Wyoming Bride (43 page)

Miss Birch, like Mrs. Templeton, seemed to find joy in brutality against those weaker than herself. Every infraction at the Institute had been punished with three—“You’re lucky it’s only three!” Miss Birch was fond of saying—vicious strokes of a birch rod.

Hetty forced her thoughts away from her five siblings, who were all lost … or dead … but certainly gone. She couldn’t do anything to help them. But she could help Grace.

“What I said about Griffin goes for Grace, too,” Hetty said. “Let go of her.”

Mrs. Templeton twisted Grace’s hair until the girl whimpered and stood on tiptoes to avoid the pain. “This is my kid. I’ll do with her as I like.”

“Not while I’m here, you won’t.” Hetty obeyed a sudden impulse, and her balled fist struck Mrs. Templeton in the nose.

“Ow!” Mrs. Templeton released Grace and grabbed her bloodied nose. “You’ll pay for that.”

Instead of running like Griffin had, Grace stood and watched with anxious eyes. “Please, Lucy,” the girl pleaded. “I’m sorry. Griffin’s sorry.”

“Shut up, you ungrateful whelp!” Mrs. Templeton said.

That was another strange thing about the Templeton family. Hetty couldn’t imagine calling her own mother by her first name, yet both children called their mother Lucy. Nor could she imagine any mother calling her daughter an “ungrateful whelp.”

Hetty should have known better than to think Mrs. Templeton wouldn’t strike back. A moment later she felt nails claw their way across her face, narrowly missing her left eye. One of the scratches across her brow bled into her eye, blurring Hetty’s vision on that side. She almost missed seeing Mrs. Templeton bend to pick up a long, heavy dead branch.

“Lucy, don’t!” Grace cried. And then, to Hetty, “Look out!”

Hetty ducked as Mrs. Templeton swung the unwieldy weapon, but she lost her balance and fell backward onto the ground. Hetty made the mistake of trying to push herself upright with her injured shoulder and yelped in pain. Even after seven weeks, it wasn’t healed enough to support her. She was stuck on the ground like a sitting duck.

Mrs. Templeton must have realized Hetty’s predicament, because she uttered a shout of triumph. However, the weight of the swinging branch as it continued in its arc pulled her sideways. Instead of letting go of the branch to regain her balance, she held on, and her momentum forced her several steps backward.

Hetty heard Mr. Lin yelling something behind her, but she was too busy trying to avoid being brained by the tree branch to pay attention. She heard Mrs. Templeton cry out and wondered if Grace had somehow intervened to save her.

Hetty looked up in time to see Mrs. Templeton’s arms flailing as she tripped backward over a large stone. She finally let go of the branch, which flew several feet upward before it began falling, falling, disappearing from sight before ever hitting the ground.

Hetty struggled to her feet, recognizing at last what Mr. Lin had been shouting. “Be careful!” she cried. “The cliff!”

She got one last look at Mrs. Templeton’s face in the firelight—a ghoulish mask of fury—before the woman fell backward out of sight.

Her shrill scream seemed to go on endlessly. Then it stopped.

Hetty dashed with Grace toward the edge of the hundred-foot rock cliff that had been visible in the daylight when they’d camped, but which had disappeared beyond the light of the campfire after dark. She felt sick with grief and regret. She’d only wanted to protect Grace and Griffin. Instead she’d made them orphans. She couldn’t do anything right. Mr. Lin should have let her die.

“Careful,” Hetty gasped as she put a hand across Grace’s waist to keep the girl away from the edge.

Grace kept repeating, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.”

“What happened?” Griffin called out. “Did the witch hurt herself?”

Grace turned on her brother as he appeared in the light of the campfire and said, “The witch is
dead
.”

Hetty stared at the two children, dismayed to hear what they were calling their mother. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked Grace. “Your mother has just died a ghastly death.”

“She wasn’t our mom!” Griffin retorted.

“Griffin,” Grace warned. “Don’t say another word.”

“There’s no reason to lie anymore. Lucy’s dead. We’re DOOMED.”

Hetty remembered her twin sister Hannah using that precise term, DOOMED, when their eldest sister Miranda had turned eighteen and could no longer remain at the orphanage. Miranda was the one who’d protected them from Miss Birch’s terrible punishments. Without her, they would certainly suffer under the iron discipline of the horrible headmistress.

In the end, Miranda had stolen away, along with their two younger brothers, Nick and Harry, to become a mail-order bride in Texas. At least, Hetty hoped that was what had happened. The three sisters left behind—Hetty, her identical twin sister Hannah, and Josie—had never heard from Miranda again.

When Miranda failed to contact them, they’d taken desperate measures to escape Miss Birch. Hannah had followed Miranda’s lead and become the mail-order bride of an Irishman, Mr. McMurtry. Hannah, Hetty, and Josie had journeyed west with him to the Wyoming Territory.

