“Ranleigh went with me,” Carrie said, looking down, her lower lip protruding just a bit. “But then Ranleigh isn’t afraid of anything. Maybe you’re afraid because you’re my second-most handsome brother, and, too, maybe Ranleigh has more self-confidence than you do. Maybe Ranleigh—”
“You win,” Jamie said, throwing up his hands in defeat. “I’ll go, but only if you swear you’ll not try to match me up with one of your unwanted women.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said as though appalled at the very idea. “Besides, who’d want you after they’d seen Ranleigh?”
Jamie grinned wickedly. “About half of China,” he said, leaning forward to cluck her under the chin, then looked down at the dog when it sneezed again. “What are you going to name him?”
“Choo-choo,” Carrie answered brightly, making Jamie groan at the infantile name, just as she knew he would.
“Give him a name with a little dignity.”
“Tell me about the women in China and I’ll call him Duke,” she said eagerly.
Pulling out his pocket watch and looking at it, he said, “I will give you one hour to dress and for every ten minutes of that hour that you don’t make me wait for you, I’ll tell you a story about China.”
Carrie grimaced. “About the scenery? About the roads and the storms at sea?”
“About the girls who danced for the emperor.” He lowered his voice. “And…they danced for me. In private.”
In a flurry of silk and flying pillows, Carrie was out of the bed in a flash. “Thirty minutes. If I can get dressed in thirty minutes, how many stories will that earn me?”
“Three.”
“They’d better be good stories and worth all the rush,” she said in warning, “because if they’re boring, I’ll invite Euphonia to dinner every night you’re home.”
“Cruel. You are cruel.” Again looking at his pocket watch, he said, “Time starts…NOW!”
Running from the bedroom, Carrie made a dash for her dressing room, Choo-choo in her arms.
“Thirty minutes,” Jamie said, half in anger, half in exasperation. “You said you’d be ready within thirty minutes. Not an hour and thirty minutes, but thirty minutes flat.”
Carrie yawned, not in the least disturbed by his tone. Jamie was all bark and no bite. “I was sleepy. Now tell me another story. You owe me two more.”
As he flicked the reins of the horse harnessed to the little carriage, Jamie looked down at her. He knew that he complained to his brothers about how they spoiled their little sister, and he knew that now he should be firm and deny her the promised stories, but then he saw the way she looked up at him, with her big blue eyes full of love and adoration, and he cursed under his breath. There wasn’t a member of his family who could deny her anything. “Maybe just one more story,” he said. “But you don’t deserve it.”
Smiling, she hugged his arm. “You know, I think that as you get older you get better looking, and in another year or two, you might surpass Ranleigh in looks.”
Jamie tried to hide his smile then gave up and grinned. “Imp!” he said and winked at her. “Like the dog, do you?”
She hugged Choo-choo. “By far my favorite present,” she said, and this time she was sincere. “Now tell me more about the dancing girls.”
When Carrie, with the little white dog tucked under her arm, walked into the parlor of the old house on her brother’s arm, the entire room came to a halt. All six of the young women, who had been Carrie’s friends for all of her life, looked up in unison. At first they merely halted their actions, then their eyes widened, then they gave a sigh that came from deep within each woman. For all that Carrie teased her brother that he wasn’t as good-looking as her brother Ranleigh, Jamie was handsome enough to cause women to make genuine fools of themselves.
Smiling in pride as she looked at the women who were frozen like statues, Carrie bent a bit and blew out the match that Euphonia had just lit before it burned her fingers.
“All of you know my brother, Jamie, don’t you?” Carrie said, acting as though she hadn’t noticed the women’s standstill. Glancing up at Jamie, she saw that, even though he was pretending he was embarrassed, she knew him well enough to see that he was actually flattered by the reaction of the young women.
Taking his arm possessively in hers, she pulled him forward. Their movement made the women come to life as they began to clear their throats and try to cover their awkwardness.
“How was your voyage, Captain Montgomery?” Helen tried to sound normal, but her voice came out in a rather curious-sounding squeak.
“Fine,” Jamie half snapped, wishing he hadn’t agreed to accompany his sister.
Carrie pulled him toward the far wall of the room where twenty-five photographs of men were pinned. The men ranged in age from a boy who didn’t look much more than about fourteen to an old geezer with a gray beard halfway down the middle of his chest. “These are the men,” Carrie said unnecessarily.
Nervously running his finger around his collar, Jamie looked at the board, but didn’t see much. All the women were behind him now, and he could feel their eyes upon him, maybe even feel their collective hot breaths on his neck.
“Have there been any new arrivals today?” Carrie asked as she turned away from the board. She turned rather quickly, just in time to see Helen do something rather odd: She slipped something under a book lying on a table. Carrie pretended she had seen nothing.
“A few,” one of the women answered. “But nothing promising. We have about twice as many men as women. You wouldn’t like to put your picture on the board, would you, Captain?” She was doing her best to sound nonchalant, but there was just a touch of desperation and yearning in her voice.
