“Travis?”
The minister’s voice faltered but did not cease. She could feel her mother’s concerned eyes boring into her back and hear the beginnings of her guests’ soft whispers. Still, all she could look at was him. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled. She would have assumed that he had been struck by the same sleeplessness as she had, but the pervasive stink of alcohol made it clear that he had been drinking into the small hours of the night. At first he would not even look at her, despite the fact that she had just interrupted their wedding to make sure that he was ok. When he finally did look at her, she wished that he had not. She knew what was going to happen before anything actually did. She could feel it in the slick sweat that sprung up in a fine film across every inch of her skin and in the heart beating much too quickly and still stuck in her throat. She felt like she might faint, felt sure that she was going to suffocate if he didn’t say something to her quickly. She needed him to tell her that everything was alright. If he couldn’t find the words, she needed him to smile at her. Just that small gesture would be enough, but it was not to be. He looked at her with tormented, almost angry eyes and shook his head slightly. She reached out one shaking hand but her fingertips never touched him. They would never touch him again. Because instead of offering her reassurance he turned to their two hundred guests with a sad smile, his eyes darting back and forth quickly in a way that she thought a criminal’s might.
“I’m terribly sorry, so terribly sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve all come out in the cold for nothing. There is not going to be any wedding today.”
Chapter Three
“Excuse me miss? You waiting for something, or just planning on making that very spot there your new home?”
Alice looked up, feeling very startled and very exposed. The sun shone so brightly in her tired eyes that she felt like she might go blind from exposure to it and a large part of her wished very much that she could just step back onto the train that had spirited her off West and go back home again. Alice had never been the sort of girl to make rash, spur of the moment decisions. She felt confident that the most unpredictable thing she had ever done had been to accept Travis’s proposal, and the only thing that had made that a tad unorthodox was how quickly it had taken place. So no, she had never done a truly unpredictable thing in the whole of her life and somehow she still found herself standing in the middle of a vast land that was, to her, entirely foreign. It felt like she was moving through a dream and she might have actually allowed herself to believe that’s what it was if it weren’t for the little beads of sweat dripping down her back and the skin she could already feel beginning to burn under the face of the relentless sun. There was no way around her. She was most definitely not in New York City any longer. She couldn’t even guess how many miles away from her home she had fled, but she knew that she was nowhere close. It was sickeningly disorienting and now, on top of that, there was some man she did not know speaking to her and confusing her even further.
“I’m sorry? I don’t think I understand.”
The man laughed and hopped down from the horse drawn wagon he occupied with an athletic ease. She took an involuntary step back. She had in no way meant to offend the man, but she was far from accustomed to being addressed so informally by men who were strangers to her. It was already becoming clear to her that things were done differently in the West. She looked at the man searchingly, still trying to bring align herself with her current reality, and noted that he was looking at her with an open and slightly mischievous grin. His eyes were a bright and merry green, his skin sporting the ghost of burns gone by, and Alice felt her own face light up with a furious blush. It was ridiculous for her to be reacting to him this way, she did not even know him, but the reaction was there all the same. Oh why had she come here? Her grandmother had told her when she was young that the first thing a person did after suffering a great disappointment was often times a mistake and Alice was almost paralyzed by the thought that this trip was that mistake for her. She could still hear the disbelief in Talia’s voice when she had delivered her news.
“You’ve done what?!” she had cried out in a louder voice than she was ever likely to use again. “You’re going where?”
Alice had been sequestered in her bedroom for what felt like years but had actually been only two weeks. Only two weeks since Travis had announced to the church and the world at large that he would not be marrying her after all. In that week she had refused to see anybody except for the maids who stocked her fire and delivered her papers, the maids that would take care of any correspondence she might wish to send or receive. At first she had been sure that she would not wish to do either of those things. She had been so sick from heartbreak and lack of food or sleep that she had been sure that she would never want to communicate with another living soul again, but flipping listlessly through her paper one morning had shown that assumption to be wrong.
“Is this real?” she had whispered to herself, not even realizing that she was speaking out loud. She had gone through the paper three times already and had only opened it again for lack of anything better to do. It was on that third perusal that she had come upon something she hadn’t even known existed but felt like it might just be the lifeline she needed to pull herself out of her current mess. There, amongst a whole host of advertisements she had never paid any mind to before, were adverts written by men who were looking for brides. It seemed impossible to Alice that something like that really happened, but there was the proof looking her in the face. There were several of them and she poured over them with a kind of macabre fascination. All of her life she had believed that there was really only one way of approaching the idea of marriage and courtship. Operating under this belief, she had gone about her own courtship according to those presupposed ideas. She had done everything just the way she was supposed to and nothing had happened the way it was supposed to. Instead of being off on her honeymoon she was locked in her childhood bedroom like some kind of a pariah. Was that not proof in of itself that conventional methods did not always yield what they were promised to? There was no doubt that using an advert in a paper to find a wife was anything but conventional but at the moment, that didn’t strike Alice as such a bad thing.
