Mail Order Brides Collection Boxed Set: Felicity, Frank, Verity and Jessica, Books 3-6 (Montana Mail Order Brides Series)

by Rose Jenster

  Despite the fact she had worked as a seamstress for a time, she was an indifferent and sometimes lazy dressmaker. When her wages had depended upon it, she paid more attention, worked faster and with better detail. For herself, however, she cared but little for the evenness of the stitches so long as the garment didn’t actually fall to pieces while she wore it. Charlotte constructed it soundly enough, but her thoughts wandered. She thought of Leah out in Montana Territory with a husband and a child, happy and fulfilled. She thought of cattle drives and men on horseback and cooking over a campfire, of masked bandits and of heroic cowboys.

  Then she thought of Franklin Barton who could not have seemed further from the noble horseman she dreamt of meeting. Mr. Barton, she presumed, was more likely to sit by the fire complaining that supper aggravated his dyspepsia than to prevent a stampede with his quick thinking and skilled horsemanship.

  She chuckled to herself occasionally, amused by her own imagery. Another reason she would not fare well in Albany society was that Charlotte at times would talk to herself and make herself laugh. She’d grown a bit eccentric in the last year or so. She vastly preferred her own company to that of those from whom she must hide the bulk of her life’s interest and work.

  It wouldn’t do to impose upon some charitable preacher’s wife who invited her to tea by muttering and giggling to herself and ignoring half the polite conversation in favor of her own inward observations. She found other people to be ridiculous a good proportion of the time. Though she hid it now, she knew that eventually she would relax her vigil and say something horridly rude, hopefully not in front of her mother.

  So she worked on her dress and read her penny novels about the Wild West, with their sensational tales of stagecoach robberies, brave sheriffs and some innocent young woman who had to be rescued from bandits. She reflected that it was often due to foolish circumstances of the lady's own making.

  When she’d assembled the dress and was finishing it, her mother took it gently from her and began to embroider it. After several days of work, the pallid lavender fabric was exquisite with a wide band of black silk embroidery vines at the hem and cuffs, and in a single column down the bodice. Charlotte gasped at how truly beautiful it was and was moved by the time and artistry that her mother had applied to her dress out of pure generosity. She wrote about it in her weekly letter to Frank.

  The post took a number of weeks to reach Albany from Montana Territory, so she’d taken to writing him weekly. If he had decided to correspond with her and replied favorably to her first letter, he wouldn’t have to wait as long for more from her. She added a postscript to the second letter that if he had decided wholly against her she would be obliged if he would give all upcoming letters from her directly to Leah Rogers without opening them. Consequently, she rambled on about the delicious pickle relish that Laetitia had sent over for them and how it had made their plain supper a veritable feast. She wrote, too, about stories she had posted to women’s periodicals in hope of building a respectable reputation as an authoress under her own name.

  Charlotte had gone so far as to write one editor directly and explain that she had been obliged to write under a man’s pseudonym to support her family, without disclosing which name or publication of course, to lend credence to her claims of writing experience. She confided to Frank that she feared her stories would be seen as insufficiently feminine, with her information on tariffs and the rising price of fresh produce even in port towns. Charlotte did not, she confessed, write much about different types of lace. For four successive weeks, Charlotte wrote to Frank unbidden, pouring out her thoughts and hoping against hope that he would read the words she sent over mountains to him.

  Chapter 5

  Charlotte received a reply from Frank at last a few weeks later. She was nervous to open it and wondered if her fate would be determined by it.

  My Dear Charlotte Conners,

  I will return the rather awkward favor you gave me by saying that, just as I failed to frighten you off with my “cantankerous” nature, equally unsuccessful were your attempts to shock me with your supposed impropriety. Anyone truly improper would be less discreet, would give less consideration to protecting the reputation of a brother to whom, if I may speak so rashly of a stranger, I feel you owe no such kindness. You may abuse me roundly for speaking so of your own brother, but, despite or perhaps even because of your compassionate descriptions of his so-called generosity, I find him lacking in character.

  A man of any age (and I suppose as an elder brother he must have been past sixteen upon your father’s death and could have sought work at the docks or breweries if he were able bodied and had his wits about him) who languishes at an institute of higher learning, drinking ale, playing dart games and talking about German poets, while his sister and widowed mother toil and live in deprivation to pay for his privilege, ought to be horsewhipped. If you don’t like my saying so, I’m sure you will make free to tell me, but I would give the selfsame opinion to his face. I have no doubt he would be a handsome sight in his three-piece suit, bought with the hard work and suffering of a woman.

  Forgive my anger on this point but I was furious to read your letter. I was pleased to receive it, to read it, but your account of your situation and how you have made do with cheap lodgings to pay his tuition and board disgusted me. Most appalling is the fact that, through both sisterly affection and your skill as a writer, you cast him in what I have no doubt is the best possible light, and it is not much good. So I imagine the truth of it to be several degrees lower still.

  He took advantage of your willingness to serve him and your mother, when he should have stepped up and taken honest labor to support his family. Anything else, but most especially living off a widowed mother and a girl who was little above a child, is base and shameful.

