The Mail-Order Brides

Waving away a cloud of midges, she trudged on, setting her sights hopefully on the gaunt structure ahead. The brisk, salt-scented breeze helped to clear her head but did little to steady her legs. She still felt as if she were on a rolling deck, although the captain had assured her that the effects would pass quickly.

Evidently she was no better a drinker than she was a sailor.

The closer she came, the more she dreaded the coming interview. To think that not long ago she’d been celebrating her engagement. Henry Carpenter Smythe, a young man her father had met on a business trip to Richmond and brought home with him, had seemed to be everything any woman could want. Handsome, with lovely manners and a delightful sense of humor, he had quietly let it be known, without actually boasting, that he was more than comfortably situated.

Dora had been smitten at first glance. Intent on impressing him, she had arranged a dinner party and invited a dozen of her closest friends, praying that Henry wouldn’t fall instantly in love with her best friend, Selma, who was easily the most beautiful woman in their set.

He’d been polite to all her friends, but no more than that. At her father’s invitation, he had extended his stay at Sutton Hall, and two weeks later, after a whirlwind courtship that had been encouraged by her father, Henry had asked her to marry him.

On St. Valentine’s Day he had given her a handsome diamond ring and they’d begun making plans for the wedding. They had talked of June weddings and bridesmaid gowns and flowers, and who Henry’s best man would be.

“If I’d seen him first,” Selma had declared, “he would have been mine.” She’d said it in jest, but there’d been something about the way she’d persisted in hanging on to Henry’s arm at every meeting, quizzing him about his friends and asking if he had a brother, that had made Dora rather uncomfortable.

But then, at the time, Dora had been increasingly concerned over her father’s health. He’d lost weight and seemed distraught. Even if she hadn’t fallen in love with Henry, she would have encouraged him to stay because her father seemed to perk up in the younger man’s company.

When Henry had asked for her hand, her father had beamed, offered his blessing and urged them not to wait. “I’m looking forward to seeing my first grandson before I die,” he kept saying, and each time, Dora would hasten to assure him that he would soon be teaching a raft of grandsons to ride, to hunt and fish.

One or two, she’d thought privately. After a few years. First she wanted time alone with her husband who, seemingly every bit as eager to wed, had talked about the trips they would take together, the home they would build, the children they would eventually have…

That had been in February. Now here she was, barely two months later—orphaned, seasick, tipsy and penniless—about to face a future as the mail-order bride of a man she had yet to meet, in the most godforsaken place she had ever seen in her entire life.

Well…not quite godforsaken, she amended. There was the tiny, steepleless church.

Standing on his wide front porch, a tall, dark-haired man slid a pair of leather-palmed hands into the hip pockets of his lean canvas trousers as he gazed with satisfaction over his windswept island. He’d watched as Dozier’s bugeye, the Bessie Mae & Annie, pulled alongside the dock. Watched the men swarm aboard, lift the hatches and begin unloading freight. Still others tackled a deck cargo of lumber, swinging bundles off onto the wharf. Clarence’s crew of warehousemen began logging in and transferring crates to the warehouse for future shipment, setting aside a few small parcels to be brought up to the house.

Grey nodded in satisfaction. They knew what they were about, the men of St. Brides. A bit rough but, for the most part, good men, deserving of all he had done for them. All he planned to do.

Today’s woman, however, couldn’t have come at a more awkward time. He needed to leave within the hour if he wanted to reach Edenton by tomorrow morning. His brother, Jocephus, after setting up a meeting with another ship owner with a view to consolidating their two businesses, had asked Grey to take part in the negotiations, even though Grey had no direct interest. While his brother might be better at reading fine print, Grey was the acknowledged expert when it came to reading men.

Circumstances had made Grey St. Bride what he was. Some called him arrogant because he made laws as he saw fit and expected those laws to be obeyed. Grey didn’t see it as arrogance, but simply as the only way to keep peace among the tough, independent men who lived and worked on St. Brides Island.

