by Rose Jenster
The room Mrs. Hostleman gave her had a narrow iron bed and washstand, pegs on the wall for her clothing, and a small wooden table that held an oil lamp. On the nightstand, as she placed her brush and comb and the book of her mother’s, she found a letter.
Dear not-Ophelia,
I fear you will find me quiet and not at all used to conversing with young ladies. We must take time to know one another properly. Do not think less of me for my reserve. I write with more fullness and confidence than I speak among strangers. I hope you will find your accommodation comfortable and that you will walk out with me tomorrow to learn about your new home and visit my business. I trust that you will be patient with me.
Henry
Reassured, Leah said a prayer of thanks and washed up for dinner. Mrs. Hostleman served potatoes and boiled cabbage and fatback, a heavier and greasier fare than Leah was accustomed to, but she took a portion of everything and thanked the good lady. She got a chance to meet the other boarders—a surveyor for the mines who was staying for two more weeks and his picky wife, and a woman staying at the house while she tried to set up shop as a dressmaker. This lady was very interested in talking to Leah soon about the current fashions on the East Coast. Leah managed to eat some of the fried potatoes, and helped clear the table and wash the dishes.
Leah excused herself and went to her room, where she divested herself of the corset that had been pinching her for the two-thousand-mile train ride. Washing up thoroughly with the cake of soap and the chilly water in her pitcher, Leah tried to rub the kinks out of her back and shoulders from the cramped journey.
She lit the lamp and read over all of his letters again, trying to keep fresh in her mind the character and voice of the man she had fallen in love with, sight unseen. His handsomeness was almost distressing—she was shy enough around ordinary people, much less a man who looked like one of the Lord’s angels.
She unfolded and brushed the cranberry walking costume with its fitted jacket and narrow striped skirt. Feeling yet too excited and awake to rest, she fished her embroidery things out of the trunk and set to work embellishing the plain jacket with twirls and leaves in a soft sage green.
Before she left New York, she had purchased more embroidery silks than she could use in two years—unsure how hard it would be to come by such luxuries in the West. She worked a twining vine with leaves around the flared hem of the short jacket and made a matching double row of delicate vine around the cuffs. Well pleased with her work, she snipped off the thread with her silver embroidery scissors and put away her sewing things for the night.
The next morning dawned, and Leah scrubbed and scoured herself, even under her nails, until every bit of railway dust was gone. Then she brushed out her long brown hair till it shone, and braided the length, twisting it into a low knot and securing it with pins. She regretted the curling tongs she used to borrow from Jane, but fluffed her fringe as best she could with her fingers and a few drops of water from the pitcher. It was nearly time for breakfast, but she could wait no longer to open Jane’s package. Unfolding the carefully pinned paper, she found an array of items that made her smile.
First was a set of new curling tongs (clever Jane!). As she set them in the lamp’s chimney to warm, she found a smart little set of jeweled hairpins—five of them—with shimmering pearl-like beads affixed to the ends, perfect for a wedding day. Next came a packet of dried lavender for her linen press, and two white tablecloths, hemstitched and ready to embroider (thoughtful Jane!). The tablecloths were folded carefully around another object…a yellow penny dreadful (mischievous Jane!)—a sensational adventure novel of the sort Jane enjoyed.
Leah giggled at the sight of it and placed it in her trunk under the tablecloths Jane had made for her, lest Mrs. Hostleman peek into the room and see such a novel lying about and think that she was fast. Leah took the tongs from the lamp and stood before the small square of spotted mirror on the wall, arranging her fringe into becoming curls.
Breakfast was more fried potatoes and fried eggs. After the washing up, Leah found Henry Rogers standing just inside the front hall, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably with his hat in his hands.
“Good morning,” she said, as casually as she could manage.
“Morning, ma’am,” he replied quietly. “You ready to go?”
“Yes, thank you. Let me get my bonnet.” She took her straw bonnet from the peg and tied it on.
