Hazel's Mail Order Joy (Home for Christmas Book 4)

by Annie Boone

  As usual, Harley had little to say along the journey. She noticed that he did not have his arm in the sling that he had been wearing. She wondered why, but refrained from asking.

  At the hotel, Harley and Hazel were ushered into a private room which the investors had reserved for their luncheon. The men and their wives were seated on the sofa and chairs. The table where they would eat was set for six, but the food had not yet been served.

  The men rose as the Wyatts entered.

  “Gentlemen, my wife,” Harley said, indicating Hazel.

  Although she knew that women were never introduced by their first names, and the assumption of a husband’s surname meant that a woman’s identity was sealed by her marital status, Hazel felt as if she were an exhibit. She saw the men’s wives survey her dress and hat, looking for flaws, but she was confident they would find none. Their attire, while clearly purchased from the most elegant establishments, was no more attractive because it was in the manner of current trends. Hazel, self-assured in her Parisian dress from two years ago, her dashing hat and Grandmama’s diamond earrings, gave the ladies her most congenial smile.

  Mother had always said that a lady knew how to use her smile as a weapon if need be. Hazel had no such martial intent, but she was determined to be gracious. The women warmed to her presence.

  “Mrs. Wyatt,” said one of them, a plump woman whose sense of style seemed to be based upon an array of gems so gorgeous that no one would notice her dress, “you have come to us from Boston, I hear.”

  “She just arrived last week,” Harley answered.

  “Such a long trip,” the other woman, tall, slender and older, spoke.

  “Almost two thousand miles,” Harley said.

  “Now, Mr. Wyatt, you must let your lovely wife speak up, or we shall think she has no voice,” the plump woman remonstrated.

  Hazel sensed that Harley was discomfited by the comment. “You must pardon my husband,” she said sweetly. “While I was traveling West, he was enduring that terrible snowstorm while driving the cattle to the railroads.”

  The women were immediately solicitous of Harley’s well being. Feeling as though she had successfully deflected attention from herself and turned it back to her husband; a satisfying retaliation for him answering for her. Hazel, with an expression of feminine attentiveness in place on her face, complimented the plump woman on her earrings and the taller woman on her hat. It led, naturally, to a discussion of jewelers and milliners, and the ladies found Hazel attentive to their words.

  After the luncheon was finished, the ladies were ushered to another downstairs room in the hotel while the gentlemen turned their talk to business. The ladies sat down and Hazel was prepared to continue the conversation where they had left it before lunch was served.

  But the ladies, Mrs. Paul and Mrs. Barry, were more interested in learning about Hazel.

  “Whatever made you come to Colorado from Boston, Mrs. Wyatt?” Mrs. Paul, the bejeweled woman with the generous bosom and hips which corseting could not entirely diminish, wanted to know.

  Hazel smiled. “Who would not want to come here?” she inquired.

  “From Boston?”

  “Where are you ladies from?” Hazel asked.

  It turned out that they were Westerners. Mrs. Paul was from California, where her husband had struck gold as a young man before the war, and was now investing his wealth in other ventures. Hazel wondered if the lady was perhaps not the first Mrs. Paul, as there was a noticeable difference in age between the couple.

  “San Francisco must be a very exciting city,” Hazel declared.

  “Oh, it is,” Mrs. Paul agreed enthusiastically. “Do you not agree, Mrs. Barry?”

  But Mrs. Barry, who looked to be a decade older than Mrs. Paul, found California too rough for her liking. She missed New Orleans, where she was born.

  Hazel had been to New Orleans a few years ago when Father had taken the family there. She remembered the city well and was able to converse knowledgeably with Mrs. Barry on the subject while eliciting details about San Francisco from Mrs. Paul. Thus the conversation flowed, with neither of the woman realizing that their questions had not been answered, and the radiant Mrs. Wyatt had divulged nothing of her origins or the reasons why she had come West to marry Harley Wyatt.

