MARGARET Choice Mail-Order Brides Agency
A Sweet Clean and Wholesome Western Historical Romance
Kate Cambridge
Edited by
Tina Rucci
Curl Up Books
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
About Kate Cambridge and Also By
CHOICE BRIDES: MARGARET
Suffragette Mail-Order Brides Agency Series
The Suffragette Mail-Order Brides Agency Series, Book 4
By Kate Cambridge
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Kate Cambridge is an emerging author, writing Sweet, Clean, Inspirational, Historical Romance and Sweet Contemporary Romance books.
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Copyright © 2016 by Kate Cambridge
All rights reserved.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or book reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, persons or animals, business establishments, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Property of Kate Cambridge, May 2016
E. Margaret, this story is dedicated to you. Although your life does not resemble the ‘Margaret’ in this story, there is a similar thread of strength, perseverance, and beauty that fully embodies who you are.
I love you, and am so grateful you are part of my life.
~K
One
“RUN!”
Margaret can hear her father’s voice, but it’s muffled by the thick smoke all around her. It clings to her skin like a noose, tightening around her throat, making her gasp and scream silently as she gropes blindly for the way out. Her fingers run along walls that are so hot she can feel them blistering.
Her mother is screaming. It isn’t muffled. It shakes Margaret to the core, vibrating through her skin so that she doesn’t know whether her mother is screaming from beside her or within her. She turns her head and abandons the wall – reaching into the smoke:
“Mom! MOM!”
The screaming continues, rising in a crescendo of fear and pain, but Margaret can’t find the other woman. She can’t find her mother. All she can see is smoke.
Heat barrels into her from the side. A door has collapsed – revealing a bright, hot orange light in the midst of the grey fog. The fire coils towards Margaret, beckoning with flickering fingers, and she backs away, backs into the wall, reaching around on either side for another way out.
Margaret can feel her skin starting to peel, the pain of it a blazing agony so intense it is almost dull – as though her body has given up feeling the pain, as though there is too much to feel, too much for Margaret’s mind to comprehend. Her face is heavy with sweat and dirt. How is it that heat creates dirt? Is it turning her into ash already?
Her mother is screaming. Her father’s voice cries ‘Run!’ again and again, and all Margaret can do is stand with her back against the wall as the flames get closer and closer, until the yellow tongues of light and heat begin to lick at her ankles.
Margaret jerked and she was out of that place – out of the noise and dirt and heat – and in a mess of blankets and hair. She scrambled out, half-screaming, and when she realized the screams weren’t silent anymore she bit down on her bottom lip to keep them in. Her face was streaked with sweat and her hair clung to her scalp by the time she managed to pull herself out of the bed, standing at the side of the mattress and heaving long, gasping sobs.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god –”
It took her a moment to realize that she was the one repeating the words. That it wasn’t just a disembodied voice, like the screams that woke her up every morning.
Out the window, the sun was shining. Margaret liked to sleep with the curtains open – better chance of seeing the moon rise. Better chance of escape if the worst should happen. She shook her head to clear it and reminded herself that she was safe here. That the Dows owned a brick and mortar house, which was far less likely to go up in flames than the cheap wooden home that Margaret had grown up in.
Someone knocked on the door, making Margaret jump.
“Yes?” she called. Her voice was heavy and rough, as though she’d been screaming for hours.
“Breakfast is ready for you, Miss Singleton,” she heard. Mr. Dow’s servants were very attentive. It had been years since someone had come to rouse Margaret when she slept – and then it had been her mother. Margaret’s family couldn’t afford servants.
“Thank you, I’ll be right down!” Margaret called back.
Footsteps faded away from the door and Margaret took a long breath, stealing herself for the day ahead. She moved around the bed and filled the basin with water, splashing her face to remove the sweat and tears from her nightmares.
“The sun is shining,” she told herself gently, counting off her reasons to smile as she always did after a bad night. “Your friends love you enough to care about you. Those awful feather hats have gone out of style so you don’t need to look at them anymore…”
The spare bedroom Mr. Dow had kindly given her was much larger than her bedroom back home. The bed took up so much space that some nights she thought she might get lost in the blankets and never return. Margaret finished her list and sat down in front of the large vanity, smoothing down her blonde, curly hair, before tying it into a simple braid. The Dows didn’t put on much of a show during breakfast – especially George, Elizabeth’s little brother, who would often wander down to the breakfast room in his nightshirt, groping for the coffee urn, unaware of Margaret’s blushing cheeks until at least his second cup.
Elizabeth used to tell stories of waking George up with a splash of cold water. Apparently, since Elizabeth had married and moved out, there had been no one left to continue the practice.
