Eternity

by Jude Deveraux

  “He won’t be disappointed in me,” Carrie said with a little smile of confidence.

  At this the women sat back in their chairs and looked at Carrie. She was so pretty that everywhere the women went men fell over themselves to get Carrie’s attention. Carrie had a way about her that every woman who saw her would have sold her soul to possess. Men liked Carrie. Men adored Carrie. Maybe being raised with seven older brothers and a father had taught her all there was to know about men. But whatever the reason, the fact was that Carrie could have any man she wanted. All she had to do was choose.

  After two days of trying to “reason” with Carrie, the women gave up. They were tired of talking, and Carrie hadn’t budged an inch. Carrie said that if they were really her friends, they’d help her try to figure out how to get herself married to Mr. Greene so that he couldn’t back out of the marriage when he found out she knew nothing about farming. “He might be a bit, well…upset when he first finds out that I’ve embellished the truth of my abilities. He might be tempted to, maybe, tell me to return home. You can never tell about men. When they think they’ve been wronged, they don’t act rationally so I want to force him to give me a chance to prove to him that I am the perfect wife for him.”

  The women had their opinions of what Mr. Greene would do when he found out that Carrie had lied, connived, plotted, and schemed, all in order to trap him into a marriage that he didn’t want. But Carrie was so determined that after a while they began to try to help her in her plan to deceive Joshua Greene. After all, it was all divinely romantic.

  The first thing they did was try to find out about farming. All of the women had grown up around the sea, and all of them had lived comfortable lives with servants to care for them. Food came from the kitchen, and they had absolutely no idea how it got into the kitchen. Sarah said that a man brought it to the back door of the house.

  With a goal in mind, the women set about researching farming just as they would have done a school project. Within a few days they realized that the subject of farming was very boring, so they asked a woman who came to them looking for a husband to write a sample letter. Carrie copied the letter in her own handwriting and sent a messenger off, at her father’s expense, to take it all the way from Maine to the tiny town of Eternity in Colorado.

  Carrie and her friends had come up with an elaborate story to tell the unsuspecting Mr. Greene about how the woman who was perfect for him had to be married by proxy before she could come to Eternity. If Mr. Greene agreed, all he had to do was sign the enclosed papers, and the marriage would take place in Warbrooke. If he agreed, then when Carrie arrived to meet him she would already be married to him.

  “Your father will never sign the papers,” Euphonia said.

  Carrie knew that she was right. Her father would never allow his youngest daughter to marry a man she’d never met, a man he had not met. He would laugh at her statement that she had fallen in love with a photograph of a man and his two children.

  “I’ll find a way,” Carrie said with more confidence than she felt.

  After she sent the letter to Josh, she had to wait for months for his reply, for even with a messenger on the trip to Colorado, it took a long time for mail to get there and back. She had made a copy of her long letter to him, and as the days went by, she criticized every sentence of it. Maybe she shouldn’t have written this; maybe this sentence should have been left out; maybe she should have included this.

  During the long months of waiting, she may have had her doubts about the letter, but she never once wavered in her conviction that what she was doing was right. Each night she kissed her fingertips and gave kisses to her future family, and every day she thought of them. She purchased fabric to make dresses for the little girl who was going to become her daughter, and she bought a sailboat for the boy. She purchased books, whistles, and boxes of hard rock candy for the children and eight shirts for Josh.

  After six months of waiting, one morning Carrie walked into the old house, and her six friends were standing and waiting for her. With such looks of anticipation on their faces, Carrie didn’t have to be told that Josh’s letter had arrived. Silently, Carrie held out her hand for the letter.

  With trembling hands, Carrie opened it, quickly scanned his letter, then hurriedly looked at the legal papers. As though the air had left her, she sat down hard on a chair. “He signed them,” she said, half in wonder, half in disbelief.

  At first the women didn’t know whether to rejoice or cry.

  Carrie grinned. “Congratulate me. I’m almost a married woman.”

  They congratulated her, but they also let her know that they thought she was crazy, and they couldn’t resist telling her for the thousandth time that Mr. Greene was going to be quite angry when he found out how he’d been tricked.

  Carrie ignored them, for she was delirious with happiness. Now all she had to do was get her father to sign her papers because she was so young, then she had to find a minister to perform the proxy service.

  Carrie handled it all in the same way that she had handled Joshua Greene: She lied.

  She went to the offices of Warbrooke Shipping, which her family owned, and nonchalantly volunteered to deliver a sheaf of papers to her father to be signed. Slipping the proxy papers in with the business papers, her father signed them without reading what he was signing. Money found a minister who would perform the service.

  So, on a late summer morning, one year after the War Between the States had ended, Carrie Montgomery legally became Mrs. Joshua Greene, with Euphonia acting as the stand-in for Josh.

  At the end of the service, Carrie threw her arms around each of her friends in turn and told them that she was going to miss them, but that she was going to be very, very happy in her new life. The women bawled copiously, wetting the front of Carrie’s new dress with their tears.

  “What if he beats you?”

  “What if he drinks?”

