Romance: Stepbrother On Top

by A. Valentine

  “There’s no proof, Abigail.”

  “And that lack of proof was enough to convince you he was a suitable husband for me?”

  Father shrugged. “I never in a million years thought it would come to this.” He shook his head. “It shouldn’t have come to this.”

  “And yet it has.” I stood up, hands on my hips. “How long do I have before this travesty takes place?”

  Father exhaled slowly. “Benson’s up in Boston, meeting with some business partners. He’s not expected back for another week.”

  “But then I’ll have to marry him.”

  Fresh tears filled my Father’s eyes. “Yes, my darling. I’m afraid so.”

  Chapter Six

  I couldn’t bear Father’s presence. He kept crying, and the constant river of tears, coupled with the theatrical nature of his sighs, was more than any young lady in my situation should have to endure. It wasn’t him condemned to a life tethered to a total stranger. He wasn’t the one whose life had been promised away without consultation and consent. Yet it was clear he counted himself the victim; life itself had conspired against him.

  “What sin have I wrought that heaven punishes me so?” he cried. “That my daughter should so cruelly be taken from me?”

  “I wasn’t taken from you, Papa,” I said sternly. Perhaps it was wrong of me to snap; a dutiful daughter would have been mindful of his heartbreak. “You gave me away.”

  He turned toward me, blue eyes wide and watery. “Such was never my intention. You are my heart’s own treasure, Abigail. I swear it.”

  “People don’t put their heart’s own treasure up as collateral,” I replied, waving my arm in a gesture that took in all of our modest kitchen and the sitting room beyond. “You could have used the property to secure the loan. People do that all the time!”

  “Damn it girl!” Father exploded. “I tried that. Robert Benson would have none of it. He has more property than God himself, he told me, and no interest in acquiring any more. The only surety he would accept was the promise of your hand in marriage.”

  “And he of course is the only man in all of Christendom who could be found to stand you the money,” I snapped. Even within myself, I was shocked at the tone of our conversation. Always I had been a dutiful and respectful daughter, who never questioned my Father’s decisions. But this announcement – the news that I’d been bartered away for a printing press – broke something inside of me that I’d never known was there to break. Rage guided my words as much as logic did. Fury burned inside of me with an intensity every bit the equal of the flames that’d consumed the print shop and stolen my future from me.

  “I’m sorry,” Father whispered. He buried his face in his hands. “I am so, so sorry.”

  I should have comforted him. I should have gone to my Papa and wrapped my arms around him and assured him that everything was going to be fine. For my entire life, Father had done his best to provide for my every need, standing as both Mother and Father to me. His guidance and counsel had made me who I am; the very least I could do in repayment is offer him up a comforting stew of lies that I would surely find happiness as Robert Benson’s bride and that everything would work out fine in the end.

  I knew this. I knew this with a certainty that came from deep within my soul. Yet I found that doing such a thing was impossible. There did not lie within me the capacity for a deceit so tremendous; I could not pretend to any happy certainty when my future was anything but.

  So instead I stood, watching my Father cry. His face was buried in his hands. Tears were working their way through the spaces between his fingers, falling one by one to spot his pants. His shoulders were shaking. He looked so very old and so very small.

  It was not an easy sight, and I could not watch for long. Papa did not look up as I walked out of the kitchen; I do not know if he saw me open the front door. Stepping out into the sunshine was an awful revelation; the world could choose to dress itself in beauty even as my life was falling apart.

  I put one foot in front of the other and started walking. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I knew I couldn’t stay where I was.

  Chapter Seven

  I met the fire marshal on the road. “Tell me you’re not coming to say the flames have birthed themselves again anew?” he asked, concern shining in his brown eyes.

  “Who cares if they have?” I exclaimed. “Let it all burn, as far as I’m concerned.”

  The fire marshal looked past me, scanning the horizon for any sign of smoke. Seeing none, he returned his attention to me. “So your Father has told you of your marriage, then.”

  “How is it you know of this when I did not?” I demanded, grasping the fire marshal’s strong arm. “Why are you privy to this sorrow of mine?”

  “Count it not a sorrow, Miss,” the fire marshal replied. “Robert Benson’s a wealthy man. You’ll live an easy life, in a fine home.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s true!” the fire marshal protested. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “And how is it that such a humble man keeps company with one of the valley’s richest fellows?” I asked, with my hands on my hips. “That you can make such assurances to me?”

  “I was there often enough,” the fire marshal snapped back, “when my sister was his bride.” It was clear from his tone that I’d wounded his pride, either with the doubting of him or by pointing out his ordinary station in life.

  “Kitty was your sister?” I exclaimed. “And you tell me to go to her murderer’s home with joy in my heart?” I shook my head so violently that some of the pins holding it up fell free; my heavy auburn hair spilled over my shoulders in wild disarray. “What have I ever done to you that you hate me so?”