That line of thought might have been where her consideration of the idea came to an end if one ad in particular hadn’t caught her eye. It was nothing fancy, nothing spectacular she supposed. There was no way she would have been able to explain her attachment to it to another living soul. If she was being honest with herself however, and if she couldn’t do that at this point then she must admit herself entirely lost, it was the simplicity of his request. He wanted a wife, that was true, but he also wrote of wanting a friend. That seemed to be the most a woman could hope for, when it was all said and done. For Alice, the idea of boiling passion had lost much of its luster. She was far more interested in something safe, perhaps something where she could be left alone to nurse her wounds without also having to suffer the stigma of forever being the jilted girl who would in no time at all become an old maid. Because when Travis had left her at the altar in such an appalling fashion he had not only tossed her aside himself. He had also created such a stir that there was no bachelor in New York or its general vicinity who had not heard of her jilting. She simply could not tolerate the idea of having to relive that with every potential suitor. Not to mention the fact that every person she saw on the street looked at her with mingled voyeuristic interest and pity. No, the idea of taking herself out west seemed to her to be the perfect solution and so she had written back and agreed to come. She had done everything but buy the railway ticket before telling her friends, and by that time there was nothing either girl could say or do to change her mind (although that hadn’t stopped Talia from trying her very hardest).
“But you can’t! You just can’t, Alice. I won’t allow it.”
Alice just smiled and shook her head. She had done everything she could think of to assuage sweet Talia’s fears and had n
ot succeeded in any way. She was set to leave the next morning and she had already spent hours of her day convincing her parents that she was not insane. She simply did not have the energy to go through that process again with her friends. She sighed deeply, opening her mouth to feebly defend herself, but much to her surprise Gretta began to speak before she could even say a word.
“I think you should go.”
She spoke so quietly that Alice couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t conjured the words out of thin air from her desire to hear them. But the look of indignation on Talia’s face told her that Gretta’s words had not been imaginary, nor had they been misunderstood. Alice’s eyes welled up with tears of relief and gratitude and Gretta took her hand and squeezed it tightly, making it clear that she would not let it go.
“You heard me correctly, Talia, and I don’t want to hear all of your reasons for why it is a mistake. More importantly, Alice doesn’t need to hear them. I have no doubt that they have all been sufficiently presented to her by her parents. Am I right?”
Alice nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She couldn’t believe that this was happening but she was beyond grateful. She felt like Gretta’s agreement was the permission she needed to go.
“See? There you have it. She’s heard all of the reasons for why she should stay. What she really needs, what she truly needs from us, is our support. It’s something I should have done more of in the past and something I intend to excel with in the future. So you go, Alice. If that’s what you want and what you feel will heal you, go. The people who love you will go on doing so whether you are in New York or out in the West.”
And so that’s what she had done. She had said farewell to her parents (with the understanding that she could return home at any time with no questions asked and no further admonishments) and purchased her ticket and now she was in the west with nothing more than a couple of suitcases. She was looking for a man named Bradan Shaw, a ranch owner and the man who was to be her husband. She had felt alright about what she was doing, too, until she was standing in confusion with no idea of what this Bradan Shaw looked like and entirely unsure of what to make of the first person in the west to speak to her. She had a feeling that he could see how completely out of place she was and she got the distinct impression that he found it to be funny. That thought was immensely frustrating to her and part of her wanted to take out all of her weeks’ worth of frustration on him, but she was not quite capable of being so rude to a stranger. So instead she smiled politely, trying very hard to ignore the beads of sweat rolling merrily down her back, waiting for him to explain himself so that she could go on about her way. He laughed again, more heartily than he had before, and his whole body shook with the effort. His green eyes twinkled at her as he pushed the slightly too long auburn hair out of his face.
“All I meant was that you seem to be fairly rooted to the spot where you’re standing. You’re looking a little bit lost. Is there something I could help you with? Something you’re looking for?”
