppose I should have known then that there was something about me that did not inspire a man to take me on for a lifetime.”

“No,” Bradan’s voice was hoarse and his tears had begun anew. “It’s nothing at all like that.  I
do
want to marry you.  I want you here badly, more than I feel capable of letting you know.”

“Well then why are you sending me away?”

“Because.  Very soon there will not be a here to live on and I can’t ask you to be my wife when I’ve nothing to provide.”

“I don’t understand.”

Bradan ran one tormented hand through his still wet hair, his eyes staring into the fireplace and his body actually shaking with fear or grief or any number of unknown feelings Alice could only begin to guess at.  She hated to see him like that and it was without a second thought that she took his hand firmly in both of hers.  She wanted him to know that she was there with him, in both body and spirit.  She wanted to give him whatever strength she was able.

“My parents.  This ranch belonged to them before it belonged to me.  They loved this land every bit as well as I do but they weren’t the best at managing their money.  When they died it was sudden and they left me not only this land but also a significant amount of debt.  I’ve spent more than a decade trying to dig us out from under it but now I see that I have failed.  I visited the bank, you see, and the last little bit of grace and leniency I had from them has been exhausted.  They mean to take the ranch unless I can pay the remainder of my parents’ debt in full by month’s end and there is no way I can accomplish that.  So you see, I can’t take you as my wife.  I don’t know what made me think I could build that dream of a life to begin with.”

“Is that all?”

Bradan finally tore his gaze away from the fire, but only to look at Alice as though she were crazy.  The combination of the look and the pure joy that had consumed Alice caused her to laugh giddily, which only confused Bradan further.  He must have thought that she had lost her mind and she supposed that she would have believed the same thing if their positions had been reversed.  It was just that she felt such a profound relief upon hearing the story that she could not keep it to herself.

“Is that all?  Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Well then we’ll be married just as we planned.”

“Do you really want to take on the role of a pauper’s life?  It will be very hard.  I will give you everything I have, I’ll do it for the rest of my life, but it will still be hard.”

“So you would want to marry me regardless of your situation?”

“Yes,” he said with that same loving kindness radiating from him, “I don’t want to think of a world where I have to lose you as well as everything else.”

“Then you shall lose nothing at all.  There is something about myself that I have not told you, something I intended to keep to myself until after we were wed.  I see that it may have been wrong and I hope you aren’t angry, but after the way I was left before I felt that I couldn’t do anything else.”

“I’m afraid that now it is I who does not understand.”

“When we are wed, it is not only me you will receive.  There is a dowry as well.  It is quite substantial, and I believe it will pay your debts with plenty to spare afterwards.”

“But that belongs to you!”

“No,” Alice said happily, knowing that when she spoke the words they were true. “It belongs to us.  To our future.”

THE END

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