by Lily Reynard
"How about nausea? Decreased appetite?" asked Dr. Addison.
"I haven't felt much like eating lately," Liza managed to wheeze, before coughing again.
Dr. Addison hooked in the earpieces of her stethoscope. "Would you mind unbuttoning your dress and unhooking your corset? I'd like to listen to your lungs and heart, and it's very difficult to do that through all these layers of clothing."
Liza immediately raised her hands and began unbuttoning the top of her high-necked, close-fitting dress, which was made from a bold floral print fabric. Sarah noticed that the beds of her friend's nails were now tinted with the same alarming shade of blue as her lips.
When Liza had opened her dress and unhooked the front of her corset, leaving her clad only in a thin cotton chemise from the waist up, Dr. Addison bent and pressed her stethoscope to various points on her patient's back and chest.
After listening intently, the doctor straightened up and removed the ends of the stethoscope from her ears. "One last question: have you been ill recently? With fever and a red rash, or a very sore throat and a fever?"
"Last…summer," Liza managed, between gasps and coughs. She sounded suddenly weaker. "I thought…I was…getting better. That this…was just…a lingering weakness."
Dr. Addison nodded gravely. "I believe that you're suffering from a severe heart ailment. It's an aftereffect of rheumatic fever. Your body is currently starved for oxygen."
"Can you cure her?" Sarah demanded.
"I'm sorry." Dr. Addison bowed her head, but not before Sarah saw the pain in the doctor's eyes. "There's no cure for congestive heart failure. But I do have some medicine in my trunk that can relieve the symptoms and allow her blood to circulate more freely."
"Please help her," Sarah begged.
"I'll do everything I can. Let me ask Mr. Anderson—your porter—if we can access the baggage wagon."
Dr. Addison backed gracefully through the screening curtains and vanished.
Liza began trying to hook her corset back together, but the halves of stiffened material kept slipping out of her fingers.
"Let me help you," Sarah urged, and leaned forward to help her friend fasten the hooks and eyes running down the front of her corset.
"Sarah," Liza whispered. Her cold fingers rose to cover Sarah's.
She had finally stopped coughing, but the labored wheezing breaths that had replaced the coughs were deeply unsettling.
"Don't speak," Sarah urged, as she swiftly finished with the corset and pulled the bodice of Liza's dress together so that she could begin doing up the buttons. "Save your strength."
"Promise me that you'll take my place." Liza's voice was the barest thread of sound, and Sarah had to bend close to hear her words. "Go to…Twin Forks. Marry them. Start your new life…as me."
"Don't say such things!" Sarah said in a fierce whisper. "We're going to Twin Forks together, remember?"
Liza shook her head. "I…don't think I have much time left." Her icy fingers trembled against the backs of Sarah's hands. "Letters. In my carpetbag. Read them. You'll know…everything about them."
Unable to believe that her friend might actually be dying, Sarah shook her head frantically. "Liza, no! You have to hang on! Dr. Addison will be back shortly. Her medicine will surely make you feel better."
Elizabeth touched her forehead to Sarah's. “The letters…read them!" she begged, her voice a faint breathless thread now. "Learn everything you can about Walter and Larkin. Don’t tell them who you really are. Take my place. That way…you can start a new life. As me.”
"I can't possibly!" Sarah protested.
Liza inhaled a wheezing breath, as if preparing to argue. Then her eyes widened, and she slumped sideways in her seat with a long, rattling exhalation. Her gaze fixed on eternity.
"Liza?" Sarah whispered, horror squeezing her chest more tightly than any corset. Then more urgently, "Liza!"
Praying that her friend had only fainted, she rose from her seat and pulled Liza's limp form upright. She peeled off her travel-stained gloves with haste, then pressed shaking fingers to the side of Liza's throat, just under the jaw, as she had seen Dr. Addison do just a few minutes ago.
Nothing.
"No…Liza, no!" Her heart pounding, Sarah fumbled in her carpetbag for the small engraved silver mirror that was part of her hairbrush and comb set. Hoping against hope, she held it close to Liza's slightly parted lips. But the mirror's glass surface remained unfogged by any faint exhalation.
She scrambled to her feet, shoving aside the curtain. "Dr. Addison!" she shouted, in a most unladylike fashion. "Dr. Addison, come quickly! Please!"
"I'll fetch her!" George called from the far end of the carriage. There was a rush of noise as he opened the connecting door and stepped through it.
A murmur of concern rose from the other passengers in the carriage. Sarah retreated behind the curtains. Her eyes began to sting and her vision blur as tears rose.
Liza was gone. She couldn't believe it…but confronted with her friend's sightless, staring eyes, she couldn't deny it either. She knew, all too well, what a body looked like once its soul had flown free of its earthly constraints.
She reached out to close Liza's eyes, just as she had closed her mother's eyes five years ago.
Go to Twin Forks. Marry them. Start a new life as me. Liza's final wish rang in her ears.
