Romance: Luther's Property

by Laurie Burrows

  “There is nothing in my heart for you save simple Christian charity,” the fire marshal protested. “And Kitty is my sister, the same as she has ever been.” He looked around to be sure we were alone on the early morning street. “And I tell you this: Robert Benson never killed Kitty. She run off on her own.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  “Her story was what yours is about to be,” the fire marshal replied. “Our family owed Mr. Benson quite a bit of money. When the debt couldn’t be paid, she was sent to be his wife.” He shrugged. “She went to a life one hundred times easier than the one she left behind, but that wasn’t enough for Kitty. “

  “Maybe she didn’t appreciate being sold into wedlock to settle someone else’s debts,” I said, aghast at learning I wasn’t the first bride Robert Benson had contracted for. “What’s wrong with this man that he can’t get a wife by ordinary means?”

  “You’ve seen him,” the fire marshal replied with a shrug. “Mr. Benson’s smart and shrewd, but he doesn’t possess a single grace of the sort ladies value.”

  “So he buys them instead, without ever once bothering to even introduce himself.” I shook my head. “I don’t have to consent to this marriage.”

  “He’ll ruin your father,” the fire marshal warned. “He did his level best to destroy my family’s meager fortunes when Kitty run off.” Some of the steel went out of the man and his shoulders sagged. “It was only after my brother and I both agreed to labor for him two days each week that he agreed that the debt would be settled and the court case pending against us dropped.”

  “How long did you have to do that for?” I asked, wondering at the size of the debt the family had amassed. A printing press ran dear enough, but they must have been much more obliged than Father was.

  “The way I figure, I’ll be at it for the rest of my life.” The fire marshal shook his head. “That’s why you might as well resign yourself to making the best of things. Richard Benson’s not a man who lets things go. He’ll make sure he gets his due, one way or another.”

  Chapter Eight

  I left the fire marshal standing in the road. As I walked away, my mind was filled with thoughts of destiny. The words of Cassius echoed in my ears. “Men at some time are masters of their fate.” Was I bound to quietly go to Robert Benson and be his bride, or was there another avenue open to me?

  The fire marshal had seemed quite certain that his sister had run off. Surely he would not agree to serving a lifetime of servitude if he believed Robert Benson to be a murderer. The comments he’d made about his sister’s character had the ring of honesty about him; Kitty had rebelled against a marriage and fled, leaving him to pick up the pieces.

  It was a choice I could see myself making. What cost would my Father bear for my flight? There was no way to answer that question. Perhaps Benson would change his mind about the desirability of the family home; perhaps Father would be forced to join the fire marshal’s ranks in the man’s cadre of unpaid help. Neither option sounded all that good, but both were infinitely preferable to spending life married to a man I didn’t even know, much less love.

  But where would I go? It’s one thing to say you’re going to flee, and quite another to have a destination in mind. I’d heard rumors of jobs in the North; perhaps I could go to New York or Boston and secure a position there. The idea appealed for a minute, but then I remembered Robert Benson regularly did business in both cities; with my luck, I’d make my escape only to encounter my would-be husband upon the sidewalk.

  The South was in shambles. I couldn’t foresee how I’d be able to make a life for myself in any of the former Confederate states; if there was one thing that was not in short supply down there at that time, it was young women in dire situations. Adding to their number wouldn’t help me.

  I could swim passably well, but crossing the ocean to Europe was surely beyond my capacity. That left the West. Plenty of people had found gold in California; there were rumors about great wealth to be found along the northern shores. Father hadn’t been interested in the prospect, but I could go alone.

  It was a ridiculous proposition, but it certainly had more appeal than marrying Richard Benson did. If it all turned out to be a disaster – and making a cross country journey with no prospects, connections, or money certainly had the potential to go very badly – at least it would be a disaster I had chosen for myself. It seemed a fine distinction, and it was, but it was a distinction that mattered to me.

  Resolved to head to California, I steered my steps into town. There were questions I needed answered, including finding out exactly how far I could go West given the meager handful of dollars I’d managed to save up over the years. Surely I couldn’t afford a train ticket all the way to California, but I’d go as far as I could. After that, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Probably a very long walk lay in my future.

  Chapter Nine

  The train station was packed. It felt like everyone and their best friend were there, waiting to go on a journey, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the next train, or buying tickets for very complicated itineraries from a haggard looking clerk. Simply listening to the steps involved in taking a train from the Shenandoah Valley to Atlanta and then from there to Texarkana was enough to make my head spin – and I knew my own journey was going to be much longer.

  Feeling slightly intimidated, I stepped out of the train station. When the crowds were thinner, I told myself, I’d return and get my questions answered. There was no sense slowing down all of the people so evidently in a hurry with my inquiries; I had a week before I was to wed Robert Benson while everyone else had places to be today.

  Located nearly next door to the train station was the newspaper offices. Father had hoped to grow his print shop to the size that the paper would steer at least some business his way; the editors were locally famous for penning volumes of religious poems and very moralistic short stories. Of course, those hopes had all gone up in flames, a fact I could read about in the broadsheet pinned to the office’s front wall.