Jamie gave the woman a weak smile. “Carrie, my love, I think I’d better go. I have to—” He couldn’t think of what he needed to do except get out of there because the women were making him feel like something in a zoo. After giving his sister a quick kiss on the cheek and a look that said, I’ll get you for this, he was gone.
For a moment the room was silent, then the women emitted a second combined sigh before turning back to their stacks of letters and photographs. Carrie stood where she was for a moment, then set Choo-choo to the floor, pointed him toward Helen, and gave him a little push.
“Catch him!” Carrie cried to Helen. “He’ll run away.”
Helen began to chase the little dog, leaving the table she had been standing by as though guarding it. Choo-choo decided he didn’t want to be caught and within seconds all the women in the room were chasing him—all of them except Carrie, that is. She used the commotion to cover her movements as she went to Helen’s table, lifted the book, and took what was hidden from under it.
Carrie pulled what was, by now, a very familiar-looking envelope from under the book. It was the type of envelope that held the photograph and letter from a man desiring a bride.
While the others were busy chasing the dog about the room, Carrie opened the letter, pulled out the photo, and looked at it. The picture was of a young man standing behind two badly dressed children, and it was the children Carrie examined first. There was a tall boy of about nine or ten and a girl of four or five. The clothes the children wore were clean but fitted them badly, as though they had been given whatever the local charity office had without consideration for fit.
But far more important than their clothes was the sadness in the eyes of the children, a kind of sad loneliness that said that there was very little laughter in their lives.
When Carrie looked up from the faces of the children, she gasped, for she saw the face of what she thought was the handsomest man in the world. Oh, maybe he wasn’t actually as good-looking as her brothers, for there was an altogether different look about him, and this man had a look of melancholy about him that no Montgomery had ever had.
Helen snatched the photograph from Carrie. “That wasn’t very nice of you to snoop like that. This is mine.”
Carrie didn’t answer bu
t sat down on a nearby chair, feeling as though the wind had been knocked from her. The moment she sat down, Choo-choo ran and jumped onto her lap, and unconsciously, she hugged the warm little animal.
“Who is he?” Carrie whispered.
“For your information, he’s the man I’m going to marry,” Helen said proudly. “I have made up my mind and no one is going to change it.”
“Who is he?” Carrie repeated.
Snatching the photo from Helen, Euphonia turned it over. “It says on the back that his name is Joshua Greene, and the children are named Tem and Dallas. What an odd name for a girl, or is the girl named Tem? Look, he misspells Tim.”
As the women passed the photo around, they looked at it. The little group was a handsome family, in spite of the children’s clothes, and the man was certainly handsome in a dark sort of way, but they had all seen better-looking men before. Not one of them could understand why Helen would hide the photo or why Carrie was looking as though she’d seen a ghost.
“I liked the man we saw last week better. What was his name? Logan something or something Logan, wasn’t it? He didn’t have two children already. If I were going to marry a man I’d never met, I’d want one without children so I could have my own.”
The other women nodded in agreement.
Helen snatched the photo away from the women. “I don’t care what you think. I’m going to marry him and that’s that. I like him.”
Euphonia, who had been reading Joshua Greene’s letter during this, began to laugh. “He won’t want you because he says he wants someone who knows how to work. He wants a woman with a great deal of farm experience, one who can run a farm if she has to, and he says he doesn’t mind a woman who is older than he is—he’s only twenty-eight—and he doesn’t mind a widow. He’ll even take on more children. What’s important to him is that she knows all there is to know about farming.” Smugly, she looked up at Helen. “You know so little about farming that you probably think the way to get milk is to pump the cow’s tail.”
Helen grabbed the letter away from her. “I don’t care what he says he wants. I know what he’s going to get.”
As Helen grabbed the letter, the photo fell from her hands to the floor and Carrie picked it up. Looking at it again, she decided that it was the eyes of the man that called to her. His eyes were filled with hurt and longing and need. They were the eyes of a man who was crying out for help. My help, she thought. He needs my help.
Standing, she tucked Choo-choo under her arm, smoothed her blue silk skirt, and handed the photo back to Helen. “You can’t marry him,” she said softly, “for I am going to marry him.”
There were a few seconds of stunned silence before the women began to laugh. “You?” they laughed. “What do you know about farming?”
Carrie was not laughing. “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know a great deal about that man. He needs me. Now,” she said regally, “if you’ll excuse me, I have some preparations to make.”
Chapter Two
Never before in her life had Carrie had to do anything in secret. She had never needed to hide anything from her family or friends, but now she had to work entirely in secret.
It had been easy to silence her friends. Since they had been children and had formed their circle of seven, Carrie had always been the leader of the group, with the others following Carrie into whatever she decided to do. They had sometimes been appalled or even afraid when one of Carrie’s crusades threatened to get them into trouble, but they had always been obedient to her wishes. Carrie’s oldest brother said that this was why Carrie had them for friends, because she could make them do what she wanted to do.
And now here was something that Carrie wanted more than she had ever wanted anything in her life before.