When they were on the wooden sidewalk, he offered her his arm stiffly and she took it just as awkwardly. She had never held a man’s arm before. She rested her fingers lightly in the crook of his elbow but did not grip his arm or lean against him in any way. It seemed a bit of an absurd way to walk, as though promenading down a city boulevard instead of traversing the uneven sidewalk of a boomtown out in the wilds of Montana Territory.
He smelled lightly of bay rum from shaving and she blushed to think of it…it was a pleasant smell, clean and spicy, but she had imagined him at a washstand, shirt undone, shaving in the early light of morning, and was nearly overcome by thinking such an immodest thing. It flustered her and she had no notion of how to speak afterward.
“Mrs. Hostleman making you feel at home?” he inquired.
“Yes, thank you. She’s very kind.”
“Food still greasy there?” he asked. “I stayed there a few weeks till my inn was built. Never had such a case of dyspepsia before or since.”
She knew he was trying to be friendly but—stomach problems? That was about as romantic as the man whose ad boasted that he owned trees, perhaps even less so! Leah decided that he was probably just bashful and unsure what to say, so she tried to help him out.
“The fare is not what I’m used to, to be sure, but her boarders seem happy enough with it and I never learnt to cook well myself. My mother liked to teach me pretty things—embroidery and piecrust and the piano. She always thought there would be time for practicality later and then—there wasn’t any ‘later’ for her,” Leah admitted, unable to keep the sadness from her voice. He looked down at her fingers on his sleeve and covered them with his own, pressing her hand comfortingly.
“I’m sorry for your loss. I am, however, happy that you’ve come here,” he managed.
“Are you really?” she asked. “I thought perhaps, after I saw you last night, that you might be disappointed in me.”
“Disappointed? Certainly not. Why would you think that?”
“Well, you’re so beautiful—“ She blurted out, blushing and breaking off. “So handsome, I mean. And I’m, well, plain.” Her voice dropped to a miserable whisper.
“Miss Weaver, do you think I placed an advertisement because I was looking for a pretty face to make my bride?”
Astonished, she gaped up at him, forgetting to blush in shock. The gentlemanly thing would have been to assure her (falsely, of course) that she was quite beautiful. He had just admitted that she was plain and that—that he didn’t even care!
“If I wanted ringlets and a cupid’s-bow mouth, I could have my pick of saloon girls any day. That isn’t what interests me. I was looking for a woman with finer tastes, an interest in literature, a fine mind—someone who could understand me and talk with me. Now, I don’t find you plain at all. But if I did, if I thought you homely as my Aunt Mildred—who had a face like President Garfield’s, whiskers and all—there is more to you than your looks anyhow.”
“So you don’t mind?”
“Mind? I had just about given up hope. I had forty letters before you wrote to me. Forty letters I replied to with a polite rejection because no one sparked the slightest interest. They wrote about their curls or their skill at arranging flowers or how they’d been jilted by some faithless sailor.
You were the only one who asked about me, wondered who I was at all. You offered to pray for me, that I would find a wife, so selflessly, with such generosity. I could not write to you fast enough—I broke the nib on my pen and had to get another because I pressed to hard in my haste. Leah—if I may call yo
u that—I never considered anyone else.”
“I thought you might not like me, Henry. I was so frightened,” she confessed.
“Not like you?”
He shook his head, his face breaking into a smile that showed two dimples and was like a flash of sunshine on the cloudy day. Her heart thrilled to see his smile and know it was for her. Henry took her hand and kissed it. Her eyes grew round with disbelief. That was the sort of thing knights did in poems, or courtly gentlemen in novels. Never had she expected a man to kiss her hand. It gave her the shivers and she wished—feeling her face flush at the thought—that he would kiss her mouth, right there in the middle of town. Her smile answered his, and he didn’t release her hand.
“You’re positively pretty when you smile. You don’t look so nervous. What’s more, I think you should have been called Ophelia. Who else but you could have tempted Hamlet to leave behind his madness and revenge?”
Leah shut her eyes. No one but her mother had ever thought to call her pretty before. She felt it, then, not like it was empty flattery, but that possibly, just possibly, he saw her for who she really was. She would have married him that very moment on the sidewalk.