  The tale was short and to the point. Flames had been spotted coming from Father’s shop shortly before midnight. I learned that it had been our elderly neighbor who’d roused the fire brigade, sending her one-armed grandson running through the night for help. Apparently there was some speculation as to the cause of the fire; in a surprising quote, the fire marshal said he felt it was a clear case of spontaneous combustion. “Printers use many volatile solvents, inks and chemicals in the course of their trade,” he said, adding that it was not unusual for the same to burst into flame unexpectedly.

  This was certainly news to me. Not the use of volatile solvents, inks and chemicals part; I’d been around print shops for nearly the entirety of my life. But we’d never had a fire – not a spark, not the tiniest bit of flame – until now.

  Perhaps that was due to the fact that Father was always extremely careful and methodical in the shop. Over the years, we’d been to other printers, and I’d seen what happens when a man with a slovenly nature takes charge: oily rags gather like dust bunnies beneath the presses, their oil streaked surfaces attracting every bit of grime and hair the shop contained; offcuts from flyers and letter heads covering the floor like autumn leaves – the sort of chaos where hungry flames would find plenty to feast upon. Father counted cleanliness to be a virtue. In his shop, the floors were swept clean every night, inks were kept closely sealed, and if you needed a rag, greasy or otherwise, you wouldn’t find it beneath the printing press.

  The lanterns Father used to light the shop were doused every night, leaving the place quite dark. This habit he persisted in even in the perilous period after the war ended; during this time of peace, wandering thieves would take advantage of every shadowy corner to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Father never minded. “Most of them want food, not books,” he’d say, “and a man who will steal something for the joy of reading it is likely enough a man I’d want to count as a friend.”

  Remembering t
hose words made my heart swell with pride – at least until I remembered how angry I was with Father. “Spontaneous combustion indeed,” I muttered, stepping to the left to read the next page of the broadsheet. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  I was soon to encounter another thing I’d never heard. Set in close type, six columns wide and the length of the entire page, the next sheet of the broadsheet was filled with advertisements. At the very top, a thirty-point headline screamed “Situations Wanted!”

  “What’s this?” I mused aloud. Even though Father brought the paper home often enough, I’d never seen this type of page before. I leaned closer to take a better look, and another lady, who’d stepped up to read the paper beside me, looked over to see what had captured my curiosity. She snorted in a most unladylike fashion and said “What you’ve got there, Missy, is messages from frontiersmen who are seeking mail-order brides.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Is there no man anywhere who can find himself a loving wife without going through these extreme machinations?” I asked my paper-reading companion. She looked at me with puzzled eyes and then shrugged.

  “You know what men are,” she replied. “Helpless babies, most of them. Once their mother’s sick of them they’ve got to get married or they’ll starve to death.” The thin gold ring on her finger showed me she might have some first-hand experience with men’s behaviors. “If it weren’t for wives, there’s men out there who would run around with their clothes in tatters and holes in their shoes.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “There are men who have wives that go around the same way.”

  My companion laughed. “But they don’t get to enjoy it the same way.” She tapped the side of her head. “Having a wife around changes everything.”

  That seemed to be what the writer of the advertisements seemed to be hoping for. “Wife wanted!” one headline after another screamed, each one prefacing a tersely eloquent summary of the aspiring groom’s charms.

  “Householder with three healthy sons,” one spelled out; it was a prospect that made my stomach lurch in a most terrifying fashion. The next belonged to a logger, also a father of three, and the one after that had only two children and a piano studio in San Francisco. I considered that one for a while, until a closer examination of the text revealed that it was very desirable that all applicants speak Mandarin Chinese.

  Lacking the desired tongue, I moved on. Some of the ads revealed themselves to be nothing more than a laundry list of wants: a wife seeking a husband must be trim, cheerful, hardworking, and virtuous – not necessarily in that order, a phenomenon I suspect said more about the groom’s experiences than his personal preferences.

  Confident that I qualified on most counts, absenting this day which found me none too cheerful, I continued reading the ads for much of the morning. A train arrived, disgorged its passengers, reloaded and left; still I stood reading. For quite some time I stood on the platform, perusing the ads. They were printed in an almost unreadably small font; squinting against the sun as it climbed up the horizon toward noontime heights was beginning to give me quite a headache.

  I glanced toward the train station office. It was near enough to empty; the few souls that were in there had apparently already finished whatever business they’d had with the ticket agent. If there was an ideal time to go in and inquire about the cost of passage to California, this was it.

  Yet I found my feet wouldn’t move. I was frozen in place, as solidly stuck as if someone had painted the soles of my shoes with stout glue. Somehow, I’d lost the ability to walk and move of my own free will; it was a strange paralysis of the likes I’d never experienced.

  While I was thus stricken, the rumble of an approaching train filled the air. I could feel the ground beneath me shaking. For a moment I thought of the Union guns and the way cannon balls screamed as they tore through the air. It took all my will to not plaster my hands over my ears; while we all did such things during the battles, only the rubes did so now.

