by Rose Jenster
“My wife’s a clever woman and marrying her is the best decision I ever made, Frank. She would not lead you astray. She would bring a boon to your life as she did for Luke too. Only see how changed he is—once so taciturn and now a relaxed, personable man.”
“I’m not likely to become a relaxed, personable man.”
“This we know. Maybe the right woman could make you a bit less misanthropic. Truth is I’ve often wondered why a man who has so little to say for humanity as a whole spends his life writing about them. From what I hear it isn’t because you have much love of working with the machinery.”
“Luke’s been talking to you, too, I see. I like to write about people, try and piece together the reasons for why things happen. It’s an interesting study for me. I don’t mind people unless they get up in my business.”
“As my wife has?” Henry’s eyebrows went up.
The tension was broken by a happy squeal and soon a sturdy little child scampered into the common room, giggling, pursued by Leah who was also laughing.
“I’m sorry, Henry, she got away from me,” Leah said, swiping back a lock of her hair that had escaped its pins in the tumult.
Henry jumped from his chair and swooped the child into his arms, kissing her head.
“Did Papa’s pet miss me, my pearl?”
“Yes, Papa,” she said. “Book! I want book!”
“Papa will read to you after supper. Listen to Mama, now, there’s a good girl.”
Her small arms went round his neck and he squeezed her with evident joy.
Frank was uncomfortable witnessing this family moment. It seemed too private, too and awkward for him. He wished himself away, perhaps having a mug over at the saloon and hearing about the Mountbattens’ intent to sell. Anyplace where such unabashed happiness didn’t fill up the room till there was little enough air to breathe would be better. No need for them to make such a show of their filial bliss, he thought.
“Good evening, Mr. Barton,” Leah said crisply.
“I should apologize for the way I took your well-meant suggestion earlier,” he managed.
“That’s indeed the most civil word you’ve had for me these two years, Mr. Barton,” she said and Henry laughed aloud. “I was trying to do you a good turn and you resisted. We shall consider it a disagreement and go on without further mention of the issue.”
“I would not wish it so. I am here to ask you to write that introduction if you will, and give me the direction where I might address a letter to the lady you mentioned.”
“You mean to consider it?” Leah asked, taking the child from Henry and giving her a kiss on her round cheek.
“Yes. If you will help me despite my initial—despite how I acted,” he said, abashed.
“Her name is Charlotte Conners. She was once a student at the school where I eventually taught. I was studying for my exams when she left school due to her father’s death. Hers has not been an easy path, but one that required courage and determination. I think you ought to take it as a compliment that I would consider you suitable for her.”
“As you say,” he managed diffidently.
“I will write the introduction tonight if little Pearl ever goes to sleep,” she said affectionately. “You may have it from Henry tomorrow morning if you wish to make haste.”
“No reason to delay once I’ve made up my mind,” he replied.
He gave a half wave to the three of them and left them to return home.
* * *
In his rooms, Frank turned up the lamp and set to work.
Dear Miss Conners,
I am given to understand by our mutual acquaintance Mrs. Rogers that you might find a change in situation to be of interest. I am not at this time willing to offer you a home in Montana Territory, nor a job with my newspaper, but I have not ruled out that possibility. I think we should give one another a fair hearing, as rational beings. If that is agreeable to you, you are welcome to write back to me.
A bit about myself now. This is harder to write than I thought it would be. I am accustomed to fill columns of news in what seems no time at all. However, when it comes to speaking of my own life, my own habits and tastes, I find I am reluctant to discuss. I am private, I think, in that way. I am a man much used to having my own way about things and keeping to myself. I have thoughts enough and books enough to keep myself from boredom, even over the long winter here when the news grows dull and consists of how much snow fell or who lost livestock when the pond froze.
I have a newspaper. Mrs. Rogers may have told you as much already, but it is the most interesting thing about me. In fact, it is the only thing I have to recommend myself. I have built a business on my own. What Mrs. Rogers could not tell you because she does not know it, is that if I wanted to be a reporter, I had to start my own paper. Not one of them in St. Louis nor Kansas City would have me in any capacity. My writing lacked pointed brevity. My temperament tended too much to impatience and even rudeness. I was not someone that the editors wanted in their newsrooms, nor representing their mastheads.
My family had money enough from their brewery. I could have gone into my father’s business and had an easy prosperity. But, I felt driven to write, to explain, even to persuade. So I set off west and didn’t stop till I reached the end of the railroad (at that time) in Billings. I established our first newspaper, with the cantankerous secondhand printing press I brought with me. It was an adventure getting started. A friend of mine (and of Henry Rogers’) is a skilled handyman and it was he who helped me install the press and get it functioning. I started out with a one sheet paper and now, with a circulation in the hundreds and subscriptions from as far away as Helena, I find myself successful with three sheets. I may expand to a fourth by year’s end, though it is doubtless boastful to say it.