Margaret had moved into Elizabeth’s father’s house after the fire. She’d lost everything – her parents, her home, all of her possessions. She would have been on the street without the Dow’s charity. Mr. Dow was a very kind, scatter-brained host, who seemed to be under the impression Margaret would be living with him indefinitely.
Quickly making herself presentable without being dressy, Margaret rushed downstairs to the shining, modern white breakfast room to find George there with a steaming mug at his elbow and a pleasant smile as he read the paper. He was dressed, blessedly, and looked like he was ready for work.
&n
bsp; “Good morning, Margaret,” he said, tossing his own blond curls out off his forehead and out of his eyes. Margaret thought he needed a haircut, but it wasn’t her place to say.
“Good morning, George,” she replied. She’d been his houseguest for several weeks, but had only recently been able to give up the formalities. “Are you dressed early, or am I up late?”
“I’m early,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Lizzie’s coming over and if I’m asleep for her visit I’ll cop a bucket-full.”
Margaret hid her smile and took the seat opposite him. She hadn’t known Lizzie would be visiting, but that was normal – she was married now, and had a business to run, so she took whatever chance she could to drop in on her family. And her family’s squatter.
Don’t think of yourself like that, Margaret thought as she thinly buttered some toast. If they thought you were a burden, they would have said so.
She picked the correct knife and fork – after carefully watching George for clues – and took a bite of toast, thinking she would have been using her fingers if she had been at home. Her parents hadn’t used more than one set of cutlery per meal. They also didn’t have a room specifically set aside for breakfast.
Regardless of the Dow’s seemingly endless hospitality, Margaret knew she couldn’t stay here much longer. She didn’t belong in this world and every day she spent trying to learn what was expected of her the more out of place she felt. The more she was reminded of her father’s insistence that the women in their family didn’t work, which had plunged them into terrible debt. He hadn’t allowed Margaret to work as a teacher, despite paying for her education, until they were living off of boiled cabbages every day. And now, here she was, using silver forks to eat her toast and sitting in a cushioned breakfast chair. She’d never wanted this kind of luxury. All she’d wanted was to be comfortable, and to live the same quality of life she would have had if she’d been born a boy.
But where else could she go? Her parents had died penniless, and she herself had lost her job as a teacher several weeks before the fire. She could remember the headmaster’s stern expression as he’d told her there had been ‘cuts to the budget’. They’d both known he had been lying. Margaret had been a devoted teacher, but an even more devoted suffragette – and the headmaster was not in favor of such activities. She’d tried to find other work and learned that he had smeared her name all over Boston. No school would hire her.
“You’re looking pensive,” George said, looking at her from over the rim of his coffee mug. He was a disturbingly observant boy. Man, she reminded herself. Though Elizabeth often complained about her baby brother, he was no baby – he was a successful banker, just turned seventeen. Margaret was only twenty-two.
“Am I?” she asked, trying to avoid the question.
But he was no fool. “You are,” he said. “But if you’d rather not discuss it until Lizzie gets here, I’ll understand.”
Disturbingly observant, but kind.
“It’s just… you know,” She waved her hand vaguely. “Nightmares.”
The fire which had claimed her parents had very nearly claimed her too. Her father had told her to run while he went back for Margaret’s mother, and Margaret hadn’t seen either of them again. She’d escaped, but in her dreams she’d never made it out. She was trapped with the heat and the smoke, burning alive just as they did. She and her parents didn’t get along of late. They’d been almost as understanding about her suffragette duties as the headmaster of her former school. But they were her parents, and she loved them. They didn’t deserve to die like that. No one did.
George nodded slowly, watching her face carefully before looking away. She wondered what he had found in her eyes and the turn of her lips that compelled him to give her a moment of privacy. They ate in silence, using cutlery which probably cost more than Margaret’s monthly earnings back when she had been employed.
Two
They were finishing their breakfast when the front door slammed shut down the hall. They heard a woman’s voice shout: “George? Margaret?”
George and Margaret abandoned the dregs of their meal and rushed out to the entrance hall to meet Elizabeth Sharpe, neé Dow. She was chatting with the butler, Christopher, who had been robbed of the chance to conduct Elizabeth into the breakfast room but the upturn of lips and light in his face showed how little he minded. He was an older man, more of a gentleman than some men of three times his social standing, with a pressed suit and slicked back silver hair.
Elizabeth was practically shining. Married life suited her. Her small nose was framed with rosy cheeks, her smile was wide and content, and her red hair was piled on top of her head in an up do which looked deceptively simple but drew particular attention to her lovely neck. She was alone – she must have left Captain Sharpe, her former bodyguard and current husband, to man her new Mail-Order Bride agency offices while she came to visit her family.
