The Mail-Order Brides

The cottage was scrupulously neat. The walls had been whitewashed, the effect being warm and bright, with a faint pattern of wood grain showing through. There were hand-crocheted rugs on the floors and a basket of onions and withered apples on the kitchen table. Homely touches one would expect of a woman, but hardly of a man.

While Dora filled the kettle, her host told her where to find the teapot. “I can’t stay long,” she reminded him, almost wishing she could. Wishing she could linger in this unlikely sanctuary until she could think of what to do next, where to go. With no money, no family and no friends—with her reputation irredeemably shattered—perhaps she could just stay right here in this warm, friendly room and sip tea forever.

That old woman? Oh, that’s Dora Sutton. Ruined herself over on the mainland, don’t you know. Couldn’t go back, couldn’t go forward, so she just sat there and drank tea until she withered up like a dried plum.

Chapter Two

Once she had brewed a pot of strong tea, which more or less exhausted her culinary talents, Dora looked about for her valise and remembered that she’d left it out in the yard. She would tell someone at the docks—that nice red-haired man, perhaps—about Mr. Meeks’s ankle. Surely he would see to sending someone along to do whatever needed doing.

“So you’re one of Grey’s brides,” Meeks repeated. “Who’re you going to marry?”

Who? Well, no one, it seemed. Dora sat back down and stared at the man reclining on an old-fashioned settee in the tiny parlor. Pride alone kept her from telling him she’d been found wanting. He’d thought she was too pretty? Absurd, she told herself, feeling a rising inner heat that had to be anger. “Well…that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”

“My Sal was the first,” Emmet confided wistfully. “Grey ordered her out special for me. Couldn’t have done better if I’d picked her out myself, and that’s the Lord’s truth. St. Bride deeded me an acre of land and the lumber to build us this home. Helped build it with his own hands, he did.” It was as if once the man began to talk, he couldn’t seem to stem the flow. “He builds one-room cabins for the single men, but he don’t deed ’em over until six months after they marry. So far, none of ’em that’s married has stayed that long. That makes me the only man on the island besides St. Bride to own so much as a grain of sand.” Pride was evident in his pale face.

But beneath the pride, there was loneliness. Dora understood grief and loneliness all too well. Somewhat to her surprise, she was tempted to pour out her own tale. What would it matter? He was a stranger, someone she would never meet again after today.

But telling wouldn’t change anything, it would only open the wounds again. The time for grieving was past. She had her future to secure now.

“Mr. Meeks, I really do need to leave now if I’m to catch the boat. I promise, though, I’ll send someone back to look after you.”

In a younger man, his smile might have been called teasing. “Call me Emmet. Been a while since I heard a lady speak my name.”

“Then, Emmet, I’d better hurry. It’s been—well, of course, the circumstances weren’t the best, but I’m truly glad I met you. Perhaps one of these days…”

What could she offer? Not friendship—there wasn’t time. “Perhaps Mr. St. Bride will find you another wife. Not to take the place of your first wife,” she added hurriedly. “I know no one could do that, but someone—a companion…”

“A companion,” he echoed wistfully. “Should’ve thought to tell him before he left.”

Before he left?

“Is Mr. St. Bride leaving, too?” If his high-and-mightiness was sailing on the same boat she was, she just might end up shoving him overboard to see if he could walk on water.

“Gone a’ready. Saw him set off across the ridge while you were helpin’ me to the house. Probably all the way out past Pelican Shoal by now, with the wind where it is.”

“He’s gone?” Dora didn’t know whether to rejoice or despair. At least he wouldn’t be sharing the cramped passenger cabin with her all the way across the Sound.

“Then I’d better—”

“Settle down, child. If you were fixin’ to sail with Cap’n Dozier you’re too late. He’s halfway out the channel by now, won’t come about for nobody, so you might’s well settle yourself in for a spell of waiting. Mail boat’s due in day after tomorrow. You could catch a ride out then if you’re still set on leaving. Dozier’ll be back the day after that.”

Settle herself in how? Where? She would like to think she’d begun to mature in spite of her father’s indulgences—the events of the past six weeks had surely hastened the process. But panic was her first reaction. What was she supposed to do, build herself a sand castle? Throw herself on the mercy of the first friendly face she came across?

Hardly. Foremost among the hard lessons she’d been forced to learn was that the world did not revolve around the Suttons. If she was to survive, it would be up to her to find a way.

“The—Mr. St. Bride, that is—um, happened to mention that my passage was paid on the Bessie Mae & Annie. What about the mail boat? Is it very expensive? Where would be her next port of call?”

“Well now, as to that, Grey owns the Bessie Mae. Mail boat’s a different matter—she don’t have much room for passengers. Won’t cost you much for deck space, but if I was you, I’d wait.”

Wait for what? Dora thought with the first fine edge of panic. Wait to be sent back to Bath, where women she’d known all her life would turn away and even cross the street to avoid embarrassment when they saw her coming? Where the men would look her up and down with a certain speculative gleam in their eyes that made her feel as if she’d wandered outside in her drawers and corselet?