  I think you may well leave off writing me now because I have spoken so unreservedly ill of one you love dearly. Let me say two things before you employ all the curses of your most poisonous pen. First of all, I am offended by him because I like you. You seem resourceful and plucky and far more patient than most, so I don’t like the idea of anyone mistreating you. Secondly, allow me to say that I would have protected you better than that, had you been my sister. You must thank the Lord you were not!

  I am a bossy creature who would have had any little sister of mine immured in a parlor embroidering screens while I unloaded crates at the dock or dug ditches. That certainly would have been more noble than exposing a young lady to the danger and indignity of having to work among men.

  In short, I feel protective of you. As if I had any right to, as if you somehow belonged to me or were to do with me in any way at all. I realize you do not, however I find that I wish I could claim you. I would say to Luke or Henry or any other man who stops in to my office, “Oh, my friend Ms. Conners said the most cunning thing about tariffs when last she wrote me,” or “I believe my friend Ms. Conners would disagree with that, as she wrote a very well-regarded piece on just that labor strike last month.” I would mention you so often that I would be subject to teasing of the most ribald sort within days, I assure you.

  I am a bachelor. I spend more time in company with my pen and paper, with my printing press than with other people. As such, in my solitude, I narrate. I describe what I am doing or thinking in an empty room, to thin air or to myself as I once thought. I realize now, since I received your letter, that for months and years, I have been talking not to myself alone, but to you. It is to the idea of you, to your obvious absence, to the place where you ought rightfully be. I have been, perhaps, storing up things to tell you.

  Do not be alarmed. I am not suggesting that you come to Montana Territory on the next train so you can sit in an office and listen to me curse the gears of the press and provide me an audience. I do not need someone to sit and admire me, to hang on my every word. I need someone sensible to answer me, to tell me when I am being cantankerous or to take a half-formed idea and spin it into something worthy, something that co
uld become a story.

  If I did not frighten you off with my first letter, I’d wager I did with this one. I do hope you weathered the tirade against your brother, against what I deem a slight to you and what you deserve. Read on, if only to see what fresh indignity I heaped upon you. Forgive me my bluntness and I will forgive you your overindulgence of a man who ill deserved it.

  I like to think that you did what you did out of a sense of duty and honor bound to the wishes of a father whose death was a loss too great to comprehend. I like to think you acted wholly out of love and hope, and that you didn’t think it through rationally. Because if you had, I flatter myself that from one letter I know your strong-mindedness enough to suspect you’d have told him to get off his duff and find an occupation.

  I am half unfit for human companionship as you can tell. My snap judgments and my rash desire to claim a friendship, a kinship with you—only tell me the truth. I do not expect you to comfort me with half-truths, you are too sensible. Tell me if I may have hope of you even with all my faults.

  Frank

  Charlotte scanned back over the letter but her vision was bright and the papers were crumpled from her gripping them so hard in anguish. To have a man she cared for already, a man whose regard she wished for—to have him speak of her family so was too painful. Immediately, she took out paper and wrote furiously.

  Mr. Barton,

  If you have any respect for me, as you claim to do, how could you speak of my brother in such a wicked, judgmental manner? Think how it must give me pain! That you censure my best-meant actions and people I love best because they do not meet with your approval—it is too hard. I could forgive anything you say about me, but when you speak so cruelly of my own brother, it infuriates and disappoints me.

  I had thought, as a man supposed to be committed to the truth of news and human interest, you would be more liberal-minded, more understanding of the dire circumstances people find themselves in and of the choices we make in extremity. I had, in short, hoped you would be better than you are. Due to your being a newspaper man, I thought you'd be kinder and more interested in understanding than condemning.

  To say that I found the remainder of your letter more pleasant is like saying that I found the smoke of a fire less agonizing than the flames themselves. I am sure you meant to make amends in some way and express regret. As a writer, you have failed. As a suitor, you have failed utterly too. I like you less than I did before you wrote to me again.

  I am only replying at all because I wish to lay bare my actions in defense of the brother you so unreasonably judged.

  It was our late father’s dearest wish that my brother be educated at college as he himself had been. He wished for Roger to pursue some field of business or law. The expectation was of course that he should then use his knowledge and skills to provide for us women, which he has never expressed anything but utter willingness to do.

  He is a generous-spirited young man and clever. He did well at his studies and was no idle wastrel as you imply. At seventeen and having only just left school himself, he was hardly fit to do more than manual labor which would have given our widowed mother the utmost grief at having disappointed father’s dearest dream for their son. She would not allow it under any circumstance and when she was sufficiently recovered from the shock of our total alteration in lifestyle, she took in fine sewing herself, doing embroidery and beadwork for women whom she used to host for tea in the rectory, at great indignity to her pride I am certain.

  I am not the only person to have sacrificed. I consider it no sacrifice to have done my duty as any daughter and sister would have done who cared for her father’s good opinion and her responsibility in the eyes of her Lord as well.