When she saw her brother and Margaret approaching, her grin grew wider. She rushed forward in a swish of skirts and pulled both of them into hugs.
“George – shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?”
“Shouldn’t you be ironing?”
Elizabeth smacked him upside the back of the head and George scurried away, snickering at the scandalized look on Elizabeth’s face.
“He’s lucky I know he’s joking,” Elizabeth muttered to Margaret once George was out of the entrance hall. “Or I would feed him his own briefcase. How are you?” she added, giving Margaret a concerned look.
Margaret could remember when she first met Elizabeth. Elizabeth had taken her under her wing, becoming an unofficial older sister and mentor for all the suffragette duties the two shared. Most of Margaret’s arrest record was indirectly related to Elizabeth. When Margaret first met her, she’d thought the other woman was burning with some unquenchable fire, that there was nothing she couldn’t do once she put her mind to it, and since then, Elizabeth had continued to prove Margaret’s first assumption right. The Mail-Order Bride agency, which she had gone to Montana to set up, was just the latest impossible task Elizabeth had accomplished.
“I’m fine,” Margaret replied out of habit. “Of course – I’m fine, Lizzie.”
Elizabeth gave her a hard look. Margaret knew she was wearing her sleepless nights in the purple smears beneath her eyes and the wan tone to her complexion, but Elizabeth – bless her – didn’t mention it. She just reached over and pulled Margaret’s hand into the crook of her elbow, guiding her to the library where they could talk.
The library had the heavy curtains drawn so that the high bookshelves were clearly visible and the gilded book covers shone in the daylight. There were portraits on the walls of unsmiling men and women, Elizabeth’s ancestors, and an overstuffed couch which Elizabeth guided Margaret into.
“Look, I’ll be honest – I’m here on business, not pleasure,” Elizabeth said, settling herself into the couch. “It is always wonderful when I get to mix the two, though.”
“Business?” Margaret asked, immediately thinking of The National American Woman Suffrage Association’s Boston branch, of which they were both members. Elizabeth lost her membership briefly when the Suffrage movement found out she was starting a mail-order bride agency, but had reinstated her once they realized it was to match Suffragettes with men who supported the movement; to give them options. “I thought we weren’t planning any more protests until June?”
“Not suffrage – my business,” Elizabeth replied.
Margaret blinked quickly and shuffled in her seat. “Alright?”
It wasn’t a completely unexpected conversation. Elizabeth had hinted to Margaret that she had found men supportive of the movement who would be good matches for her friends and fellow suffragettes. Suffragettes like Margaret – who had no prospects, no chance at finding work, and who wouldn’t give up the cause just to buy themselves an easy life as someone’s wife. Margaret had considered asking Elizabeth about her options more than once since moving into th
e Dow home, but something had stopped her every time. Maybe it was the knowledge that there was no turning back from marriage; maybe it was the thought that moving to Montana – or wherever her prospective husband lived – would mean leaving everything she’d ever known and striking out for a world she couldn’t know.
But now Lizzie was holding Margaret’s hands and starting the conversation herself. So she must have thought Margaret was ready for this. Or maybe she just knew that Margaret couldn’t live with herself if she continued to be a burden on the kindness of Lizzie’s family. Though Lizzie would never think of her as one.
“I’ve got a man in Montana,” Lizzie said. “I think you and he would get along.”
Margaret swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “I see.”
Elizabeth searched her face. “You can tell me to get lost if you’re not interested.”
“No, no – I actually am interested. I’m just… scared, I suppose. But then isn’t everyone?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I think so. I was.” Margaret didn’t point out that Elizabeth had taken several months to get to know her husband before she’d married him. It certainly hadn’t been a sight-unseen situation. “But I promise – the man is good. Very good, in fact. So good that Joseph didn’t want me speaking to him at first.”
Margaret felt a smile blossoming on her lips. “He must be something, to make Captain Sharpe feel inadequate. Probably more than I deserve.”
“Margaret, stop. You underestimate yourself. You deserve royalty, my dear.”
Margaret shook her head. She wouldn’t know what to do with royalty. All she needed was a job – but if she couldn’t have that, a simple man with simple tastes, who would allow her to be his equal would work.
“What’s his name?” Margaret asked.
“Jake MacDonald,” Elizabeth replied. She pulled a letter out of her pocket and handed it to Margaret. Margaret ran her fingers over the fold, feeling the rough paper ruffle beneath her fingertips, but she didn’t open it straight away. “He’s a rancher in Helena. You remember I told you that I had some difficulties with some of the local men? Well, he intervened on my behalf.”
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