  “There is nothing in my heart for you save simple Christian charity,” the fire marshal protested. “And Kitty is my sister, the same as she has ever been.” He looked around to be sure we were alone on the early morning street. “And I tell you this: Robert Benson never killed Kitty. She run off on her own.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  “Her story was what yours is about to be,” the fire marshal replied. “Our family owed Mr. Benson quite a bit of money. When the debt couldn’t be paid, she was sent to be his wife.” He shrugged. “She went to a life one hundred times easier than the one she left behind, but that wasn’t enough for Kitty. “

  “Maybe she didn’t appreciate being sold into wedlock to settle someone else’s debts,” I said, aghast at learning I wasn’t the first bride Robert Benson had contracted for. “What’s wrong with this man that he can’t get a wife by ordinary means?”

  “You’ve seen him,” the fire marshal replied with a shrug. “Mr. Benson’s smart and shrewd, but he doesn’t possess a single grace of the sort ladies value.”

  “So he buys them instead, without ever once bothering to even introduce himself.” I shook my head. “I don’t have to consent to this marriage.”

  “He’ll ruin your father,” the fire marshal warned. “He did his level best to destroy my family’s meager fortunes when Kitty run off.” Some of the steel went out of the man and his shoulders sagged. “It was only after my brother and I both agreed to labor for him two days each week that he agreed that the debt would be settled and the court case pending against us dropped.”

  “How long did you have to do that for?” I asked, wondering at the size of the debt the family had amassed. A printing press ran dear enough, but they must have been much more obliged than Father was.

  “The way I figure, I’ll be at it for the rest of my life.” The fire marshal shook his head. “That’s why you might as well resign yourself to making the best of things. Richard Benson’s not a man who lets things go. He’ll make sure he gets his due, one way or another.”

  Chapter Eight

  I left the fire marshal standing in the road. As I walked away, my mind was filled with thoughts of destiny. The words of Cassius echoed in my ears. “Men at some time are masters of their fate
.” Was I bound to quietly go to Robert Benson and be his bride, or was there another avenue open to me?

  The fire marshal had seemed quite certain that his sister had run off. Surely he would not agree to serving a lifetime of servitude if he believed Robert Benson to be a murderer. The comments he’d made about his sister’s character had the ring of honesty about him; Kitty had rebelled against a marriage and fled, leaving him to pick up the pieces.

  It was a choice I could see myself making. What cost would my Father bear for my flight? There was no way to answer that question. Perhaps Benson would change his mind about the desirability of the family home; perhaps Father would be forced to join the fire marshal’s ranks in the man’s cadre of unpaid help. Neither option sounded all that good, but both were infinitely preferable to spending life married to a man I didn’t even know, much less love.

  But where would I go? It’s one thing to say you’re going to flee, and quite another to have a destination in mind. I’d heard rumors of jobs in the North; perhaps I could go to New York or Boston and secure a position there. The idea appealed for a minute, but then I remembered Robert Benson regularly did business in both cities; with my luck, I’d make my escape only to encounter my would-be husband upon the sidewalk.

  The South was in shambles. I couldn’t foresee how I’d be able to make a life for myself in any of the former Confederate states; if there was one thing that was not in short supply down there at that time, it was young women in dire situations. Adding to their number wouldn’t help me.

  I could swim passably well, but crossing the ocean to Europe was surely beyond my capacity. That left the West. Plenty of people had found gold in California; there were rumors about great wealth to be found along the northern shores. Father hadn’t been interested in the prospect, but I could go alone.

  It was a ridiculous proposition, but it certainly had more appeal than marrying Richard Benson did. If it all turned out to be a disaster – and making a cross country journey with no prospects, connections, or money certainly had the potential to go very badly – at least it would be a disaster I had chosen for myself. It seemed a fine distinction, and it was, but it was a distinction that mattered to me.

  Resolved to head to California, I steered my steps into town. There were questions I needed answered, including finding out exactly how far I could go West given the meager handful of dollars I’d managed to save up over the years. Surely I couldn’t afford a train ticket all the way to California, but I’d go as far as I could. After that, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Probably a very long walk lay in my future.

  Chapter Nine

  The train station was packed. It felt like everyone and their best friend were there, waiting to go on a journey, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the next train, or buying tickets for very complicated itineraries from a haggard looking clerk. Simply listening to the steps involved in taking a train from the Shenandoah Valley to Atlanta and then from there to Texarkana was enough to make my head spin – and I knew my own journey was going to be much longer.

  Feeling slightly intimidated, I stepped out of the train station. When the crowds were thinner, I told myself, I’d return and get my questions answered. There was no sense slowing down all of the people so evidently in a hurry with my inquiries; I had a week before I was to wed Robert Benson while everyone else had places to be today.

  Located nearly next door to the train station was the newspaper offices. Father had hoped to grow his print shop to the size that the paper would steer at least some business his way; the editors were locally famous for penning volumes of religious poems and very moralistic short stories. Of course, those hopes had all gone up in flames, a fact I could read about in the broadsheet pinned to the office’s front wall.