He conducted her down the street to a magnificent wooden building, constructed of logs, with many glass picture windows on the main level. It was three stories high with a porch on each floor. He brought her round to the back porch and indicated a rocking chair for her to sit in. As she sank onto the seat, she looked out at the view and saw the stately gray mountains, rising bluish in the last of the morning fog, and she gasped at their beauty.
“Oh, I could sit here for hours and look at them,” she said, turning to Henry with tears in her eyes.
He took her hand again and kissed it without a word. They sat in silence for several minutes before he took her hand again and led her indoors. She entered a sitting room with a bright rag rug on the floor and a hunting dog asleep on the hearth. Leah saw the table and chairs, the cook stove and cupboard at the far end of the room, the cheerful white curtains at the window where a pump stood over the washbasin.
Admiring it all, she went to the hearth first and knelt beside the dog to pat him. The animal stirred and thumped its tail against the wood floor happily as she petted his soft ears and whispered to him.
“North likes you,” Henry remarked.
“I like him, too,” she said.
“Good. Thought you might not like a dog in the house.” He was taciturn again and she shook her head, wondering about these fits of shyness and how changeable he seemed.
“I don’t mind,” she said, standing up and looking around.
Two chairs stood before the hearth with a table to hold the lamp between them. There were no books, no evidence of a shelf or cabinet that might hold the library he’d written of. Disappointed, she wondered if he had made that up to impress her. Sighing, she nodded approvingly and waited to see what he would say.
“Through there’s the bedroom. Wouldn’t be right to show it to you now, I suppose. If I step out on the porch you can peek in there,” he offered, and let himself outdoors with the dog trailing after him.
The log bedstead held a puffy featherbed covered by an eiderdown quilt. A wardrobe and some clothes pegs took up one wall and the other two were covered entirely in bookshelves, laden with volumes of every description. She approached the books reverently, touching the binding of a worn copy of Thomas Jefferson’s letters, another of The Pilgrim’s Progress. She longed to take down a book and read, sharing passages aloud, discussing points of the plot together. Eyes shining, she rejoined him on the back porch, sinking into the chair she had vacated.
“It wouldn’t do to have books out where people could see,” he explained.
“Is there—do you think there might be room on the shelves for my books? I’ve brought quite a lot. Not so many as you have, but several dozens at least,” she inquired boldly.
Again, Henry grinned at her, an almost boyish smile brightening his already handsome features.
“Suppose you’d like to see the inn and stables,” he said, taking her back around to the front of the building and showing her around, from the reception desk to the linen closet. He opened one door and stepped back into the hallway carefully. “This is what a room looks like. You’re free to look around if you want. I’ll stand out here.” He was so meticulous about her virtue, about making his honorable nature clear.
There were sixteen horses in the stable, all shining with health and whinnying at their entrance. Leah winced, stepping back to the door when one stallion stomped its great hooves and tossed its majestic head in greeting. Henry patted the horse’s muzzle and grinned confidently. This fearsome creature had to be his pet, Dionysius. Henry must be an incredibly strong horseman, she thought with awe.
He stopped to give a bit of carrot to each of the horses and pet their long faces solemnly. One of the three stable hands asked him a question, and he paused to discuss the matter with the boy as seriously as if another tradesman were speaking to him, an equal instead of a subordinate. She noted the quiet way he listened, the respectful nod of understanding, as well as the way the stable boy looked up at him with awe and almost hero-worship.
Leah stood back, a bit uneasy around horses, but she admired the tidy and efficient set-up of the stable and remarked on the number of wagons and coaches he rented out to others as part of his business. A high-wheeled buggy, painted glossy black, stood in back of the other conveyances, and she walked over to it admiringly, touching its red wheels.
“Want to see the church?” he asked. She nodded.