That trip had ended in disaster, with Hannah’s husband dead of cholera and their sixteen-year-old sister, Josie, taken captive by the Sioux, who’d attacked their wagon and wounded Hetty. Hetty’s widowed twin, Hannah, had disappeared after leaving Hetty in the wagon—wounded and dying—to go for help.

By the time Hetty had come to her senses, after weeks and weeks of being nursed back to health by Mr. Lin, they’d been closer to Butte than Cheyenne. She’d been forced to continue the journey to the Montana Territory. Once she got to Butte, Hetty hoped to find some way to get back to Cheyenne, locate Hannah, if she was still alive, and begin a search for Josie.

Hetty realized she must have been in shock to get so lost in her thoughts at such a dire moment. She shook her head and focused on what Griffin had blurted.

She wasn’t our mom!

That explained so many things that had seemed strange about Mrs. Templeton’s behavior toward her supposed children. About Griffin’s pranks, which often had Mrs. Templeton as their victim. About Grace’s wariness around her pretend mother. About the disparities in ages and appearances of the entire fake family.

Hetty turned to Grace and Griffin, who were now standing beside each other. She crossed her arms over her chest because she could feel her body beginning to tremble. Mrs. Templeton was dead on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Hetty was at least partly responsible for someone dying. Again.

She forced her mind away from the memories of the calamity she’d caused on the journey west. There was nothing she could do to change the past. She closed her eyes to shut out the awful vision of the man she loved dying in her arms. When she opened them again, she said to the two children, “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

“Mrs. Templeton worked upstairs at the saloon where we were living,” Griffin said. “Before our mom died, she used to work there, and some of the ladies made sure we had a place to sleep and food to eat. But Grace was getting older, and they wanted her to—”

“Griffin, that’s enough,” Grace interrupted.

“Anyway,” Griffin continued, “Mr. Norwood’s advertisement for a mail-order bride said he’d give preference to a widow with children, so Grace went to Lucy with this crazy idea that we could all get out of that place if Lucy became this guy Norwood’s mail-order bride.”

“And Mrs. Templeton went along?” Hetty said.

Griffin snorted. “Yeah, as soon as Grace agreed to pay her, she did.”

“You
paid
her and she treated you that badly?” Hetty said, appalled.

“Why do you think I dumped those beans in her lap?” Griffin said. “Lucy wrote back to Norwood that she was twenty-five, so we had to pretend to be younger, too. I’m nine and a half, not seven.”

Hetty turned to Grace and asked, “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

Hetty glanced at Mr. Lin, who was listening to this confession, wondering what he was thinking. His dark eyes remained inscrutable.

“We’re DOOMED all right,” Grace said.

Hetty watched tears pool in Grace’s eyes before they slid onto her freckled cheeks. Her heart went out to the two children.

Grace glanced at her brother and said, “I can always get work at a saloon in Butte.”

Griffin’s eyes narrowed and his mouth flattened to a hard line. “Not that kind of work. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“What other choice do we have?” Grace said quietly.

It took Hetty a moment to realize what kind of work Grace was considering. At seventeen, Hetty was still naive enough, even after meeting a girl at the orphanage who’d taken a lover, to be shocked. “There must be a better alternative,” she said.

“Not unless we go to some orphanage,” Griffin said bitterly. “We ended up in one right after our mother died, but we ran away and have been hiding out at the saloon ever since. I’m never going back. I’ll starve first.”

Hetty shuddered. Grace working in a brothel? Grace and Griffin at the mercy of a cruel headmistress like Miss Iris Birch? “There has to be a way for the two of you to avoid either of those choices.”

“There is way,” Mr. Lin said.

Hetty, Grace, and Griffin all turned to find the Chinaman tapping out the contents of his long clay pipe.

“What do you suggest?” Hetty asked.

“I think
you
be mail-order bride,” Mr. Lin said. “Two kids be your kids. Mr. Norwood get bride, kids get home, you get husband help you look for sisters.” He smiled and said, “Work out happy for everybody. Okay?”

Hetty stared at Mr. Lin for a moment in astonishment, then glanced at the two children, who were staring back at her with hopeful eyes. Hetty wanted to help, truly she did. But she’d caused so much pain and suffering, she wasn’t worthy to become someone’s wife. She’d had her one chance at love, and she’d utterly destroyed it. She didn’t deserve another.

Besides, the deception would never work. She could never pass for twenty-five. She knew nothing about being a mother or a nurse. And she was a virgin.

Then she thought of the occupation Grace might be forced to join if she refused. And pictured mischievous Griffin in an orphanage, with a cruel headmistress like Miss Iris Birch.

Hetty looked from one young worried face to the other and said, “Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll become Mr. Norwood’s mail-order bride.”