I have to take pride in what I do. It is very nearly all there is to me and I am, to tell you candidly, the only person who has ever been proud of Franklin Barton. I had no interest in business, nor even in the brew that bore my family’s label. I didn’t marry young as my brother did, nor bring much in the way of a personality. I suppose I’ve always felt a bit sorry for myself, since I was not the good son, the successful son, the son who got on well with everyone and married himself a pretty wife. I only rode the train out to the mountains and scribbled away hoping someone would read it.
Better than anything else, I like books and writing. I also lemonade, which we get a bit of in summer when the lemons come in by train and appear as if by magic in Wilford’s store. They are by rights the dry goods store for these parts, selling ribbons and lace and the like. Mrs. Wilford has a right fondness for citrus fruits so they bring a lot in by train and sell the surplus in the store. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t indulge in a number of lemons each year. I’ve never quite gotten the lemonade right, myself. When my mother used to make it, there was some sort of syrup to the process and I’ve never rightly figured it out.
You may wonder why I do not write my mother and inquire after the recipe. The reason is that my parents think very shabbily of my corner of the world and the choices I've made. Any communication from me would create an opening for a correspondence filled with recriminations and with disappointed hopes. I was a clever boy growing up and I think they expected better of me. I didn’t turn out right, is how they say it to their friends. I know from my brother’s occasional missive that it is thus.
Even my own friends in Billings chasten me for being misanthropic, for disliking most people. I will own that I am unfriendly, but for the few I truly care for, and to those I am completely loyal. If Luke Cameron needed the last drop of my blood, I would give it him without question. What I mean to say is that I do not wish to frighten you with my grumpy manners. I am not a heartless brute, only a rather particular one.
I am not certain I could earn your good opinion, but I want to be acquainted with you, at least by correspondence, and whatever else may occur will happen in due course.
Tell me about yourself and your adventures as a write
r. Mrs. Rogers said you had some sad event in your past that changed the course of your life. If it is prying to ask about it, know that I am a reporter and my first instinct when faced with a mystery is to find out the answer to it. Feel free to query me about any topic you like. It would be easier to answer questions than to figure out what to say in a free form manner like this one. I have rambled on and likely shared too much, enough to prompt you to throw away my letter. I hope you do not discard it. I hope you write back to me. There, that is more than I wanted to admit, so I shall finish thus.
Good night.
Franklin Barton
Chapter 4
Charlotte received a letter only two days after the first from Leah. This one was addressed in a different hand. Within it was a short message from Leah and then pages in another handwriting.
Dearest Charlotte,
Only trust me and try to consider this.
This man runs the newspaper in Billings. He speaks bluntly and lacks refinement, but he has a fine mind and I believe a good heart as well. Read on and see if my matchmaking career is to meet a sad end or if I may yet prove to be a prodigy in this delicate field of practice.
Leah
Leah had sent her what amounted to a warning. It dampened Charlotte’s spirits to think that whomever Leah was sending her was quite possibly more rough than he was diamond. She screwed up her courage and decided emphatically that he must be nothing more than an undiscovered gem, a man whose hidden depths were brilliant and compassionate, but who was perhaps too shy to share his heart with others.
Charlotte read the letter from Frank and was quickly disabused of the notion that he was shy. Frank was instead outspoken, seemingly judgmental and cross about everything. Scowling, she took a long breath and tried to figure out how to best phrase a reply to such a man.
Ducking into the lodgings she shared with her mother, she darted back to the bedroom and changed to a dress. She bundled up her boys’ clothing and rushed downstairs to cook the beans for supper. Her mother was at work hemming her new gown for the wedding. She looked up with a small smile.
“How was the library today, Charlotte?”
“Very busy mother. I had to wait a long time to access the reference book I needed,” Charlotte fibbed as she stirred the beans. “I have to finish the instructions on a recipe. I’ll turn these down and go finish up now.”
Charlotte hurried to the bedroom, hoping her mother wouldn’t notice she wasn’t using the writing desk in the front room…because that’s where her mother was sewing away busily.
Dear Mr. Barton,
I am Charlotte Conners. I have written for the Albany newspaper for the past two years. Before that I did sewing and other discreet ladylike enterprises but could not make ends meet. I was the sole support for my widowed mother after my father, the Reverend Conners, passed away suddenly.
My brother Roger had to be put through school with what money we had, so lodgings and food and those other expenses that add up so staggeringly—a paper of hairpins, a spool of thread, a shoelace because mine broke—were mine alone. So you might as well know I wrote as a man and dressed as a man. I expect you disapprove of me, since you seem, if I may be candid, to disapprove of the world at large and people in particular.
I have serious doubts that I would satisfy your notion of a suitable correspondent. My interests run toward dockworker strikes and children working in unsafe mills. I haven’t much to say on topics of poetry or art. I’m distressingly practical and unless you wish to know which sort of dried beans are cheapest, I have little information with which to dazzle you in your lack of interesting companions.
My situation has altered materially since my brother completed his law course and is comfortably situated to take us in. While I desire these improved circumstances for my mother’s sake, I have no wish to throw myself upon Roger’s charity and be the cuckoo in his wife’s nest, a spinster sister.