  Had I refused to leave school, had I tormented my poor grieving mother with a tantrum over how I ought not to be deprived of every luxury I had henceforth known, I would be worse than the lowest creature. Had my brother thrown off all our family’s hopes for him and taken work on the docks among rough company, imagine the disappointment, the doubled sadness it would have visited upon my mother’s heart, to see him brought so low. To see a young man of the finest potential reduced to only the work of his limbs and sweat of his brow when he might have served justice and honor instead would have been a tragedy.

  I feel almost that you are unable to comprehend this sort of feeling. Your words anger me, in truth, but they rouse pity in me as well. Could you have been so ill treated as to think only of the protection or interest of one person in a family? Did not you realize the wants of the individual must be ranked below the needs of the family? Was your own family so distant to you? Were you so devoid of love and loyalty for your kin? It saddens me.

  I must lay this letter aside now and give myself time to think before completing it. I cannot think now how to conclude.

  Charlotte left off, almost beside herself with sadness that Frank had written her such a letter. She had to let go of all her hopes of him. Charlotte slept poorly and woke in a poor mood. All that long day she darned stockings, made soup and stared out their sole window listlessly. When she went to pick up the post, thinking the walk would do her some good, she felt even sadder, more desolate because only yesterday she had rejoiced to receive his letter. There were two envelopes, one a bill from the grocer and the other, a new letter from Frank.

  Charlotte had half a mind to rip it in two and drop it in the gutter with the sludge. Had he written to heap more abuse on her brother’s head? Perhaps he had some censure for her mother or her dead father? Furiously, she ripped into the letter right there at the post office. She feared if she waited to read it at home where there was no privacy her mother would see how discomfited she was and would want to know what was the matter.

  How I hope you read this, how I expect you will toss it in the garbage unread after the things I said to you! Miss Conners—Charlotte—I beg you to accept my deepest apology.

  I wrote you bluntly, and I cannot ask you to excuse my thoughts. However, accept my apology for writing them down, for franking them and posting them as if you wished to read some stranger’s unvarnished opinion of your family. You told me personal things, private things and I judged them. I will not do so again. I will guard my words and guard your feelings as I failed to do before.

  I do not have many friends and I have none whom I confide in with such information as my innermost thoughts and feelings. It isn’t possible for me to know how it struck you to see that I had no sympathy for those you hold dear. I judged them harshly. I ought not to have said what I said, not any of it. If I must give an excuse let it be that I was carried away by an early and unexpected regard for you and wanted to strike at anything I considered threatening to your happiness. In truth, the only threat to your peace was myself and my angry words.

  You did as best you could and your father, I have no doubt (nor right to say it), would be proud of how you promoted your brother’s interests over your own. I know Mrs. Rogers thinks well of you and I know that I myself think highly of you.

  It hardly matters how I would have acted in your brother’s circumstance as I am not he. I only know that you deserved better from me, deserved only the tenderest understanding and kindness. I have treated you ill. I have given you pain in scolding your family for actions that were both conventional and expected by society as a whole. I have, in short, censured you and all your relations for not allowing me to make all your decisions for you so I might approve them. It matters not if I approve them. It matters that I have given you reason to despise me. I wish it were not so.

  I wrote this as soon as I returned from the post office, so it necessitates another trip back. The clerk will raise his bushy eyebrows at me, wondering why in the space of an hour I must post two letters to the same person in Albany and what business a bachelor such as myself might have writing to women. As the surname differs from mine he must discern that I write some young woman in hopes of imposing upon her to become my wife, sight unseen. Perhaps I imagine that he will chuckle at
me and think such a woman would not be signing on for a good bargain.

  What may I do to make clear my regret for how I wrote of your family? It was not my place, and had it been my place, it would yet have been badly done to have said such things. I am sorry. You will either have discarded this missive unread or used it as more reason to rain curses down on my head for being arrogant. I deserve no better from you, certainly.

  If you will find a way to write me, I will send you next the most civil and flattering letter there may be, even if I must copy the words of some famed poet or philosopher. Or else I shall tell you of my troublesome printing press and the sort of articles which you may find dull but which are palatable to those who subscribe to my paper.

  Please, Charlotte.

  I have no right to call you that. I have no right to ask or to expect forgiveness. I have no rights at all. I have only hope. Hope in you.

  Frank

  His letter did not erase the hurtful things he had said. Nothing he offered could excuse his behavior. But the fact he recognized that he had done wrong, that he apologized made a difference to her. Once, before her father’s death, she had heard her mother counseling a churchgoer having marriage problems. Charlotte had often listened at the sitting room door on those occasions! Her mother had told the woman to forgive, for men could not be expected to say they were wrong even if they knew it to be true.

  It was her job to let go of any resentment, to let her heart be full and open and not to grow bitter. Charlotte had thought privately that it was a bit much to ask the wife, to be unconditionally forgiving and loving. She also remembered thinking that if those were the expectations, she had better be an old maid herself.

  Now she was torn. She wanted so much to forgive Frank because she liked him. She liked the idea of corresponding with a man such as himself, a man in the Wild West. He was the editor of a newspaper, older and sophisticated and interested in her ideas and opinions. She thought about it all the way home. When she reached the door of their lodgings, she found her mother sitting with Laetitia whose pale yellow silk dress looked out of place in her drab surroundings.