by Carla Kelly
“You’ll find something equally good in London for her, my love,” she said. She was in a position to look over his shoulder. “Oh, dear. Here is who will be disappointed.”
He turned around to see Rob Beazer coming toward them, passing a cudgel from one hand to the other. “Perhaps you can find him another clerk,” Mary Ann whispered in his ear. “Really soon.”
As a man who had also worked his way to success from the bottom, Thomas knew that a man didn’t achieve the running of a major business in a competitive town without considerable shrewdness. He also knew that if he were running said corporation and saw his new clerk sitting on a crate of dried herring cuddling with a man, that a fulsome explanation might be in order. He stood up, quite prepared for such an explanation.
Thomas began with no preamble, because he knew Rob Beazer well. After all, a man doesn’t spend hours in such a warehouse, going over bills of lading and inspecting cargo without developing a friendship, which in this case was about to be stretched to the limit. “Rob, I have bad news for you.”
“You are marrying my new clerk and stealing her away,” Rob said. At least he had quit tossing the cudgel from hand to hand.
Might as well brazen it out. “Tomorrow morning. I have a special license. I am, I …”
Rob dropped the weapon. With barely suppressed glee, he clapped his hands on Thomas’s arms. “I just won five pounds,” he declared. “I wagered Meggie that you would not waste a minute in stealing my clerk. She said Mary Ann would make you wait for banns. Shake my hand, Master Jenkins.”
They shook hands. “How did you know?” Thomas asked, not certain if he was more amused or more relieved.
“You never saw your face when you brought this lovely lady here on Christmas Day. I watched you while she and I talked and settled the matter.”
“My face?”
“In this business, I have learned to read people. I know a liar when I see one, and I know a determined man, too.” He glanced at Mary Ann. “I think now that I know what a man looks like when he is in love.” He chuckled. “Never thought to see it here among the herring and navy beans, though.”
“You amaze me, Rob Beazer,” Thomas said. “I thought that all I wanted on Christmas Day was to fulfill an obligation to my sister after complaining about boredom.”
Rob shook his head. “T’wasn’t what I saw!” He gestured to Mary Ann, who joined them, holding out her hands to both men. “How simple is man,” he told her as he grasped her hand. “Mary Ann, I’m going to have to sack you.”
She kissed her employer’s cheek. “Bless you,” she whispered.
“I’ll find another clerk.” He put her hand in Thomas’s. “Take good care of each other.”
He turned to Thomas. “As for you …”
It was no threat. “Bless you, Rob,” Thomas echoed. “Saint Andrews tomorrow morning at eight of the clock, and bring Meggie, of course.”
“Thomas, we have until noon, according to the license,” Mary Ann said, an efficient secretary to the end, apparently.
“I know, my love. Remember? I am forty-three.”
Faithfully Yours
It all started with a letter. No reason it wouldn’t end with one.
Nothing much exciting ever happened in Dumfries, Scottish market town in the old kingdom of Galloway. It prospered because of its fishing fleet and English visitors, who came to appreciate its handsome stone houses and tidy businesses, located on the lovely River Nith.
This story begins in 1818 with two young ladies, one the daughter of a local merchant who had become quite comfortable through business dealings, cod, and herring. The merchant may have been actually wealthy, but there is something in the Presbyterian water of Scotland that calls bragging a sin.
The other young lady is Sally Wilson, only child of Dumfries’ minister of the Church of Scotland, retired now from the pulpit. Such a man would never be wealthy, but he would be respected. So was his daughter.
Ten years before the beginning of this story, Margaret Patterson, daughter of the wealthy merchant, had informed a young man that she would write to him, as he sailed across the Atlantic to make his fortune in Canada. She had done it as a dare from her equally silly friends.
She shouldn’t have teased John McPherson like this. In John’s defense, he hadn’t thought that any gently reared young lady would ever write to a man not her husband or fiancé. Youngest son of the disreputable, unwelcome McPhersons, John was dubious Margaret would reply. He only agreed to her forward scheme because who doesn’t like to get letters?
Margaret confided in Sally Wilson that she had no intention of writing to someone as lowly as John McPherson, which horrified Sally, who did not approve of such casual cruelty. To spare John further humiliation, she agreed to write in Margaret’s place, using Margaret’s name.
Who understands the minds of young people? Not anyone in Scotland, any more than anyone in England. Maybe things are different in France or Italy, but this is not a story of those people.
That’s enough to know as this Christmas tale begins.
T
On a typical day, Sally Wilson found that from the time she called the village school to order, to the time she bade her little pupils good day, every minute overflowed with arithmetic, penmanship, composition, and improving works.
This day dragged because just before Sally went outside to call her students in, Margaret Patterson dropped off the latest letter from John McPherson.
“I can’t stay,” Margaret said. “Besides, you are about to call the class to order, and I have so many details yet to work out for my wedding.” She waved a ringed hand in Sally’s general vicinity. “Sally, you can’t imagine everything I have to do!” she tittered behind her glove. “How could you know? You don’t have a sweetheart.”
Another wave of the ringed hand, and she was gone in the family carriage, probably to track down a pint each of eye of newt and toe of frog for the groom’s cake, as Sally’s father liked to tease.