Likewise, I must give over my reporting career as it could give rise to a scandal that would cause harm to my brother’s situation. So I would find myself at a loose end, living under obligation to a brother who did not in any small way partake of the poverty to which we were reduced, and being a recipient of his charity. Though he is kind about it, and his bride all that is congenial, it is not how I wish to live.
Therefore I’ve decided to cast my lot with fortune and see about making my own way in the least scandalous manner possible. For a woman, that means marriage. I haven’t much in the way of education or beauty to recommend me, but I know a great deal about social problems and I know how to economize with minimal complaint. These are not inconsiderable assets, I would expect, on the frontier. I would not grow faint at the sight of injury or disaster. I can keep my head about me.
In exchange for your confession of being, shall I term it cantankerous?—I give you my own. Before my good father passed away, I thought all the world was kind and comfortable. Since that sad event changed all our circumstances forever, I have come to believe that humans are selfish creatures and care but little for their fellow man.
When I have written sympathetic pieces about a labor strike or a factory fire or a riot, I have received through the paper an outpouring of mail against me. Three or four of fifty letters will be praising the milk of human kindness that some fair reader had thought gone utterly from the earth, while the remaining forty-six or –seven will denounce me to fiery perdition. I have been, by exact count, condemned to hell by one hundred seventy-seven separate people. In fact, several of those have written multiple times to rain brimstone on my sinful head, bringing me to a total of over two hundred angry missives.
I take those to be a testament to my success since someone must be reading my words in order to be rendered sick with fury at me. I have burnt them all for the sake of discretion. It would grieve my poor mother to discover what I have been doing to pay the rent on our meager lodgings. Had I been able to preserve them as mementos I could send you one now, boastfully.
Do not think you can frighten me with your misanthropy. I can match you disillusionment for disillusionment and more, for as a woman I can lay ignominious claim to the many injustices done to women. Yes, I am a suffragette. I haven’t much hope of gaining the vote in my lifetime, but I had not much hope of seeing slavery abolished and that has come to pass.
I confess I never hold out much hope. It was a surprise to receive your letter and my friend’s introduction to it. I had thought that, like everything else in my recent past, I would have to fight for this. Not that I presume that your writing a single missive indicates that you plan to invite me out to Montana Territory for marriage.
I am approaching the age of true spinsterhood now and have no prospects. I dropped out of all polite society when we could not afford to reciprocate invitations. As marriage is the only respectable occupation for a woman, I wish to spare my up-and-coming sibling any breath of scandal. I find it expedient to secure a matrimonial situation as far from Albany, New York as may be reasonably possible on a round planet. For while I can endeavor to marry a decent man, I cannot forswear to avoid working for a newspaper nor the occasional wearing of trousers.
My actions had best be out of the realm of the Albany gossip mill for Roger’s sake and my mother’s. I wouldn’t wish to reflect poorly on their sterling morality with my shocking antics. I say that with humor, I hope you realize. As a secret suffragette and pen-warrior for fair labor practices, I do not consider the wearing of trousers anything more than an ordinary convenience. If my statements have scandalized you thus far, I consider my duty well done. For you made every effort to put me off of you by being boorish and condescending. I hope you are confident now that I too can be enough of an oddity to make you lift your eyebrows in dismay.
If you have not lifted your brows so much during the course of this letter as to give yourself the sick headache, do write to me. Although I have declared I hold out little hope of anything, I return your wish for a reply.
Sincerely (and more th
an a bit mischievously)
Charlotte Worth Conners
She read it over and smiled to herself. That ought to set him back on his heels, she thought with amusement. If he were a man who could withstand all her candor and her refusal to be cowed by all his caustic introduction, then this would tell the tale. Charlotte felt energized, excited even, at the prospect of writing to such a man. She enjoyed being able to unfold her entire story, her struggle, to someone who was far enough away to be no threat to her family’s peace of mind. He was, for all his bluster, a man with the same interests as she.
Charlotte knew herself well enough to see that she was no suitable match for a proper young man of Albany. No minister, not even a shopkeeper would be likely to look twice at her in all her shabbiness. Even when she had the new dress from Roger, she might look presentable but would still have her opinions and her habit of self-sufficiency as marks against her. She was no sweet girl to sit in a meek pearl gray dimity gown and flower the walls at her brother’s dinner parties, saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir”.
She was not one to suppress thoughts that might offend. Her work history at the newspaper rendered her, if not so soiled a dove as the ladies of the evening, at least an objectionable companion for nice young ladies to befriend. For any hope of society, for friendship and possible marriage, she had to go outside of Albany to seek it. She wished for a moment that she had a silken scarf to throw about her throat as dramatically as an actress in a play, to add verve to the declaration that this city was finished for her! Charlotte giggled a little at the extravagant train of thought.
In the weeks before she could expect a reply, Charlotte filled her time with her final handful of articles for the paper, and assembling her own dress. It was lavender in color. At nearly twenty one, she was past the age for wearing all white like a debutante at her first party. The color did her no favors with her brown hair and eyes. It would have better suited a pretty blonde with pink cheeks instead of sallow ones. But she had preferred it over the other fabric Laetitia had sent over. That had been a rose so lively one would wish only to see it on one’s plate of salmon, not on one’s back.