  The tale was short and to the point. Flames had been spotted coming from Father’s shop shortly before midnight. I learned that it had been our elderly neighbor who’d roused the fire brigade, sending her one-armed grandson running through the night for help. Apparently there was some speculation as to the cause of the fire; in a surprising quote, the fire marshal said he felt it was a clear case of spontaneous combustion. “Printers use many volatile solvents, inks and chemicals in the course of their trade,” he said, adding that it was not unusual for the same to burst into flame unexpectedly.

  This was certainly news to me. Not the use of volatile solvents, inks and chemicals part; I’d been around print shops for nearly the entirety of my life. But we’d never had a fire – not a spark, not the tiniest bit of flame – until now.

  Perhaps that was due to the fact that Father was always extremely careful and methodical in the shop. Over the years, we’d been to other printers, and I’d seen what happens when a man with a slovenly nature takes charge: oily rags gather like dust bunnies beneath the presses, their oil streaked surfaces attracting every bit of grime and hair the shop contained; offcuts from flyers and letter heads covering the floor like autumn leaves – the sort of chaos where hungry flames would find plenty to feast upon. Father counted cleanliness to be a virtue. In his shop, the floors were swept clean every night, inks were kept closely sealed, and if you needed a rag, greasy or otherwise, you wouldn’t find it beneath the printing press.

  The lanterns Father used to light the shop were doused every night, leaving the place quite dark. This habit he persisted in even in the perilous period after the war ended; during this time of peace, wandering thieves would take advantage of every shadowy corner to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Father never minded. “Most of them want food, not books,” he’d say, “and a man who will steal something for the joy of reading it is likely enough a man I’d want to count as a friend.”

  Remembering those words made my heart swell with pride – at least until I remembered how angry I was with Father. “Spontaneous combustion indeed,” I muttered, stepping to the left to read the next page of the broadsheet. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  I was soon to encounter another thing I’d never heard. Set in close type, six columns wide and the length of the entire page, the next sheet of the broadsheet was filled with advertisements. At the very top, a thirty-point headline screamed “Situations Wanted!”

  “What’s this?” I mused aloud. Even though Father brought the paper home often enough, I’d never seen this type of page before. I leaned closer to take a better look, and another lady, who’d stepped up to read the paper beside me, looked over to see what had captured my curiosity. She snorted in a most unladylike fashion and said “What you’ve got there, Missy, is messages from frontiersmen who are seeking mail-order brides.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Is there no man anywhere who can find himself a loving wife without going through these extreme machinations?” I asked my paper-reading companion. She looked at me with puzzled eyes and then shrugged.

  “You know what men are,” she replied. “Helpless babies, most of them. Once their mother’s sick of them they’ve got to get married or they’ll starve to death.” The thin gold ring on her finger showed me she might have some first-hand experience with men’s behaviors. “If it weren’t for wives, there’s men out there who would run around with their clothes in tatters and holes in their shoes.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “There are men who have wives that go around the same way.”

  My companion laughed. “But they don’t get to enjoy it the same way.” She tapped the side of her head. “Having a wife around changes everything.”

  That seemed to be what the writer of the advertisements seemed to be hoping for. “Wife wanted!” one headline after another screamed, each one prefacing a tersely eloquent summary of the aspiring groom’s charms.

  “Householder with three healthy sons,” one spelled out; it was a prospect that made my stomach lurch in a most terrifying fashion. The next belonged to a logger, also a father of three, and the one after that had only two children and a piano studio in San Francisco. I considered that one for a while, until a clos
er examination of the text revealed that it was very desirable that all applicants speak Mandarin Chinese.

  Lacking the desired tongue, I moved on. Some of the ads revealed themselves to be nothing more than a laundry list of wants: a wife seeking a husband must be trim, cheerful, hardworking, and virtuous – not necessarily in that order, a phenomenon I suspect said more about the groom’s experiences than his personal preferences.

  Confident that I qualified on most counts, absenting this day which found me none too cheerful, I continued reading the ads for much of the morning. A train arrived, disgorged its passengers, reloaded and left; still I stood reading. For quite some time I stood on the platform, perusing the ads. They were printed in an almost unreadably small font; squinting against the sun as it climbed up the horizon toward noontime heights was beginning to give me quite a headache.

  I glanced toward the train station office. It was near enough to empty; the few souls that were in there had apparently already finished whatever business they’d had with the ticket agent. If there was an ideal time to go in and inquire about the cost of passage to California, this was it.

  Yet I found my feet wouldn’t move. I was frozen in place, as solidly stuck as if someone had painted the soles of my shoes with stout glue. Somehow, I’d lost the ability to walk and move of my own free will; it was a strange paralysis of the likes I’d never experienced.

  While I was thus stricken, the rumble of an approaching train filled the air. I could feel the ground beneath me shaking. For a moment I thought of the Union guns and the way cannon balls screamed as they tore through the air. It took all my will to not plaster my hands over my ears; while we all did such things during the battles, only the rubes did so now.