Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) (2 page)

She waited there, unwilling to move a muscle, listening intently to the vacuous silence of the church around her. She refused all efforts by her mind and heart to question her decision to go through with this project, and she stubbornly blotted from her mind all doubt about the suitability of her groom. In the year preceding her acceptance of this marriage, she communicated solely with George through letters, without the aid of a chaperoning relative, so she had only his word about the desirability of his son as her betrothed. Faced with no other prospects, she jumped at the chance to finalize such an advantageous match, but she still knew next to nothing about the man she was about to marry. Having proceeded so far along this course as to be standing in the entrance of the church with her betrothed waiting at the altar, she supposed she couldn’t withdraw at this point, so she just waited for George to come and escort her to her groom. At least the church was warm.

In a moment, she heard the door slide open again and footsteps approach her. “Here we go,” George murmured, and he took her by the hand. “Everybody’s waiting.”

Penelope began to walk, still unable to see where she was going, but to her eternal gratitude, George looped her hand through the crook of his arm, and she followed where he led. Another door opened in front of them, and the strains of the organ flowed out from the church, swirling around her. Through one of the holes in the lace of the veil, Penelope just made out the familiar arrangement of the church with its pews on
either side and the aisle leading up to the altar. She distinguished a male shape in a grey suit standing near the altar and the priest in a white cassock. The only other person she could see was Matilda in the first pew, straining her neck to watch George conduct her down the aisle. Leaning on George’s arm for balance, Penelope stumbled blindly forward until she felt the older man slow and stop, and then he transferred her hand to the arm of another person, who turned her bodily to face the priest.

The priest launched into his “Dearly Beloved” speech, which Penelope ignored. Her head swam with heady excitement, and the thought, “I’m getting married” continually reiterated in her mind. Distantly, she felt the presence of the man next to her, and through the sleeve of his jacket, she perceived his essence. She listened to him breathing throughout the introductory speech, and she only attended to the priest’s words when he began his warning imprecations about the sanctity and complexity of marriage. At all the weddings Penelope attended previously, she always dismissed these cautionary statements as a trite formality designed to frighten the bride. Now, with herself as the target of these admonitions, she took special note of them. She wondered why she never considered their importance before now, when no avenue of retreat remained. Why hadn’t someone told her all these things before she contracted this marriage? But, come to think of it, they
had
told her, hadn’t they, at all those other weddings she attended. She imagined what her mother, or an aunt, would have advised her to do during her negotiations with George, if she had a mother or aunt to consult. Would they sit her down before she boarded the train in Baltimore and ask her in the most serious tones possible, “Now, are you absolutely certain you want to go through with this?” And would they tell her stories from their own marriages to give her a clear idea of the road upon which she intended to embark? She could only speculate on those things now, and consign them to the bin of what might have been.

The warning concluded, and the priest announced the next phase of the ceremony, which involved the taking of vows. He elucidated the dire consequences of breaking the vows undertaken in the name of God, and after much ado, he asked if anyone present bore any objection to the proposed marriage about to be finalized and if so, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. However, because only George and Matilda formed the company of witnesses, Penelope expected no sound from behind her in the vacant assembly of the church. After an appropriate silence, the priest continued with his recital. Once again, the vows to which both Penelope and the man next to her agreed came from the stock Christian liturgy, and she had heard them so many times before that her mind somehow resisted even pondering them, let alone questioning them. Still, what remained for her to do? She could hardly answer “I don’t” to any of the questions. Of course she did. She made the decision to love, honor, and obey, forsaking all others, weeks before when she wrote to George that she would come and marry his son. This ceremony represented nothing more than a pantomime, a convention, an overture to the pre-concluded fact that she and Anders West were already married. They had to complete these pre-assigned dance steps before they could go home together. Penelope remembered reading in a book somewhere—she could not remember what book—that some foreign cultures dispensed with all ritual associated with marriage, and that the act of going home together to the same house and the same bed constituted the sum total of the marriage service.
How sensible that would be, compared to this business of dressing up in white costumes and covering our faces with veils!
she thought. Anders had never laid eyes on Penelope before today, and the veil only served as a theatrical pretext to prolong the inevitable disclosure.

All these thoughts swirled through her brain during the service itself and so preoccupied her mind that, when the priest finally asked her the fateful question, she almost lost track of the expected answer. She paused, struggling to collect her wits and express her answer, so that the groom and his parents examined her quizzically, although they couldn’t see her face any more clearly than she could see them. Eventually, she managed to blurt out, “I do.” The family sighed with relief, and the priest plodded on through the ritual.

Ultimately, the wedding service wound to its conclusion. The priest invited the bride and groom to face each other and gave his permission for the groom to kiss the bride. Everyone froze in suspended animation as the man at Penelope’s side turned to her and she turned to him, and he hesitated to unveil her. His hands lifted the corners of the veil and its weight shifted on her head. Then, he brought the two front corners up and tossed them back behind her, revealing her face. For the first time, she laid her eyes on her husband, and he laid his eyes on her.

He really did look quite handsome in his brushed grey suit that resembled his mother’s. The same silk rosebuds highlighted the lapel of his jacket, and a gold watch chain swung across the front of his waistcoat. His languid green eyes searched her face as intently as she searched his, until he smiled kindly and brought his face nearer to hers to kiss her gently on the lips. His thin cropped moustache tickled her nose, and his soft lips left an exotic perfume lingering near her face. She also smelled an intoxicating blend of tobacco on his breath.