He’d been seventeen, Jocephus nineteen, when their father’s health had begun to fail. Calling his two sons to his bedside, the old man had given them their choice of his various and scattered properties. Jocephus, then a student at Chapel Hill, had chosen the family’s two small schooners and the warehouse in Edenton; Grey had chosen the island that had been granted by the state of North Carolina to his great-grandfather more than a hundred years earlier.

By the time Grey had actually inherited the island that bore his name, there’d been little left but a single storm-ravaged house and a few dilapidated wharves and warehouses. More valuable was the dependable deepwater inlet on the north side, between St. Brides and Ocracoke Island, as well as a less dependable one to the south between St. Brides and Portsmouth.

He remembered standing on this very spot—gazing out over the free-ranging livestock that had eaten down the vegetation to the point where blowing sand had covered half the maritime forest—and thinking something had to be done if the island was to survive, much less thrive.

Left to the meager population of transient seamen, inlet pilots and seasonal fishermen who came late in the summer for the mullet, residing in bulrush-thatched huts bordering the North End, the entire island might have washed away before anyone could take measures to secure it. As it was there were tree stumps visible at low tide in both the sound and the ocean, a mark of the constant erosion.

The first thing he’d done was to bring in a few stockmen to pen up the livestock so the scrubby vegetation could recover. Next, he’d brought in carpenters to rebuild the docks and warehouses and provide sturdier housing for the permanent men. Three years ago, it had occurred to him that something was still missing.

Women.

Actually, he hadn’t thought of it until Emmet Meeks had led a delegation up the ridge to ask what he could do about bringing out a few women.

“Thing is, Cap’n—” the men gave him the courtesy title, saying damned if they were going to call him Saint. “—see, the thing is, it takes so long to go over to the mainland and meet up with a woman and court her, and then, when she finds out where we hail from, they don’t want nothing to do with us.”

Not to mention the fact, Grey had told himself, that most of the men, as decent and hardworking as they were, lacked certain social graces, shyness being the least of their problems.

It was Almy Dole, boatbuilder and general carpenter, who had expressed it best. “Maybe once we get ’em stranded out here for a spell, it won’t be long before we start looking right good to ’em.”

That had planted the seed—because the men were right. In order to thrive, a community needed stability, and that meant creating families. To that end he had tracked down the circuit preacher who served the nearby islands of Portsmouth and Ocracoke, and convinced him to add St. Brides to his charge. Then he’d set about building a church and a parsonage. Next, he’d composed a carefully worded advertisement and sent it off to the newspapers in three different coastal towns on a rotating basis, as he lacked the amenities to deal with more than one or two women at a time.

Some called him hard as pig iron. Grey preferred to think of himself as a visionary. Generous but firm. According to the terms of the old land grant, no St. Bride could sell so much as a grain of sand, but there was nothing to say he couldn’t give it away. So as an added inducement, part of the marriage bargain was to deed each married man an acre of land and the material to build a house.

His plan included an initial exchange of letters with any applicant before he arranged for her outward passage. Those who didn’t pass muster would be sent back with enough funds to support them until they could make other arrangements. He hated to send any woman back, knowing she had to be desperate to even answer such an advertisement, but if his plan was to work at all, he had to maintain standards. It took a special kind of woman to survive on a barrier island like St. Brides. Rejecting those he deemed unsuitable was actually a kindness.

But it also meant that his plan was progressing far slower than he had hoped.

As a shaft of sun glinted on the head of golden hair a few hundred yards down the road, Grey eased his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms over his broad chest. He could easily have met the woman at the landing and interviewed her there, as he’d be leaving within the hour. It would have saved time. But experience had taught him that distance lent him the perspective he needed to make a judgment. Gave him time to watch a prospective bride and size her up. By the time she reached him, he would likely have made up his mind whether or not she would do.

From what he’d seen so far, this one looked none too promising. A man needed good stock if he hoped to breed up a passel of strong St. Bridians. The woman coming up the road looked as if a stiff breeze would send her tumbling tip over toenails.

Eyes narrowed against the sudden glare of the sun, Grey studied the yellow-haired woman who was trying to hold down her skirts with one hand, hang on to her valise with the other, and still keep her hair out of her face as she staggered up the road toward him.

Staggered?