  “What if he’s a bank robber or a gambler or he’s been in jail? What if he is a murderer?”

  “You didn’t worry about the hundreds of other women we’ve sent out, why should you worry about me?” Carrie asked, annoyed with the women for not being happy for her.

  Her friends just cried harder into their handkerchiefs.

  To Carrie, all that she’d done so far was easy compared to what she still had to do: tell her parents. When she did tell them, her mother wasn’t nearly as stunned as her father. Her mother gave her husband a look of disgust and said, “I told you that all of you spoiled her, and this is the consequence.”

  Carrie thought her father might start crying. He adored his last child, and it had never crossed his mind that she might grow up, much less marry someone and go hundreds of miles away to live.

  Carrie’s mother suggested that the marriage was illegal and that they could have it annulled. With utter simplicity and absolute conviction, Carrie said, “I will run away.”

  Studying her daughter’s humorless face, her mother nodded. The Montgomery stubbornness was infamous, and she knew that if her daughter had made up her mind to stay married to a man she’d never met, then she would stay married.

  “I wish ’Ring were here,” her father said, speaking of his oldest son.

  Carrie shuddered. Had her oldest brother been there, she would have waited until he left before presenting the fact of her marriage to her softhearted parents. Her oldest brother was not softhearted nor particularly indulgent of his sister’s schemes. In fact, Carrie would not have told her parents while any of her brothers were home.

  “I don’t see that there’s anything we can do,” her father said sadly. “When will you leave?” His voice was heavy with tears.

  “As soon as I can pack,” Carrie answered.

  Her mother squinted at her youngest child. “And what do you plan to take to this wilderness?”

  “Everything,” Carrie said in answer to what she thought was an odd question. “I plan to take everything that I own.”

  At that, h
er parents’ long faces changed from sadness to mirth. They looked at each other and began to laugh, but laugh in a way that made Carrie feel defensive.

  Straightening her back, Carrie stood up. One could almost take offense at the tone of their laughter. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go to my room and start packing for the journey to meet my husband.” Stiffly, she walked from the room.

  Chapter Three

  Mrs. Joshua Greene fanned herself with an ivory-handled, feather-tipped fan, stroked the little dog beside her, and tried to still the beating of her heart. In another few minutes she and the other stagecoach passengers would be in Eternity. Since they were a full four days later than scheduled, she wondered if her husband would be there to meet her.

  Every time she thought the word husband she smiled to herself. She thought of the pleasure she was going to see on Josh’s face when he realized that his new wife was not a woman with a back meant to pull a plow, but was instead a young lady of some…well, appeal.

  Thinking of their first night together, Carrie began to fan herself harder. Even though her brothers thought they had been successful in keeping their little sister’s mind pure and uncluttered with any knowledge of the world, Carrie had learned a great deal about men and women from sitting quietly and listening to her brothers’ remarks about bachelor life. She was certainly sure that she knew more than most young women. And if she was sure of anything at all, she was sure that she wasn’t afraid of what happened between a man and a woman. According to the laughs and comments of her brothers, what a man and woman did together was the most exciting, pleasurable, worthwhile event on earth. All in all, Carrie was very much looking forward to the experience.

  When at last the coach pulled into Eternity and stopped before the depot, she saw him long before the vehicle halted.

  “Is he there?” the woman across from her asked.

  Carrie smiled shyly and nodded. She and this woman had traveled together for the last seven hundred miles, and Carrie had told her that she was going to meet her new husband. She had not told all the details, preferring to leave out that her letter to Josh had contained some untruths, but she’d told her all the most romantic parts of the approaching love affair. Carrie had told of the adventure of being a mail-order bride and being married by proxy because they had fallen in love through letters and that now she was going to meet her husband for the first time.

  The woman, who lived with her husband and four children in California, leaned over and patted Carrie’s hand. “He’ll be even more in love with you the moment he sees you. He’s a very lucky man.”

  Looking down at her hands, Carrie blushed.

  When the stage finally stopped, Carrie found herself suddenly frightened, and every word that her friends and parents had said to her came back to her. Quite suddenly, she thought, What in the world have I done?

  Two men got out of the coach, but Carrie hung back, drawing the coach’s leather curtain aside and looking out at the man standing on the porch gazing at the coach with unreadable eyes.

  She would have known him anywhere. This was Josh, this was the man who was her husband. In secret, behind the cover of the leather shade, she examined him. He was shorter than her brothers, standing about five foot nine or ten, but he was as strongly built as they were, just as broad shouldered and slim hipped, and he was just as handsome. He had piercing dark eyes that stared at the coach intently, and he was leaning against the wall of the stage depot, looking for all the world as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He was wearing a black suit of excellent cut and quality, and Carrie’s expert eye knew that when it was new it had been very expensive, but the suit was a bit worn now, frayed here and there.

  Wiping her hands on her traveling skirt, Carrie listened to the stage driver unloading the bags from the top of the coach, but still she sat where she was, holding Choo-choo on her lap and looking out at Josh. She wanted to see him to make sure that what she had felt from the photo was true when she saw him in person. What kind of man was he?