  The ladies rejoined the gentlemen and the talk turned to the subject of the theatre. Hazel, who in more prosperous times had attended the theatre often with her family, was again able to add to the conversation. She had attended everything from musical comedy to Christmas pantomimes, and when she spoke of having seen Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice in London a few years ago, Mrs. Paul so forgot herself as to clap her hands in delight.

  “Oh, Mrs. Wyatt,” she said, “how very fortunate you are to have seen them together.”

  Her husband looked fondly upon his wife. “Irving is planning tours of America,” he said. “Perhaps we shall be able to entice him to inaugurate our theatre when it is built. Mrs. Wyatt, I hope that we may enlist your support in our efforts.”

  “I was only in the audience, sir, and could not hope to prevail upon Mr. Irving’s travel itinerary,” Hazel said, “but I join your wife in hoping that actors of his caliber, and of Miss Terry’s, will see fit to cross the Mississippi and provide us with their entertainment.”

  “Irving could not possibly withstand your charm,” Mr. Paul said. “Wyatt, you must bring your wife to lunch another time. I see that she and the ladies have become friends and we shall benefit from their rapport.”

  After the meeting, when she and Harley were returning to the ranch, Hazel asked her husband whether the meeting had been a success.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said, “until Paul spoke of you. Then, I knew that we would begin work on the theatre.”

  7

  Hazel was delighted when Minnie came to call a week after the luncheon. As they enjoyed tea and sandwiches prepared by Jane and served, inexplicably, by Oakley, Hazel confessed to her sister that Oakley’s presence in the household was an unexplained mystery.

  “I don’t know whether she is here as a servant or a family member and no one else knows. Harley will not say; he refuses to respond.”

  “How can he not respond?” Minnie asked, incredulity plain in her voice. She could not imagine Gavin refusing to answer a question if she put it to him.

  “He is very adroit at turning aside a question and either answering another, or posing one of his own,” Hazel admitted.

  “Do you think the girl is his child?” Minnie asked directly. She had seen that Oakley’s blonde coloring was not unlike that of Harley’s.

  “I don’t know,” Hazel admitted. “I wish I knew. If she is his daughter, then he ought to acknowledge her.”

  “Would you accept that?”

  “I would rather know. Who else’s child could she be? The Colonel could have fathered her, I suppose, but Harley speaks of his father as a man of honor. Even though he was living in Colorado Territory when the War Between the States broke out, he returned to Virginia, where he was from, to fight with General Lee.”

  Minnie didn’t see what that had to do with being honorable, but she told Hazel that Gavin had also spoken respectfully of Colonel Wyatt.

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to offend you with her presence at the ranch,” Minnie offered. “So he prefers not to offer details.”

  “Offending me would make little difference,” Hazel answered. “Where would I go if I were offended? I can’t go back to Boston.”

  “If anything should ever go awry,” Minnie said tactfully. “You know that there is always room with us.”

  Hazel knew that her sister’s offer was genuine, and she also knew that Gavin would concur. Minnie could make such an offer without consulting Gavin, because it was their home and they were equals in their marriage. That was certainly unusual, even in the West, where the dearth of women gave females more influence than they would otherwise have had. Still, Hazel would not have made such a promis
e without first consulting Harley, were circumstances different.

  As the days went by, Hazel’s routine became a pattern. She had not yet met with the woman, Mrs. de la Rosa, regarding the position of cook for the ranch. Harley said the woman had had to rearrange her schedule but he hadn’t said why. Harley himself was untroubled by the delay, even though Hazel would have liked to do the cooking herself, if only to relieve the tedium of Jane’s uninspired monotony of dishes. It was no use complaining about a sixteen-year old girl who was hired to be a housemaid, not a cook, and Hazel said nothing. But as she told Minnie when she visited again, she actually missed doing the cooking.

  “I didn’t think I would, but I do. The chef on the train gave me such delicious recipes and I would like to try them.”