“Actually, yes, there is. I’m supposed to find the ranch of Bradan Shaw, and, as it turns out, I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about doing that.”
“Oh ho ho!” the man crowed, his voice loud and quite startling to Alice, “It looks like you’re in luck then, if that’s where you’re aiming to go.”
“I am? Why is that?”
“Because, I happen to be Bradan Shaw. And I would be more than happy to show you to my ranch.”
Chapter Four
Life on the Shaw property was unlike anything Alice had ever known. She had lived what she considered to be a relatively full life up to that point, and still none of her past experience had prepared her for this next chapter of her life she had chosen to embark on. She quickly discovered that, just as with the marriage to Travis that never quite happened, she had failed to consider what life might be like after she made her move. She had never even been to a ranch, let alone thought of what it might be like to live on one. On top of that, she hadn’t really thought through what it would be like to be living with a man she was set to marry whom she had never even met.
Alice hadn’t ever been on a ranch before, let alone spent a significant amount of time on one. Somehow she had convinced herself in those feverish nights before her departure that nothing about it would really be all that different, but she quickly realized that was not quite so. Life was different in every possible way, including the fact that there were many new faces to learn and people to get to know. And one of those people, one of those strangers, was to be her husband. What an awful time to find herself shy for the very first time in her life! Being social had always come second nature to Alice and although that had come to a grinding halt when she had found herself so unceremoniously jilted, she had assumed that things would return back to normal once she recovered a bit. That had not proved to be the case and unfortunately she seemed the least able to overcome her personal baggage with Bradan.
Bradan Shaw, the man she was to marry, seemed to be a man she was almost completely incapable of interacting with without her face heating up with a radiant blush and a feeling of complete and utter foolishness. It was the way she had felt when he had first spoken to her. It was the way she had felt when he had taken her hand and helped her up into his wagon before chucking her bags into the back with little regard to whether or not they contained any valuables. Her first instinct was to cry out in indignation but fortunately she was able to stop herself. She was not in her usual habitat and she did not know this man. She didn’t know anything of what she found around her and, if anything, she should just be grateful for the fact that Bradan seemed so far to be a friendly sort of a man.
It was at that moment that she began to pray. She prayed for the entire length of the trip to Bradan’s farm, hardly hearing a word he spoke to her. She prayed that she would be humble, that she would be kind and forgiving. She prayed that she would be what she should be and not what the world and its folly tempted her to be. She prayed many things without ceasing and hardly spoke a word. By the time Bradan had taken her hand and helped her back down out of his wagon, she wasn’t sure that she had actually spoken to him at all, not once on the entire ride. Even after having lived on the ranch for almost five weeks, Alice was sure that she could have counted the number of times she had spoken to Bradan on one hand. Even thinking about it made her feel sick to her stomach. She couldn’t understand why she was being so disagreeable, why she was being so unresponsive to all of his attempts to get to know her. It was like she was willing him to do away with her just the same way that Travis had. Travis, who she had learned was completely penniless and had thrown her over for a girl with more money that even Alice herself had access to and a family with less breeding and therefore less concern over his own. It wasn’t that she thought Bradan was a villain as well, not necessarily, but her faith in the rougher sex had been badly shaken and she did not believe that he was not a villain either. It was a questions she wrestled with daily, one that haunted her and kept her up at nights. She was aware that she was becoming a mere shadow of the girl she had once been, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how to undo the damage.
“You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on you, child! Come along with me now, you hear? Come along with Mrs. Patterson and she’ll help put your mind at right again.”
The sound of the motherly and always comforting Mrs. Patterson drew Alice out of her steadily darkening thoughts and she smiled up at her. For what must have been the hundredth time she thought to herself how grateful she was for this woman’s presence in her life. She hadn’t learned all that much about her, even in five weeks, but she was sure that if it weren’t for her things would have been much harder on the ranch.
“Do you hear me, dearie? It’s time to get up and outdoors! Can’t just it in your room and mope the whole day long. No sense or health found in a plan like that.”
Alice opened her mouth to protest but then thought better of it. Mrs. Patterson was right. Mopin
g was exactly what she was doing and it wasn’t going to help her secure her future here. So she stood and smiled wider before following the kindly woman outdoors. She winced in the strong sunlight she was not yet used to and was even more grateful than she had already been when Mrs. Patterson handed her a wide brimmed straw hat to shade her eyes and her delicate skin.
Romance: Western Mail Order Bride Bethany's Love -Clean Christian Historical Romance (Western Mail Order Bride Short Shorties Series) Page 137