As they made their way down the next street, she heard a stir of whispers as they passed by. She caught a comment about her dress and how she was “some uppity piece from back East”. Looking down at the new jacket and dress she’d been so proud of, the neat embroidery she’d worked on by the light of the oil lamp the night before, she felt conspicuous, blowsy, and too colorful. She blushed and made no comment.
The church was a whitewashed building with a steeple and an empty bell tower. She was reluctant to mount the steps, feeling as if all eyes were on her.
“We’re raising money for a bell maybe sometime next year,” he said by way of explanation.
“It’s nice.”
“I’ll be by to escort you to church tomorrow. Services are at eight.”
“Thank you.”
Leah vowed to sponge her black traveling dress and wear it to church. It was a plain stout woolen unlikely to cause a stir. She had thought her walking dress so smart, and now she wished she’d never seen it. They parted at the door to the boarding house and she withdrew to her room to read and reflect…and ready her dress for the morrow.
She wore her plain dress without any ornament save her mother’s locket, which she always wore, and arranged her hair in a neat bun. Leah looked sober enough to be a widow instead of a bride, but she hoped she’d be above reproach in her appearance. Henry wore a brown suit, the soft scent of starch in his shirt mingling with the bay rum. He was even handsomer in a suit, and it was hard not to stare at him.
They took a seat on the aisle about halfway up and she busied herself by leafing through the hymnal after she marked the week’s text in her Bible with a ribbon. All around them, she heard the flutter, the bustle of gossip.
“…Rogers finally going to take a wife. Thought sure he was done for after Baker’s daughter left town.”
“This one looks like she puts on airs, dressing like that with the stand-up collar done up with all that braid.”
“Never seen anything like it even in the fashion plates down at the mercantile.”
“…think he’ll marry her, or send her back because she’s so plain?”
At the last whisper, Henry Rogers turned around slowly and fixed a glare on the matron behind them who’d uttered the offending phrase.
“Madam,” he whispered. “As we are all children of the Lord it might be better not to gossip in church.”
There was a ga
sp of shock and renewed babbling, this time condemning his ill manners.
“Were they under the impression that I can’t hear?” Leah whispered to him
Henry suppressed a laugh of delight. Instead, he covered her hand with his and pressed it. She felt, for the moment at least, that they were in this together. Her heart soared with the memory of his defense of her, the way he had delivered a set-down to the impertinent woman who called her plain. Even if she were plain, he didn’t mind it.
The service was lengthy and the piano was grossly out of tune, but the congregation sang joyously and she joined in. After church was over, Henry introduced her to the Reverend Gibson and his wife. Mrs. Gibson took her aside and complimented her dress.
“We are a bit behind the fashions out on the frontier, I believe. Your high collar is most becoming. I may have to see if I can remake one of my own gowns to have a stand-up neckline like it. Do you sew?”
“I do embroidery fairly well. My mother taught me, and she was a deft hand at fancy work. She was consumptive and passed away before I learnt good plain sewing, though. I have regretted it often in my clumsy mending, I confess,” Leah confided.
“Perhaps you’ll join our quilting circle. We meet at the rectory next door here on Tuesday mornings at ten.”
“I’d love to try. I’ll be happy to learn,” Leah promised.
“I’ll see you then,” Mrs. Gibson said kindly, and introduced her to Becky Quinn, a young bride who had joined the circle just a few weeks ago.
Chapter 4
BILLINGS, MONTANA, 1884
Leah wrote to Jane that she had arrived safely and thanked her for the parcel. She described the town and the boarding house but mentioned Henry very little. Their relationship felt fragile as a butterfly just then, precious and delicate, and she feared talking about it lest something go wrong.
At times Henry was the perfect companion of his letters, warm and open, but then a gloom seemed to take hold of him and he became quiet and formal. She wondered why he withdrew, and if he did not trust her. He had taken pains to assure her, in Mrs. Hostleman’s wholesome presence, that he would be a perfect gentleman and safeguard her virtue on their short carriage rides. In the city it would not have been permitted, but out West, since he’d declared his intention to court Leah, it was allowed. She was astounded by this freedom, having never been alone with any man besides her father or her brother.