Despite her grief and shock at the unexpected loss of her new friend, Sarah had a big decision to make, and quickly. Should I really leave the train there? And if I do, can I really make Eliza's two fiancés believe that I'm the woman with whom they corresponded through the mail-order bride service?
Could Twin Forks be the safe haven I've been searching for?
Telling herself that it would do no harm to simply read the letters in the hours that remained before the train arrived in Twin Forks, Sarah reached for Liza's carpetbag, which was resting on the floor next to Sarah's bag. She found a thick packet of letters, tied with a rose-colored hair ribbon, at the very bottom of the bag, tucked away beneath Liza's change of unmentionables, her hair brush, and a novel.
After a moment's consideration, Sarah opened her own bag and swiftly switched her train ticket, inscribed with her name in the station agent's flowing copperplate script, with Liza's. The conductor had already passed through the carriage and checked their tickets, but if Sarah decided to go through with this wild scheme, she needed to ensure that none of Liza's belongings betrayed her true identity.
She shoved the packet of letters and Liza's ticket into her own carpetbag, closing the metal latch an instant before the curtains screening her seat billowed.
"Miss?" came Dr. Addison's voice.
"Oh, thank goodness you're here," Sarah exclaimed. "My friend—she's—I'm afraid she's—"
The tears that had been blurring her vision finally began to spill, flowing down her cheeks in hot trails.
"Oh no!" Dr. Addison thrust aside the curtains and swooped into the enclosed space. "Don't tell me I'm too late! I searched for this as quickly as I could!"
Distress clouded the doctor's beautiful features as she showed Sarah what she held: a cobalt-blue glass vial labeled "Amyl Nitrite" and a clean flannel rag. "Here, let me look at her."
As the doctor conducted a swift examination, Sarah dug for a handkerchief and tried to bring her emotions back under control.
After a minute or two, Dr. Addison sighed. Her shoulders slumped, confirming what Sarah already suspected. The medicine that the doctor had fetched could not revive Liza.
“It appears that her heart gave out. There's nothing I can do for her now," Dr. Addison said softly. "I'm so very sorry."
She draped the rag over Liza's face, then straightened and turned to look at Sarah. "You were traveling together? Were you relatives?”
"No—I—we—we only met a few days ago, on the train from Kansas City," Sarah replied, stumbling over the words as she tried to gather her thoughts.
“Can you tell me her name and where she might have family? I n
eed to write out her death certificate and notify her kin once we arrive in Twin Forks.”
Sarah opened her mouth to reply. Now I have to decide. Do I take this opportunity to start a new life as Liza Hunter, mail-order bride?
This was it. This was her chance to forever sever the bonds to her old life in Boston…and to ensure that no one from her old life would ever be able to find her.
Not Father…and especially not Clyde Burgess.
An icy dart of terror pierced her at the thought of Mr. Burgess.
“She told me that her name was Sarah Franklin,” said Sarah, her voice shaking from the force of her wildly beating heart. “And that she was traveling from Boston.”
Chapter Two
In the aftermath of Liza's death, when Dr. Addison had departed, two of the train's porters appeared to carry Liza's sheet-wrapped body away.
The excited murmur of questions and shocked exclamations from the other women in the carriage eventually died down. Sarah sat in a stunned stupor for a long time, until George returned to dim the carriage's gaslights and to make up the beds.
Now, she lay on the bed created by unfolding and sliding the two facing seats together. The hour was late, but a combination of grief and apprehension drove away sleep.
I can't believe that I've decided to embark on this crazy scheme! How can I possibly keep up the charade with any success? And more importantly, how can I even entertain the prospect of entering into a relationship with a man—two men—I've never met?
She remembered the full moon outside and drew aside the heavy velvet drape that hung over the window to admit a pale, illuminating beam of moonlight. Then she began to read the letters that Liza and her husband-to-be Walter Edwards had exchanged over the past autumn and winter. Sarah blessed the fact that Liza had kept the first drafts of her own letters to Mr. Edwards, with scribbled additions and crossed-out lines, so that she knew what biographical details Liza had confided to her beau.
As she scanned the tightly written pages, trying to learn as much as possible, she gained the impression that "Walt," as he signed his letters, seemed a kind, thoughtful fellow. He had written Liza long letters filled with interesting descriptions of Twin Forks and life on the ranch that he owned with his friend and business partner, Larkin Williams.
But as Sarah made her way through the thick bundle of letters over the next few hours, she realized that there were no letters at all from Larkin. He hadn't even scribbled a postscript to any of Walt's missives.
Perhaps he simply isn't a man of letters, Sarah told herself.
She could only hope that he would be as kind and thoughtful as Walt appeared to be.
Either way, both options seemed better than the hellish prospect she had escaped from. On the night she crept out of her childhood home, she had vowed never to return. She had fled Boston with no real plan other than to get as far away from Massachusetts as her limited funds would take her.
Sarah finished reading the last of the letters, where Walt promised to meet Liza at the Twin Forks station, and stared up at the dim curve of the train carriage's ceiling.