Sally took the letter, admiring, as always, John McPherson’s impeccable penmanship. For a man who came from a rough family, he had somehow absorbed educational truths as well as life lessons. She remembered him sitting by himself in his poor clothes, seldom washed, in the vicarage school, the one that had become the village school where she taught today. No one ever wanted to sit near him because he reeked. Since her minister father taught the school, he asked her to befriend the lonely lad.
And so Sally had become friends enough with Johnny to know that his mother was dead, leaving no one to see to the washing, ironing. and mending that all the rackety McPherson boys lacked. Sally understood why he smelled so vile, and in the understanding, became a friend.
Had it been ten years since he left Scotland? Sally swept out her classroom and banked the fire. She glanced at the well-traveled letter on her desk, putting off the pleasure of sharing John’s glimpse of a new world, and his own efforts surviving in that land of snakes and Indians, and even prospering, if the expensive paper was any indication.
As much as she enjoyed writing to John in Margaret’s place, Sally felt a twinge of conscience at duping a well-meaning friend. Ten years older and wiser now, she regretted pretending she was Margaret in the letters she wrote to John. At first, she tried to talk about John’s letters to Margaret, but her friend just waved her hand and said she had no time for someone as insignificant as John McPherson.
Hardly anyone in Dumfries received letters, and these were letters from Canada first and the United States now. For a few years she asked herself why Margaret didn’t at least read them.
After a decade of writing to John McPherson, pretending to be someone else, Sally had grown in introspection as well as maturity. The Margaret Patterson who had petitioned the more reserved and malleable Sally Wilson to write those letters had become a vain creature, a spoiled one, and a social climber.
Perhaps Margaret had always suffered from those defects, but Sally preferred to give her sometime-friend the bene
fit of the doubt. She was a generous soul and it was Christmas, when one was supposed to overlook pettiness and concentrate on giving, instead of making note of general nastiness.
When she had done everything except put on her cloak and bonnet, Sally sat down, slit the envelope and pulled out a letter that had been sent three months earlier, according to the barely visible postmark. After it had been read several times and answered, this letter would join the others in a pasteboard box labeled Doctor Meacham’s Restorative Tonic, and shoved under her bed. She had never thrown out any of John’s letters, preferring to read them over and over, and contemplate the writer who had changed mightily in ten years.
In fact, the earliest letters, desperate affairs telling of cold and hunger and ill use as he ventured into Canada’s interior to trap beaver, were written on such cheap paper that they needed to be copied onto better paper. The few days’ break at Christmas would be a good opportunity to do that. She had worn them out with reading.
She stared at the folded letter, remembering two awful years during those ten when she had heard nothing and finally given him up for dead. Even now, she couldn’t help the tears that welled in her eyes, remembering her prayers then her anger that such a nice man should die alone in a strange country. Finally she had resigned herself to the will of God, since the matter was in omnipotent hands anyway—at least that’s what Papa said. And besides that, she was writing for Margaret Patterson and not Sally Wilson, who could only anguish in private and pray for John McPherson’s safety.
She slid the letter back into the envelope, deciding to read it at home after supper. Since there were usually only three letters a year, she had schooled herself to savor them, because the next one would be a long time coming. Lately she had been writing once a month, telling him Dumfries news, which meant stretching out even the most trivial detail, since Dumfries was a quiet town. She could only assume that when he did get mail, it accumulated in a pile for him to read.
She locked the school door behind her and walked slowly home, pausing as usual at the bridge over River Nith that separated the east side of Dumfries from the west. Accompanied by its usual cloud of seagulls, the fishing fleet was tying up and preparing to sling the day’s catch to the wharf, where the poor women who scaled, gutted, and filleted the fish were even now readying their knives.
Several of her students’ mothers saw her on the bridge and waved. Sally waved back, happy to teach their children and perhaps, if they were lucky and sharp, school them for something better than gutting fish.
She walked slowly through Dumfries, nodding to her friends, stopping to chat with other parents, and smiling at the students. Released from school only an hour ago, they were working behind counters and helping their families.
Her days were predictable and unerring. She thought of John McPherson, breaking free from the deadly cycle of other McPhersons, who fished a little, ran a few cattle—hopefully their own—smuggled French brandy, and scratched a meager meal or two from exhausted soil, as their fathers before them had done. In spite of family skepticism and a certain amount of disdain from others, John had set out to seek his fortune at eighteen years old, far away from his useless kinfolk.
At least he was a man and at liberty to break away. Here I remain, Sally thought, and not for the first time. Too bad that ladies cannot seek their fortune, too. She saw no change in her future, not at twenty-four, with only a modest dowry. The story might have been different, were she beautiful enough to allow a man to overlook the deficiency of a skimpy marriage portion.
She was hardworking and ordinary, with no glaring defects, but no soaring beauty beyond kind eyes. On the bright side, she would never lack for employment, and the house would be hers when her father died. Is that all? she asked herself there on the bridge. Tell me that isn’t all.
She put off the letter, deciding to save it for herself alone. She could tell her father over breakfast what John had said. She knew from long experience Papa would advise her to end this deception and send the man a letter explaining just who has written the letters he thought came from Margaret. Ministers were like that.
