Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) (7 page)

When daylight returned to the roof window and the people in the room stirred to life, Penelope emerged from her bed much refreshed and inspired by a renewed curiosity about her imagined captors. Because she couldn’t communicate with them using words, she watched their activities with interest to grasp any idea of their lifestyle. She noted the kindness they displayed toward their children, especially the affinity between the extremely aged, some of whom never moved from their bed rolls near the fire, and the very young, who engaged in constant chatter with their elders, brought them things to eat and drink, and even fetched things for them when asked. One young girl threaded her old grandmother’s needle, while another little boy rubbed his grandfather’s feet. Such relationships Penelope imagined, watching them together. The parents and other middle-aged adults came and went from the house without any concern for the welfare of their children, leaving older girls to tend the fire and cook meals for the aged and the younger children. Penelope saw none of the strife between the children she remembered among white children. A few words from one of the elders sufficed to settle all conflict almost before it began, and the children deferred to these judgments without question. They executed their duties with enthusiasm, but one and all strenuously ignored Penelope. Only one girl, almost teenaged in her willowy stature, served Penelope her meals in the absence of her custodian, but made no further effort to engage her in any interaction.

The custodian herself, when she returned from her occupation outside (Penelope couldn’t imagine what that might be), tried a few more times to talk to Penelope, but gave it up soon enough. Each morning, the woman smeared some foul-smelling ointment onto a particularly nasty gash in Penelope’s forehead, but after a few days, the cut healed and the woman left Penelope to rest and recover from the remainder of her injuries. Penelope slept a great deal during those first three days, sensing each day the return of her ability to move and the fading of the pain in her limbs, head, and back. She dared not remove her clothing in that environment to examine her bruises but after three days, she felt well enough to walk around the room. The next morning, she ventured outside for a walk around the encampment. Her custodian observed her approvingly from the doorway and patted her on the shoulder when she returned. After that, Penelope enjoyed perfect freedom of movement around the encampment. Although she still considered herself a prisoner, no one attempted to stop her from going wherever she pleased. To test this, Penelope extended the range of her walk further and further each day, exploring the perimeter of the encampment, but only her custodian paid her any attention, and that attention only included the occasional approving smile at her improvement. In the end, her own shoes, so thin and tight and ill-suited to extensive walking, prevented her from walking any further. The cold of the frozen ground cut straight through them, and when she returned to the house of her incarceration, she often dropped onto her bed with an agonizing groan and spent the next hour massaging her toes and ankles to restore the sensation in her feet.

Her custodian commented on the shoes and shook her head. She rummaged in a bundle in a dim corner of the house and proffered toward Penelope a pair of rugged buckskin boots, lined with sheep’s wool, and well battered from years of use. The woman shortened and extended her arm several times, holding the boots in her hand, thrusting them toward Penelope in a pantomime of inducing her to take them. But the prospect of adopting any of these people’s ways, or relinquishing any of her own civilized refinement, horrified Penelope. If her own shoes crippled her for life, she would cling to them all the more desperately as a symbol of her lost civility. At such times, when the people treated her the most solicitously and tended her the most gently, Penelope remembered the West ranch with regret.

Her reaction confused her, because she could remember nothing about the West family or its environment that inspired as much feeling of acceptance or freedom as this destitute Indian camp. The smoke-smudged faces, the dirt-blackened fingernails of the children when they handed her a bowl of food, and the chuckling laughter of the women as they pursued their daily work—every face bestowed on Penelope a kindness and recognition she never experienced anywhere in the white world before, especially not from any member of the West family. On consideration of this question, two exceptions contradicted her judgment, and the faces of Janet, the cook, and Caleb, the stable hand, floated before her mind’s eye.
Why them?
she wondered
What set them apart?
Somewhere in her subconscious, she associated these two people with one another, though she couldn’t figure out what connected them to each other. The faces of the West family drifted further back into the recesses of her awareness, almost as though they lacked enough reality to exist at all. Matilda’s resigned sadness and George’s aloof passivity rendered them as transparent as ghosts. Anders rumbled around the periphery of her awareness like a distant roll of thunder, far away and receding further all the time. The faces of Janet and Caleb remained prominent in her recollection of the ranch, especially Caleb. Penelope marveled over this, because he behaved so submissively when confronted by anyone, nodding his head and parroting his formula of “Yes, sir” to every communication. Only the brief interlude when she met him in the barn offered any deviation from this formula, but those fragile moments impressed still further on Penelope the truth of Anders’ claim that Caleb thought a lot more about everything around him than he ever expressed. Penelope lamented Anders’ intrusion into her conversation with Caleb. She wished she could engage in an uninhibited interaction with him, talking to him and getting to know him, until she understood enough about him to answer all her questions and satisfy her fascination for him.

On the fifth day after her arrival in the Indian camp, her custodian brought Penelope out of the house after breakfast in the morning. She pointed to the horizon, speaking intently and gesticulating toward the east. She then waved the old boots at her several more times, insisting that Penelope take them. Penelope shook her head most emphatically. The woman pointed again, and this time, when Penelope followed the direction of her finger, she noticed a group of men assembling at the door of another building. Again, the custodian tried to convince Penelope to take the boots, and again, Penelope declined them. The woman scowled. Just at that moment, one of the men jogged over and exchanged words with the woman. The woman held up the boots and then pointed down at Penelope’s shoes. The man scowled in exactly the same way. Reluctantly, he took the boots himself. Through sign language and repeated
pointings, the two people communicated to Penelope that she must go with these men wherever they intended to take her. Penelope walked away from her custodian and once she had joined the cluster of men, the group moved out of the encampment toward the east.