If I go through with this plan, I'll be taking a very risky gamble. Twin Forks sounds like a little town in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps I should just continue on to Butte, after all. On the map, it looked like the largest city in the Montana Territory.
And then there's the fact that these two men were courting Liza as their bigamous bride!
Everything in her very proper upbringing informed her that she ought to be scandalized and immediately dismiss the notion of making their acquaintance.
But the same wicked voice that occasionally whispered in Sarah's ear, and which had urged her to defy her father and run away from her unbearable fate, now pressed her to consider her options. Becoming Liza Hunter…no, Mrs. Walter Edwards… might be the only way that she could ever again feel safe.
If Father and Mr. Burgess both believed that Sarah Franklin had died tonight, then she wouldn't have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.
Only one stumbling block remained…in his last letter, Walt had written of his regrets that Liza had been unable to afford to send him a photograph of herself, but that he would look for a pretty brunette when the train arrived. Sarah had always been proud of her waist-length golden tresses, but now she realized that it would be impossible to pass herself off as Liza if her hair was the wrong color when she arrived.
Amidst a stab of panic, Sarah recalled something she had read in a novel. In it, the heroine had disguised herself by changing her hair color with boot blacking.
In her haste to flee her home, Sarah hadn't packed any blacking, but perhaps Liza had.
As quietly as she could, to avoid disturbing any of her fellow passengers, Sarah retrieved Liza's carpetbag and searched it.
To her relief, she found a familiar-looking bottle among Liza's belongings, filled with dark, viscous liquid. It was unlabeled, but it looked just like the bottles of blacking that the maid had used when she shined Father's shoes. Blacking would be a temporary solution at best, but Sarah hoped that she could purchase hair dye from one of Twin Forks' shops or, in a pinch, make her own from walnuts.
She reached for her thick flannel wrapper and pulled it around her nightgown. Then, with the bottle and her comb clutched tightly in her hands, she crept towards the washroom.
All of the seating sections in the rail carriage had been made up into bunk beds. From the gentle snores issuing from behind the screening curtains, Sarah realized that her fellow passengers were all asleep.
Once inside the washroom, she opened the bottle. As expected, it contained a thick black goo. A strong, unpleasantly fishy odor wafted from the open bottle.
Knowing that she needed to work as quickly as possible, in case someone else wanted to use the washroom, she gritted her teeth and bent over the sink to do what needed to be done.
She swiftly combed the tarry, stinky substance through her hair from roots to ends.
Only then did she notice that her horn comb had turned a deep purple color.
Sarah inhaled sharply as shock rushed through her like a torrent of icy water.
Too late, she realized that Liza must have reused an old bootblack bottle and filled it with mauveine, perhaps hoping to dye wool or fabric when she reached her new home.
Sarah grabbed for a nearby cake of soap and frantically began to work lather through her hair, hoping against hope that she could scrub away the freakish shade before the color set and became permanent.
Fifteen minutes later, a glance at the washroom's polished metal mirror revealed that the soap hadn't helped to reverse her dreadful miscalculation. Her crowning glory had transmuted from gold to a vivid imperial purple.
"What have I done?" she asked her reflection, her eyes wide with horror.
Now there was no way on earth that any respectable employer in Butte would consider hiring her as a nanny, governess, or schoolteacher. And she would be very lucky if Mr. Edwards and Mr. Williams didn't renege on their promise of marriage, at their first sight of her, and order her to immediately depart Twin Forks.
* * *
Twin Forks, Montana Territory
The next morning
"Walt, what the hell are you doing, all shined up like that?" asked Larkin Williams.
He closed the front door behind him and came to a halt in the front hall of the ranch house that he shared with his best friend and business partner.
Walt looked scrubbed raw and freshly shaved. His normally unruly reddish-blond hair had been neatly combed and the curls tamed with pomade, and he was wearing his best suit.
"It ain't Sunday…is it?" Larkin added, suddenly wondering if he'd somehow lost track of time while he'd been away supervising operations at the copper mine located on the other end of their property.
He, Walt, and their third partner, Jim Soo Fong, usually worked three-day shifts at the mine, but Jim had left for Butte last week to visit his sick uncle, so Larkin had offered to
cover for him.
Thanks to a run-in with a couple of would-be claim jumpers who had shown up convinced that the mine was actually digging a rich vein of gold ore rather than the more prosaic copper, Larkin was exhausted, grimy, and dying for a glass of whiskey and a bath in the ranch house's indoor bathtub.
"Nope, it's still Friday." Walt chuckled. Then he cast Larkin a wary glance. "I'm, uh, heading to town to fetch my bride."
Larkin laughed. "That's a good one, Walt! What are you really up to? Gonna pay a call on one of the ladies of the line?"
"I'm not joking," Walt said.
He reached for his black felt Stetson hat, which hung from a homemade hat tree near the front door. Larkin noticed that the hat had been brushed clean of its usual coating of dust and bits of hay.