  The train was shorter than most; it had an engine, four passenger cars, and trailing those, a private car with big windows. Through the glass I could glimpse a tabletop dressed with white linen; beyond that, I had a fleeting glance of red velvet upholstery. Painted on the side of the car in golden letters were the words Benson Trading and Exchange, Limited.

  My heart stopped in my chest. I could feel my mouth go dry. The fear I felt in that moment exceeded anything I’d felt the night before, watching Father’s print shop burn. The private train car before me belonged to Richard Benson. Riding inside it was the man so determined to be my husband.

  Chapter Eleven

  I knew Robert as soon as he stepped out of the train car. He had to stoop to do so; he was a very tall man, and that considerable height was exaggerated by the oily-looking black top hat he wore. Such hats were in fashion, but it suited him poorly; it was too small by half for his bulbous head.

  The man who would marry me had red skin, covered over nearly entirely with angry boils and acne pustules. Such a thing was not uncommon among boys and even men my own age, but to see such a compromised complexion in one nearly Father’s age was revolting. It wasn’t particularly warm that day, but even at a distance I could see a glistening sheen where his skin appeared to be weeping.

  He was broad, with a thick torso, tree trunk legs, and ape-like arms that filled his jacked sleeves near to bursting. Watching him move was a fascinating spectacle. Robert Benson didn’t walk as much as he lurched forward, one stiff step after another made without the slightest regard of anyone else’s presence or position. I saw a mother snatch her young child out of Mr. Benson’s way with barely a moment to spare; if she’d not acted, surely he would have trod directly on the tot.

  Every bit of the man’s appearance seemed designed to evoke a response of fear and revulsion. His suit was the darkest black; the walking stick he carried was topped with a gold-chased burl. I’d heard he’d bragged of cracking heads with it, and rumors were that he would laugh at a dog’s pained yowls after he shooed them away.

  I couldn’t stop staring at him, but I didn’t want him to see me. In that moment, I remembered my hair had fallen free from its braids. The red hue was particularly noticeable in the sun; of all the women of my age in the valley, I was the only one blessed with auburn locks. This I was sure Robert Benson knew; the merest glance in my direction would reveal my presence to him.

  There was no time to re-braid my hair. With thick, heavy locks past my shoulders, putting my hair up properly always took the better part of an hour, not to mention a mirror and a brush. Besides, in itself, a braid wouldn’t be enough to conceal the color.

  I had a handkerchief tucked up my sleeve. It smelled of smoke and had gotten a little dingy, but that couldn’t be helped. I managed to get it secured around my hair in the nick of time. No sooner was the small cloth knotted than Richard Benson stepped out of the train station onto the sidewalk. I was no more than twenty feet from him.

  The air stilled. I could hear a million cicadas singing, their fiddling song cutting through the air like a saw blade with an agenda. When I breathed in, all I could smell was the sickly-sweet odor of rose water; clearly Benson bathed in the stuff. I didn’t breathe out. I feared that doing so might attract his attention. If the sound of my exhalation didn’t do so, surely the retching I was working so hard to contain would have.

  Luckily, most of Robert’s attention was focused on the fact that his carriage had not arrived as scheduled to pick him up. “I don’t care if the blasted train is early,” he raged at a short man who toadied alongside him, carrying a heavy black case and a portfolio stuffed to overflowing with papers. “I need to go home now. I can’t waste half the day standing around waiting for Boutwell to show up!” He hit the ground with his walking stick, and then leaned heavily upon it. “I can’t, and I won’t!”

  “You shant have to, Sir,” the short man said. “There’s the carriage there. He’s coming now.” From down the road, travelling at
high speed, came an ornately painted coach being pulled by a splendid team of matching chestnuts. It was being driven by a man who bore more than a passing resemblance to the fire marshal.

  Was this, I wondered, Kitty’s other brother?

  My curiosity had a weight of its own, apparently. Benson started to turn in my direction, apparently sensing that someone was watching. I chose that moment to direct my attention back to the personal ads, deciding in the heat of that moment that I would answer the very first one I read; whoever placed that message was surely fated to be my husband.

  “Iowa Agronomist Seeks Wife,” the headline read. The ad was shorter than most. The only other thing it said was “Must Love To Read.”

  Chapter Twelve

  When I returned home, I found Father sitting on the front porch. He had recovered his composure, thankfully. His eyes were dry. He’d combed his hair and exchanged the sooty clothes he’d been wearing for another set.

  “I’ve news for you,” he said. “My daughter.”

  “If you mean to tell me that Richard Benson’s come back from Boston, I know,” I replied. “I saw his carriage on the road.”

  Father nodded slowly. “He sent a boy round with the message that we’re to join him at the dinner hour tomorrow.” He took a deep breath. “To discuss the wedding arrangements.”

  I think Father was expecting a reprise of our earlier conflict, but I didn’t have it in me to argue with him again. There was no point in it. I simply nodded my head a little bit and said, “All right.”

  He brightened at my acquiescence. “I know this isn’t what you wanted, girl, but things may work out better than expected. The Lord works in mysterious ways.” A smile, slow and tentative, crept across his face. “Why, your Mother and I hadn’t known each other but a season when we decided to wed. And we were very happy together.”