A fair man, he gave her the benefit of doubt. Walking in sand and shell took some getting used to when a woman was accustomed to sidewalks or hard clay roads. Then, too, she’d just crossed the Pamlico Sound. With a thirty-knot breeze out of the northeast, the waters might be a bit choppy. The effects took a while to wear off.

On the other hand, he needed women who were sound of wind and limb. Even with his inspection hampered by layers of billowing skirts, it was plain to see there wasn’t much in the way of flesh on this one. Maybe he should have specified a minimum weight. No runts need apply.

Grey made every effort to evaluate the woman objectively, but something in the way she moved distracted him. Such as the way her arms would fly out for balance when her foot caught the edge of a deep rut or a clump of uncrushed shell. When a gust of wind caught her skirt and she swatted it down again, offering him a clear view of the shape underneath, he barely managed to hang on to his objectivity. Shifting uncomfortably, he found himself reacting in a way that was not only inappropriate but damned embarrassing.

Waiting until she was close enough to see the set of her features—he firmly believed that given the right circumstances, a woman’s disposition could be read in her face—he descended the worn wooden steps. Obviously, she was tired and irritated. Only to be expected. Other than that, he couldn’t quite decide. She was a real beauty, though, and beauty was definitely not an asset on an island where men were men and women were rare.

He’d intended her for James Calvin, his chief carpenter. Thank God he hadn’t told him she was due in today, because he was going to have to send this one back and try again. Whatever else she might be, a woman with her looks was trouble just waiting to happen. The last thing he needed was to set the men fighting over her like a pack of mangy hounds.

At the foot of the dune, Dora stopped and watched the man striding toward her. This was Grey St. Bride? This was the man who had advertised for a wife?

There must be something terribly wrong with him—something that didn’t show from the outside. Either that or the brandy had affected her eyesight, because even from this distance he appeared to be strikingly handsome. Tall, with a rangy sort of leanness that reminded her of the live oak stumps she’d noticed along the shore, worn down to heartwood by centuries of wind and water.

“Mrs. Sutton?”

Dora remembered just in time that on her application she’d claimed to be a widow. “Mr. St. Bride?”

Warily, silently, they sized each other up. Dora, still reeling from the long crossing, swayed on her feet. Forcing back a lingering queasiness, she managed a parody of a smile. “What a—an interesting place,” she said. It was the best she could come up with. Bleak. Stark. Inhospitable. Definitely the ends of the earth. “I’m sure it must be quite lovely in the summertime.” It’s the middle of April, for heaven’s sake. If ever a place is going to be lovely, surely it would be by now.

Grey took in everything about the woman, then wished he hadn’t. Seeing her at close range only confirmed his decision. Skin that pale, that soft, would never survive the harsh climate. As for her hands, if they’d ever done a lick of work it couldn’t have been anything more strenuous than wielding one of those fancy feather fans society ladies used for flirting.

Her eyes were the color of Spanish moss, shifting from gray to green. A man could lose his wits trying to figure out exactly which color they were.

“Not got your land legs under you yet, Mrs. Sutton? The trouble with living on an island is that there’s only one way to travel. I’ll be glad to pay for your time, but I’m afraid—” His keen senses picked up the smell of brandy. And while he wasn’t one to hold the occasional drink against anyone, man or woman, it was just one more thing he could chalk up against this particular woman. She was too frail, too pretty, and evidently prone to drink.

She’d never last out a month. If the hard work expected of a St. Bridian woman didn’t defeat her, the solitude surely would. Pretty soon she’d insist on leaving, and then, there would go his best carpenter. It had happened before. What man, offered a choice between work on a desolate island and a woman like this, would choose the job?

“Darling, you can’t possibly expect me to move out to that wretched island of yours. I’d wither and die within a week.”

Echoes of the past. Grey blocked them out and studied this small butterfly of a woman before him. The women who replied to the advertisements he’d been placing monthly were inclined to be plain, verging onto outright homely. If they could have found a husband at home, they would never have applied to his advertisement. It didn’t take a Solomon to know that whatever she was doing here, this one would be nothing but trouble, setting the men against one another.