After that first day, the day Jamie came home, the day she first saw the man’s photograph, she was a woman obsessed. It had been rather easy to defeat Helen and “take” Joshua Greene away from her. Carrie felt a little bad about taking him away from her friend, but Helen had to understand that Josh—as Carrie was already calling him—belonged to Carrie. Josh was hers and hers alone.
That first day she left the old Johnson house, the photograph and letter in one hand, her dog in the other, she went to the old Montgomery boathouse that was rarely used any longer. She wanted to be alone to sit and think and look at the man and his children.
She seemed to have some sense left, for she repeatedly told herself that she was being ridiculous, that this man was no different from a hundred others who had sent in their pictures. She had seen them all, but none of the pictures had ever affected her. Not at all. She had never thought of leaving her home and her family to go out West to marry one of the men from the photographs. But this man was different; this family was different. This family was hers and they needed her.
She spent the day in the boathouse, sometimes sitting on a dusty old rug in a canoe, sometimes pacing, sometimes just staring at the photo. After pinning it to the wall, she looked at it and tried to analyze what it was that she liked about the man and his children. She tried to think in cold, hard terms, but try as she might, she couldn’t come up with any answers.
Twice she told herself that she should forget about the man, that maybe the look in his eyes was just a trick of the light. Maybe there was another reason for the sadness she thought she saw. Perhaps the children’s dog had died that morning, and that was why all of them looked so lost and alone.
At about four, when Choo-choo was getting restless and Carrie was beginning to feel her own hunger, one of the old men who worked in the chandlery came into the boathouse.
“Beggin’ your pardon, miss. Oh, it’s you, Miss Carrie.”
Carrie nodded to him then motioned for him to come to her. “Look at that picture,” she said, pointing to where she’d pinned the photo on the wall. “What do you see in that picture?”
The man studied the picture, squinting at it. Carrie took it down from the wall, so the old man could take it to the window to look at it in the light. She could see that he was taking her question very seriously. When he finally looked back at her, he said, “Handsome family.”
“Anything else?” she urged.
The man looked confused. “Not that I could see. They don’t look rich, but maybe they’ve fallen on hard times.”
Carrie frowned. “They don’t look, well…sad to you?”
The man looked surprised. “Sad? But all of them’s smilin’.”
It was Carrie’s turn to look surprised. Taking the photo from him, she looked at it again. She would have thought there was nothing new in it for her to discover, but now she saw it in a new light. All three of the people in the picture were indeed smiling. If they were smiling, how could she have thought they were sad? The little boy had his arm around the girl, and the father had a hand on each child’s shoulder. How could they be lonely if they had each other?
Carrie looked back at the old man. “Not sad and not lonely?”
“They look particular happy to me, but then what do I know?” He smiled at her. “If you want them to be sad, Miss Carrie, then I guess they can be.”
Carrie smiled back at the man as he tugged at the brim of his cap, then left the boathouse.
Not sad or lonely, Carrie thought. Other people saw a happy, smiling family, but that’s not what Carrie saw, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why she saw them as sad or what it was about the family that appealed to her. Cried out to her, actually.
She stayed in the boathouse another few minutes, then picked up Choo-choo and went back to her own house. That night there was a celebration dinner in honor of Jamie’s return, and all their Montgomery and Taggert relatives were there, which meant that the house was filled with so many people that no one noticed that Carrie was unusually quiet.
For the next three days Carrie was quiet. She went about her daily life, went to the old Johnson house every day and looked at the photographs the men sent, interviewed the women who wan
ted husbands, and tried to pretend that her mind was on something besides the family in the photograph.
She looked at the picture and read Josh’s letter until they were nearly worn out. She knew every sentence by heart, and she could have picked Josh’s handwriting out of hundreds of others.
At the end of three days she knew what she had to do. Just as she had originally planned, she was going to marry Mr. Joshua Greene. Josh seemed to think he needed a woman who knew about milking cows and whatever else one did on a farm, but Carrie was convinced that what he actually needed was her.
When Carrie told her friends what she was going to do, they were outraged. Even Helen, who was still smoldering with resentment over Carrie’s highhandedly taking Josh away from her, was upset.
“You are out of your mind,” Euphonia said. “You could have any man you wanted. With your looks and your money—”
At that, there was a gasp from the others, because it had always been prohibited to speak of Carrie’s money.
“Someone has to speak the truth,” Euphonia said with a sniff. “And this man wants a farm wife. Carrie, you can’t even sew, much less plant corn.” She narrowed her eyes. “You do know that corn silk isn’t really silk, don’t you?”
Carrie knew no such thing, but that was hardly the issue. “I have considered the possibility that if I were to write Mr. Greene, he might not think me suitable as a wife. Since he seems to believe that he needs a hired hand instead of a wife, I have therefore decided to marry him before I go to this town of his in Colorado, this Eternity.”
This announcement set the women to talking at once as they tried to reason with Carrie, but it was like talking to a wall. They pointed out that she would have to lie to Mr. Greene, and one of their policies had always been that they weren’t to lie to the men who requested brides. They didn’t tell a man who wanted a sweet-tempered wife that they were sending him a dear woman and then send him a virago. Mr. Greene had asked for a farm wife, and he should have what he asked for.