  “Gavin would be more than happy to let you prepare them for our table,” Minnie laughed. “In the meantime, I want to copy the rest of your recipes to make. I’m burning fewer meals and once in awhile, the loaf of bread that I bake is actually bread and not a squashed-looking sort of a pancake without flavor.”

  Minnie was so merry as she mentioned her failures, Hazel noted. What was it like not to feel that one had to be perfect for a husband, and to be confident in his contentment with her as she was?

  The sisters discussed the imminent arrival of Clara, who would be arriving by the end of the week. Hazel and Minnie were both concerned at not having yet met her husband-to-be

  “Harley describes him as a congenial fellow,” Hazel volunteered. “Surely that is good.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Although I imagine Clara would prefer a house to live in over a congenial husband. I hope Mr. Edwards does not plan to continue to dwell in the mining camp.”

  “We should go and see,” Hazel said.

  Minnie suggested that Gavin could take them, as the sheep he had ordered would not arrive until early the following week. With this plan in motion, the sisters hoped that they would be able to find out how matters stood with Clara’s miner.

  But when Minnie and Gavin stopped at the ranch to follow through on the plan to meet with Mr. Edwards, Hazel was apologetic. Mrs. de la Rosa had come and Harley wanted Hazel to meet with her to review her qualifications for the cooking position. Hazel was genuinely sorry, but she had no choice.

  Minnie promised to let her know how the meeting with Mr. Edwards went and then she and Gavin rode away. Hazel returned to the kitchen.

  Mrs. de la Rosa was a spirited woman of middle years, a widow to a man who had died in a cattle drive when he was caught in a stampede a year ago. She spoke English with a charming accent that reminded Hazel of the people she had met when Father had taken the family to Rome the year that she was twelve. She had been enraptured by the Italians, their passion for life and their enthusiasm, and Mrs. de la Rosa was delighted in return to hear Hazel speak of her homeland.

  The two women chatted for a few minutes about the Italian countryside and its beauty before Hazel steered the conversation back to the initial topic.

  “Italian cookery is very different from the food here,” Hazel said diplomatically. “I enjoyed the menus while I was there, but I am not sure that Mr. Wyatt would be as pleased. He prefers traditional Western cooking.”

  Mrs. de la Rosa nodded emphatically. “The same with my late husband, no pasta, no sauce, just the meat, the potatoes . . . I cook this. I cook whatever you ask me to cook. Food is food, no? You don’t want oregano, I don’t use oregano.”

  “I have some spices and herbs which were given to me by a cook on one of the Pullman kitchen cars,” Hazel said. “Perhaps they would be of use to you?”

  “Oregano?”

  “I don’t think that was one of the ones that he provided. But there were others that would add flavor. I think that Mr. Wyatt would not object to some variation in his menus, provided that they were not too unusual.”

  “I cook whatever you ask me to cook,” Mrs. de la Rosa said. “I make bread, good bread. I bake bread since I was a little girl. Everybody likes bread. You have chickens? I make chicken, not just beef, not just ham. They are good, but not always the same, yes?”

  “Yes— no. Yes. Variety would be very good, Mrs. de la Rosa. It would be pleasant if menus were not repeated too often within a week.”

  “Soup? You like soup? I make soup.”

  “Very much, we like soup very much.” In truth, Jane’s cooking had only extended to ham and bean soup, but Harley seemed to like it well enough. Or at least, sufficiently so that Hazel could assert with confidence that soup would be an acceptable menu item.

  Mrs. de la Rosa nodded as if this confirmed a basic fact with which she was already familiar. “I make soup. You have goats, cows, sheep? I make cheese.”

  “Yes, that would be excellent. Yes, cheese. B—bread and cheese, that will be very good. Tell me, how do you prepare your beef dishes?”