Before she could scrutinize him further, he took her by the arm and swung around toward the audience, where George and Matilda watched them from the first pew. Matilda wiped her eyes, and George beamed up at them. Anders marched Penelope back down the aisle to the vestry, with his parents following after them, and the door closed behind them, sealing them outside the sanctuary of the church. In the vestry, Anders dropped Penelope’s arm and the two examined each other more closely between the embraces of his mother and his father slapping him on the back and pumping his hand. The two couples dawdled in the vestry, attempting to converse but failing miserably, until they gave up altogether. After collecting their coats from the side room, they proceeded out of doors to the street, where the elder Wests’ buggy and another smaller one awaited them at the curb.

George and Matilda loaded into their buggy and trotted away, leaving Anders and Penelope on the curb, where a boy in patched knee britches held the horse’s bridle for them. Anders handed Penelope up into the seat and, with many solicitous tones, tucked her into a lap robe and surrounded her shoulders with blankets before he took his own position next to her. With a shout to the boy, he urged his horse into a jog and drove away down the street. They retraced their route back through the town, past the hotel where Penelope disembarked not an hour previously, and out the other side of town into the countryside.

Penelope made a few lame overtures to conversation on the way but after the first pleasantries met with single word answers from Anders, she retreated into the shelter of her blankets and rode the rest of the way toward their destination in silence. With the increase in bodily warmth she carried into her wraps from the church, she surveyed the landscape with a less dejected attitude than she had from the coach, and she admired the rolling fields and tree-lined streams with the hope of seeing them resplendent in their spring and summer greenery. The road they traveled traversed plowed farmland lying fallow and forests sunk deep into the winter stillness. They swerved this way and that, past houses with smoke billowing from their chimneys and well-insulated people braving the cold to fetch water from their wells, until their journey bore them beyond the limits of the farmland into open range. After many more miles without further sight of houses or humans, Anders steered his horse into a long drive bounded on either side by enormous poplar trees, all stark and bare in their winter austerity. The drive itself navigated several hills and corners, covering miles of terrain before it widened into a yard in front of a grand two-story house surrounded by barns and out-buildings. Smoke rising from the chimneys indicated human habitation of several of these buildings, and four men emerged from separate places around the place to meet them in the yard.

Anders drove his buggy up to the door of the largest barn, where a lanky youth slid the door open for him, and he drove straight into the main passage. At the sight of these other people, Anders surfaced from his withdrawn state and called out to them in the most familiar language. “Get hold of her head, boy!” he yelled. “Where’s Bill?”

“I’m right here,” a gruff older man replied from the open barn door.

“Get
her combed down and the buggy put away,” Anders barked to the young man.

The so-called boy, who stood taller than Anders himself, mumbled, “Yes, sir,” as he held the horse still.
Immediately, his clear grey eyes locked onto Penelope’s face, and a bolt of lightning shot through her. Though he addressed Anders, he seemed to speak directly to her, igniting in her heart a burning curiosity about him.

Anders handed Penelope down from the seat. “Bill, you come and see me up at the house later,” Anders ordered. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“What is it?” the older man demanded.

“I don’t want to talk about it in front of the lady,” Anders grumbled. “I’m
takin’ her inside and getting’ her settled in. Then you come up and see me and we’ll talk privately. And after you finish that,” he continued to the youth. “get the wagon hitched up. You’re going into town to collect the lady’s trunk from the hotel. Those fools took it inside, so you’ll have to search around to find it. And you make sure you get the right one.” Anders spoke to Penelope for the first time. “Did you say your trunk has your name on it, or some other identifying markings?”

Penelope hastened to answer this commanding interrogation. “Yes, my name and Penelope
Mathers is written plainly on the lid. You won’t have any trouble identifying it.”

“There you go,” Anders pointed out to the youth. “Now, get on with it!” He planted his boot heel on the young man’s lower back and gave him a hard shove, sending him sprawling into the dirt on the floor of the barn. Penelope screamed involuntarily, taken as much by surprise at the sudden attack as the youth himself. One of the other men standing nearby guffawed loudly, but the older man, Bill, jumped between them, grasping the horse’s bridle the youth dropped in his fall.

“Easy, there, Caleb!” he assured the young man. “You lay off him, Anders! He ain’t done nothin’ to deserve that kind of treatment.”

“You stay out of it, Bill!” Anders snarled. “I’m the boss around here, and I’ll treat him any way I choose. Now pass him the reins and let him get on with his work! Get up, boy! Get to work, before I give you another one!”

“No, you won’t!” Bill put in. “Not while I’m here, you won’t.”

“I’m
warnin’ you to mind your own business, Bill Olsen!” Anders hissed. “You could find yourself on the wrong side of me, actin’ that way. You could find yourself out of a job.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Bill bellowed. “And if you lay a finger on me, you’ll find yourself in need of a doctor!”

Anders whirled away, his face a mask of rage. He seized Penelope by the wrist and dragged her out of the barn, across the gravel driveway to the big house dominating the area. She ran to keep up with him, up the steps to the porch, and he burst through the door into a carpeted corridor before he let her go. Once inside, he calmed down and tugged down the corners of his waistcoat to compose himself. Penelope kept silent, shocked and dismayed by his outrageous behavior, but Anders’ abuse of the young man, especially after the passage of such a significant glance between herself and Caleb, repulsed her from her new husband. She loathed the idea of spending a moment more in his company. But the possibility of retreat lay permanently closed behind her, accomplished now with definite finality by the falling of night outside.

Anders slid aside a panel leading into a nicely furnished parlor, where his parents awaited them in front of a blazing fire. As soon as Anders closed the door behind them, Penelope drifted toward the fire, where she managed to banish the last remnants of cold from her hands and feet. She also slowly—she hoped inconspicuously—removed some of the more garish of Matilda’s additions to her wardrobe.