Very shortly, Penelope understood the nature of her custodian’s communication about the boots because her feet tortured her terribly, and the group traveled on and on, into the day, over fields and heath, fording streams and traversing patches of dense forest. Although she noted that the man still dangled the boots in his hand and she longed to accept them in place of her own tormenting shoes, Penelope staunchly resisted the temptation. The men escorting her frowned at her when she stumbled and limped, but made no further effort to offer her the alternative footwear. Unlike her custodian, these men cared not a jot if she ruined her feet if she lacked the sense to accept a gift when it was offered.

Later in the afternoon, the band climbed up into a series of foothills. At the top of one of these elevations, the men halted and exchanged words with each other, pointing in different directions as if consulting on which direction they should go. Suddenly, they all trained their gazes southward and flopped down onto their stomachs on the ground, hiding themselves behind the crest of the hill. The man carrying the boots dragged Penelope down next to him, pressing her into the dirt. Every pair of eyes studied the southern horizon, and in a moment, a line of mounted horsemen appeared from the trees lining a stream bed in the valley below them. The riders cantered out of the trees, onto the plane, and crossed their line of vision before disappearing into the trees on the other side of the valley. Penelope caught her breath, as the men did, and watched until the riders passed out of sight. Only after they vanished and the pounding of their horse’s hooves faded from hearing did she recall the cut of their hats and their saddles and realize those riders were white people. Calling out to them never occurred to her. Maybe they could have rescued her from these Indians and taken her home again. She sniffed back a tear as she thought of this scenario, but it was too late now. The band of men stood up and continued walking. Penelope noted that they retraced their steps back toward the encampment and before night fell, she found herself back in the same house, with the same people, and her same old custodian bending over her bleeding feet with her healing ointment.

That night, after the fire died to a bed of glowing embers and the Indians snored in their blankets around her, Penelope buried her face in her own bedding and sobbed her helpless despair away. Would she spend the rest of her life with these people? Would she ever consent to change her clothes or wash her hair for grief at the loss of her former life? Would she one day give up all hope of returning to
her own people? Would she forget how to speak English, as she once read happened to women and children taken to live for decades among the Indians? Would she, like them, fight off her rescuers and resist being taken home again? Her grief flowed out of her unabated, until she cried herself to sleep.

The next morning, Penelope finished her breakfast and examined the faces and trimmings in the house with fresh consideration. She wondered at her own ability to appreciate them in their raw, polluted austerity. But just as she allowed herself to look kindly on her prison and her keepers, a great bustle of activity and animated voices rose up outside. Nearly half the able-bodied people in the room hastened out through the door. When they returned, talking and gesturing together in a flurry of excitement, Penelope almost jumped up from her seat when the last person entered the room and she recognized Caleb. He scanned the room until he found her. He nodded to her in an officious way, strolled over to her, and sat down cross-legged on the floor next to her.

“I thought you’d be here,” he told her.

“What are you doing here?” she stared at him in wonderment.

“I thought you might be here. I came to get you.”

He lifted his head and called out across the room. The custodian joined them and sat opposite them. She spoke to Caleb in her own language, pointing into different directions and then at Penelope. Caleb listened to her until she finished, then he addressed Penelope again.

“She says they’ve been trying to figure out how to send you back home,” he related. “They weren’t sure how to do that. They’re very happy that I’m here, and that I know who you are and where you belong. She says I can take you home.”

“Why did they take me away in the first place?” Penelope gasped, still starting at him.

“They didn’t,” he informed her. “She says they found you unconscious on the road. You were too hurt to leave you by yourself, so they brought you with them.”

“But they attacked the carriage,” she retorted.

He cocked his head on one side. “I don’t think so.”

“Yes, they did,” she maintained. “I saw them.”

“What did you see?” he asked.

“Indians on horseback,” she replied. “They were waving their weapons and screaming at us. Their faces were painted up, and they drove the carriage off the road.”

“Did they have long hair?” he questioned her. “Or was their hair cut short?”

“They had their heads shaved,” she asserted.
“All except for a patch in the middle, running back along the top of their heads. Like this.” She showed him with her hand.

“Those were
Comanches,” he declared. “They are at war with white people. The Comanches attack anything that moves along the road, if they can find it. They probably didn’t realize that you were still alive, or they would have killed you the way they killed Pete. He was the man driving you. These people are Shoshones. They are friendly. You should have realized that. They’ve been very anxious to take care of you and to get you home again. This woman,” Caleb indicated the custodian. “she arranged for her husband and some of the other men to take you back to the nearest town but on the way, they had to hide from a band of what looked to them like hostile bandits, so they decided to bring you back here until they figured out what to do with you. I told them that the sheriff is out with a posse looking for you. Anders is very angry that they haven’t been able to find you. These people didn’t know the sheriff was looking for you, otherwise, they wouldn’t have hidden themselves and you from them.”

“Is Anders out looking for me, too?” Penelope murmured.

“No,” he smiled. “He’s at home, waiting for the sheriff to find you.”

“Well, how did you find me, then?” Penelope inquired.

“I heard about the carriage being found wrecked on the side of the road,” Caleb recounted. “I also heard that the horses were never found, so I figured they must have been taken by someone. They found Pete’s body, but not yours, so I reckoned whoever took the horses must have you, too. I knew this band of Shoshones had a camp here, and I thought you might be here. If you weren’t here, they might know something about where you were, so I came to check. I guess I just got lucky.”