  In a mixture of English and Italian, Mrs. de la Rosa disclosed the different ways that beef could be prepared. She listed everything except the manner in which Jane had been cooking it, which was to fry it in a skillet over the fire. She was equally voluble on the subject of ways to prepare ham. Chicken was apparently her favorite, and she knew more recipes for chicken than Hazel had even heard of, but by the end of the meeting, the two ladies were not only confident that Mrs. de la Rosa’s immediate employment would be of benefit to the household, but the woman was also agreeable to teaching Jane the rudiments of cooking so that she could add to her skills.

  Hilda, who did the cleaning, came three times a week and was so thorough in her work that Hazel wondered if they needed to have her come so often. But Harley had set up the schedule, and she wasn’t going to challenge him on it, even though she doubted whether he would have noticed had a cobweb appeared in a corner in between her cleaning days.

  After establishing that Mrs. de la Rosa, in addition to her multitude of chicken dishes and her passion for bread, could also prepare the traditional dishes which were an inveterate part of a Colorado meal, such as corn bread, baked beans, and of course steak, Hazel was happy to offer the woman the position. She would work every day but Sunday. On Saturdays, she would prepare extra meals that could easily be heated over the fire and served.

  Hazel reported on her prowess that night at supper over the usual steak, potatoes, and biscuits. Harley nodded after she finished.

  “I looked at that filly I told you about.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted a horse of your own,” Harley reminded her. “If you want to see her, Angus is bringing her by tomorrow. She’s a blue roan; she’ll suit you, I think. She’s got a bit of sass to her, but nothing that’s likely to make her throw you. After he brings her by, I’ll hitch her up and we’ll ride into town.”

  “You’ve already bought her,” Hazel said to him.

  “She’s a good horse. If you don’t like her, I’ll find another one.”

  It was clear that Harley’s notion of Hazel deciding on her preference for a horse meant that he would decide first. Hazel realized that she ought not to be perturbed. He had wasted no time in finding a horse for her and she knew that he would choose well.

  “I’m sure she will do,” Hazel said politely.

  When Angus White brought his filly to the ranch, Hazel immediately lost her heart to the horse. The blue roan’s mane and tail were black and her coat was a beautiful shade of silver-gray.

  “She’s lovely,” Hazel said to Mr. White, who nodded in agreement. “What is her name?”

  “Juno,” he said.

  “Juno,” Hazel repeated, stroking the horse along her neck. The horse seemed to appreciate this, giving Hazel a sidelong glance out of her lucent dark eyes.

  Harley handed Angus a number of bills in payment. “We’ll order a sidesaddle for you in town,” Harley said while Carlos hitched Juno to the wagon.

  “Thank you,” Hazel said.

  He nodded and then helped Hazel into the wagon. As they rode along the dusty road, Hazel noticed how vividly the flowers in the field w
ere showing their colors. “Would it be possible,” she asked, “to have a flower garden?”

  There was a pause. “My mother used to have one, over by the front of the ranch. She said it brought the butterflies. It’s overgrown now, no one has done anything with that plot of land since she’s been gone. I’ll have one of the men clear it for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When is Mrs. de la Rosa going to start?”

  “She’s coming on Saturday to make food for the weekend, and so that we’ll have meals for Sunday when she’s off.”

  “When is your sister arriving?”

  “She should be here Friday. Would it be all right if she comes here after she arrives and then dresses here for her wedding on Saturday?”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all right. Pete Edwards . . . I believe he’s finished that house he was working on.”

  “Oh, that’s good news,” Hazel said thankfully, forgetting her annoyance at his response to her question. Could he never simply respond affirmatively, without making his answer sound as if it had undergone a review? “Minnie and I feared that our sister would be living in a mining camp.”

  “You might check with your sister Minnie to see if there’s anything the house still needs. Knowing Pete, he’s put everything into making the place look like it came right out of the Bay State, and hasn’t so much as a chair inside.”

  “No furniture?”

  “Your sister will let you know. This sister who’s coming, what’s her name?”

  “Clara.”

  “Does she ride?”

  “Of course. We all do.”

  “Does she ride a camel?”

  Harley seemed to have no sense of humor, therefore his question could not be a joke.