  He didn’t move from his place against the wall even when there seemed to be no more passengers disembarking. Standing very still, he watched and waited.

  He knows that I’m inside, Carrie thought. He knows it and he’s waiting for me. At that thought she relaxed and smiled, and the woman across from her smiled also.

  Putting the loop of Choo-choo’s leash over her wrist, Carrie got up from her seat and went to the coach door.

  The moment Josh saw a skirt in the doorway, he stepped away from the wall and came forward, and when he saw Carrie, he paused.

  In the instant Carrie met his eyes, she knew without one doubt in the world that she had made no mistake. Mr. Joshua Greene was hers and would be for the rest of her life.

  She smiled at him. It was a tremulous smile, for her heart was beating in her throat so hard that she seemed to have trouble thinking.

  Without smiling, Josh came forward quickly. By the expression on his handsome face a person might not have known he was anxious, but he nearly knocked the stage driver to the ground in his rush to get to Carrie. Putting his strong hands up toward her waist, he waited to help her down.

  As Josh’s hands touched Carrie’s waist, the moment they connected, the two of them froze in place. He held her waist, looking up at her as she stood in the doorway, and there was a charge of such excitement between the two of them that Carrie was sure her pounding heart was going to burst her bodice.

  For minutes the two of them stood there, Josh’s hands about her waist, Carrie’s feet barely grazing the stage step, neither of them moving as they stared at each other. To an outsider they might have been statues except for the fact that every visible blood vessel was engorged and throbbing.

  “You two lovebirds mind gettin’ out of my way?” the stage driver said as he tried to push Josh aside. But Josh was as firmly rooted where he was as though he’d been planted and grown roots a hundred feet deep.

  It was Carrie who broke the spell when she smiled at her husband.

  When Josh returned her smile, Carrie thought she might melt. He had the most beautiful smile in the world, with perfect, even, white teeth and lips that were finely shaped.

  Slowly, ignoring the stage driver who stood looking at them in disgust, Josh lowered Carrie to the ground. As he lowered her, his hands—strong hands—moved from her waist all the way up to her armpits. When his palms went past her breasts, Carrie was sure she was going to faint.

  When Carrie’s feet were on the ground (literally speaking), Josh stepped away and tipped his hat. “Ma’am,” he said softly.

  If Carrie hadn’t been in love with him before, she was sure she would have been after she heard his voice. Odd, but in all her imaginings she hadn’t thought about what his voice would be like. It was deep and…and, well, beautiful, almost like a singer’s voice.

  She knew she should introduce herself, but suddenly the words stuck in her throat. What could she say? “Hello, I’m your wife?” Or “Did you really, actually, truly want a farm girl?” Or should she say what first came to her mind, which was, “Kiss me”?

  After discarding all those alternatives, she didn’t say anything, but stepped away from the coach, Choo-choo panting and following her, and walked to the shade of the porch of the stage depot. Standing there, she took the fan from her wrist and used it as she watched Josh turn back toward the stage.

  As Carrie watched, the woman who had traveled with her stepped from the coach, and Josh politely put his hands up to help her down. The woman was at least fifty pounds overweight, as well as being several years older than Josh.

  “Are you Miss Montgomery?” she heard him ask. “I mean, Mrs. Greene?”

  The woman smiled at Josh. “You can get that worried look off your face, young man, I’m not your bride.”

  Instantly, Josh removed his hat and bowed before her. (What lovely hair, Carrie thought.) “Had I been so honored, my lady, I would feel myself the most fortunate of men,” he said.

&nbs
p; The woman, nearly old enough to be Josh’s mother, blushed and giggled at his gallantry.

  Behind them, Carrie smiled. If she’d had any doubts left about what she’d done having been right, they would have left her when she saw Josh’s chivalric courtesy. Now it was up to her when she told Josh that the two of them belonged together—and she wanted to do that in privacy.

  She watched as Josh looked into the empty stage; then he went to the driver and questioned him, where he was told that there were no other passengers on board.

  Sitting down on a dusty bench on the porch of the stage station, Choo-choo at her feet, Carrie watched Josh as he removed her letter from his coat pocket and reread it. She looked at the way his hands moved. They were expressive hands, and she remembered his touching her.

  When the stage driver called for the continuing passengers to reboard, one by one, they did. When the coach was loaded and the driver seated on top, Josh turned to Carrie and looked at her in question. Carrie was well aware that he hadn’t forgotten her presence for even a split second. He had been as aware of her as she was of him.

  “May I help you onto the stage?” he asked softly, and just his eyes on her made Carrie’s heart beat faster.

  She managed to shake her head no, but couldn’t seem to speak.

  The driver yelled to the horses, and in a cloud of dust, the coach pulled away. After the depot manager went inside the building, Carrie and Josh were left alone outside.

  Standing in the sun, his back to Carrie, Josh watched the departing stage coach. When it was out of sight, he slowly turned back to her, moving so he was standing in the shade, but still a few feet from her. “Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.

  “My husband,” she said, then smiled a bit at his crestfallen face. “And you? Are you waiting for someone?”