Better to let her father talk through supper, even though he was retired from the ministry and seldom ventured much before their doorstep now. She knew he had little to tell her, beyond what he had read in Bartell’s Confessions of a Penitent Sinner, or some other tract or treatise. She would listen through supper, drink a small cup of negus with him in the sitting room later, then make her way to bed, another day done, one much like the day before, except for John’s occasional letters.
So it was that she made herself comfortable in bed, cap on her head, warming pan at her feet, and opened the letter.
She couldn’t help observing that the stationery was even more expensive this time, too heavy to see through as she held it to the lantern light, and possessing a watermark. On a whim, she reached under her bed, pulled out the Restorative Tonic box and reached for the earliest, most fragile letter, written on scraps, but still signed Faithfully Yours.
“You have come so far, my dear,” she whispered, even though Papa snored in the bedchamber across the hall and couldn’t have heard a black bear trundle through—black bears that John had described in some detail during those first few years in Canada.
She carefully replaced the old letter and hunkered down in bed to read the new one, pretending, as usual, that John McPherson was her fiancé. She knew it was a harmless diversion, but one that she would never divulge to another soul.
She read slowly and with growing delight, relishing the words. John described his promotion to assistant purveyor of furs to John Jacob Astor—a German immigrant, Sally had learned in a previous letter, who had come to American shores with ten dollars and a suitcase of clarinets to sell. This had strangely led to trade in furs, and then real estate, hence the Fifth Avenue address. Apparently there was no end to what even a musician could achieve.
Margaret, I have a place of my own here in New York City, Sally read. It’s been ten long years. I can finally say that the wisest thing I ever did was to leave Dumfries and seek my fortune.
She settled lower in her bed, reading of his only occasional trips now into America’s interior on flatboat and by canoe. Generally, he signed off on great packs of beaver and buffalo robes floated down the Missouri to St. Louis, where they were sorted, then taken overland to New York City. The final destination was the Paris and Frankfort markets, now that the long war had ended and commerce could return safely. We are even negotiating to sell buffalo robes to Czar Alexander, to make overcoats for his troops, John wrote.
As always, Sally read between the lines, savoring the confidence that nearly leaped out of the page at her—well, at Margaret. She put down the letter, thinking of her last sight of John McPherson, ragged duffel slung over his shoulder, as he left Dumfries sitting on the back of a hay wain heading toward Carlisle. She had waved to him, and he had smiled back. No one else had seen him off. Even then, through his dirty clothes and hair in need of cutting, she had seen confidence burning in his eyes.
“Good for you, John,” she told the words before her.
She picked up the last page of his lengthy letter, gulped, and read it again. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”
T
Luckily the next day was Saturday and no school. Sally doubted that Margaret ever woke up early, but she didn’t care. Letter tight in hand, she marched up the tree-lined lane, bare of leaves now in winter, and right to the front door.
As she waited for the footman to answer her knock, Sally tried to recall the last time she had visited the Patterson home and found she could not. We were never friends, she thought in dismay. I let you use me.
The footman opened the door, fixing her with a frosty stare. One would think he didn’t often see young persons at his doorstep so early, especially someone with hair twisted into a careless knot and left there to languish.
“The servants’ entrance is around back,” he said, and tried to shut the
door.
Fearing just this brush-off, Sally had worn her sturdy shoes, one of which she stuck in the door as it started to close. “I am Sally Wilson, a good friend of Miss Patterson,” she said, which meant the door widened a little. “My father was the min—”
“Miss Wilson, I recommend that you come around at a more appropriate ti—”
Another hand flung the door open wide, grabbed Sally, and yanked her inside. “That will do, Reston,” Margaret Patterson snapped. “Go away!”
Sally was at least relieved to see that Margaret looked no better than she did. In fact, she looked worse, with dark smudges under her eyes, and a pinched look to her mouth. She couldn’t help thinking that the dignified Mr. Mallory, who was going to marry Margaret in a few days, was in for a real surprise the morning after the wedding.
With unexpected strength, Margaret towed Sally up the stairs and dragged her into her bedchamber. Giving Sally no time to catch her breath, she thrust a single sheet of paper under Sally’s nose. “I am ruined!” she declared.
Sally held the sheet away from her face so she could read it. “‘My dear Margaret,’” she read out loud. “‘I’m in Bristol right now and have only to arrange a post chaise to Dumfries. I am eager to see you and talk to your father. Yours faithfully …’”
Margaret snatched the sheet back and tore it into tiny bits of confetti. “Don’t read it out loud! What are we to do?”
Sally thought about putting John’s much-larger letter under Margaret’s nose, but changed her mind. Beyond the obvious truth that all this was Margaret’s doing, she had a question of her own.
“Margaret, you haven’t read a single letter ever,” she said. “Why this little note now?”
Margaret was busy in tossing the note out the window, all hundred pieces of it now, maybe thinking that the wind would blow it away and end the dilemma. Sally could have told her that troubles don’t vanish like that, but she reckoned it was a little late to inject life lessons into Margaret’s woefully slender frame of reference.