No, thank you.

Where she would have too much pride to beg and too few resources to keep from starving?

No, thank you indeed!

“I don’t suppose there’s a—um, a boardinghouse here?” Where she could wash dishes to earn her keep until she could think of something better to do.

Emmet shook his head. “No need for one. There’s a longhouse for the pilots up at North End. Been inlet pilots here long’s there’s been a good inlet, ready to go out and meet incoming traffic, guide ’em across the shoals. Come August, there’s mullet fishermen, but now we got more of a permanent population. Like I said, St. Bride built cabins for them that don’t stay in the barracks.”

“What about the—the women? Where do they stay?” Surely she could find someplace to shelter until she could get off St. Bride’s blasted island.

“When Sal was here, we took one of ’em in. Didn’t stay long, poor woman. Lit out on the mail boat two days after she come. Since then, if the circuit preacher’s not here, they stay at the parsonage. If he’s here, he moves up to Grey’s house, let’s ’em have his place until things is settled one way or the other. Like I said, so far none of ’em’s stuck more’n a month or two, ’ceptin’ for my Sal.”

“Do you suppose—?” She hardly dared voice the question. If it involved the cooperation of Grey St. Bride, she knew in advance the answer. Having ordered her to leave, he would expect her to be gone. Instead she’d stopped to help someone in need and missed the boat. He could hardly blame her for that…could he?

“Now, if you was to want to stay here until the Bessie Mae gets back” Emmet said thoughtfully, “reckon there’s not much Grey could say about it, seein’s he deeded this place to me, fair and square.”

Dora looked about the small cottage. There appeared to be several rooms, including the kitchen off the back. There was also a narrow, steep stairway leading to what must be more rooms or an attic. Altogether, compared to Sutton Hall, Emmet’s cottage was scarcely larger than the servants’ quarters out behind their carriage house.

Odd that it should feel so…safe. Did she dare stay here long enough to plan her next move? No matter how despotic he might be, St. Bride could hardly chase her off his island as long as she remained on the part of it that Emmet owned.

Stalling for time until she could weigh her options, Dora said, “Would you like more tea? Perhaps I could—” Cook his dinner?

Hardly. She wouldn’t know how to start. She’d been no more truthful in her application when she had claimed to be a capable woman than she had when she’d called herself a widow.

Heaven help her if she had actually married St. Bride, as she had naively expected to, and he’d discovered the extent of her lies.

Fortunately, Emmet seemed more interested in talking than in dining. “Did I tell you about Sal? I buried her out by the fig trees. Sal used to race out there of a morning to beat the mockingbirds to the ripe figs.” His smile was for another woman, another time. Dora started to speak, but he continued, and so she leaned back in the uncomfortable spindle-backed chair, determined to be the audience he so obviously needed. She might be shockingly inadequate in most respects, but she could certainly listen for as long as he wanted to talk.

“Now’n again I haul a chair out there by her grave and study on the way things turn out in a man’s life. Planning don’t do much good, not when there’s a Master Planner up there with his own notions of how things is going to turn out.”

“Fate,” Dora murmured. She knew all about the way life’s chessboard could tilt with no warning, sending all the pieces crashing to the floor.

He nodded. “Some calls it luck—some might call it fate when a young woman happens by an old man’s house just when his sand’s about to run out. Does she stop and help when the old fool climbs up a ladder and takes a fall, or does she walk on by?”

Inside her flimsy kid slippers, Dora’s toes curled. What was he trying to say? That fate had directed her to his gate just as another door slammed shut in her face? Whatever it was he suggesting, could she afford not to listen? If she’d already missed the boat, what choice did she have?

“St. Bride, he signed up the circuit preacher before he sent for the first brace o’women. My Sal was one of ’em. With our own preacher on the line, we could send for him whenever there was any splicin’ that needed doing without having to sail o’er and hitch up on the mainland.”

Dora waited. She had a feeling he was leading up to something, only she couldn’t imagine what it could be. Surely he wasn’t about to ask her to marry him.

“Works out real good. Course, there’s not a lot for a preacher to do here less’n there’s a marrying. Not much sinnin’ to preach at, not like some of his other charges where they have saloons and wild women. Grey won’t tolerate sinnin’ on St. Brides—says if he allows sinnin’, first thing you know he’ll have to bring in a sawbones and a sheriff.”

Most of the color had returned to his weathered face. Dora murmured something to the effect that a doctor might be useful, but Emmet, now that his initial discomfort had lessened, seemed more inclined to talk than to listen.

“Now, Preacher Filmore, he’s a good man. Give you the shirt off’n his back if you need it. The Lord sort of slowed up his talking so folks wouldn’t miss any of his words. Trouble is, I listen a whole lot faster than he talks, and besides that, he don’t even play checkers. Not even for black-eyed peas. Calls it gambling, and gambling’s a sin in his book. So you can see the fix I’m in.”