Mary's Mail Order Husband Read online

  LILY WILSPUR

  Mary’s Mail Order Husband

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  “Are you absolutely certain you want to go through with this?” Simon Costello blinked his red eyes at his daughter.

  “Dad!” she exclaimed. “You’ve only asked me that every ten minutes since I first told you I wanted to get married. Now stop asking! Of course I’m certain I want to go through with this. I wouldn’t have come this far if I wasn’t.” Mary Allen let out one more exasperated sigh and turned back toward the window. She didn’t need her father voicing her own concerns.

  The dusty streets of Fort Collins, Colorado, stretched away from the window. “I’m sorry, Mary,” Simon replied. “I can’t help it. I just don’t like the idea of you marrying so soon after Albert’s death. And marrying a stranger, too.”

  “You just don’t want me doing anything that would take my attention away from you,” Mary shot back. “You want to keep me all to yourself. Admit it!”

  “You’re right,” Simon replied. “But you have to admit, this business of getting yourself a mail-order husband you don’t even know, and shipping him into town from who knows where, is a dodgy proposition at best.”

  “It isn’t dodgy, Dad,” Mary grumbled. “Hundreds of mail-order brides are doing it. And lots of mail-order husbands are doing it, too. It works equally well for men and women who are looking to get married.”

  “But you haven’t answered me,” Simon insisted. “You don’t know the first thing about this John Webster character. He could be a wanted criminal, for all you know.”

  “I’ve exchanged letters with John,” Mary told him for the thousandth time. “He’s a young business man who’s done very well for himself in the Carolina tobacco trade. Now he wants to make a new start out West. And what better way to do that than to get married?”

  “He sounds like a bandit to me,” Simon grumbled. “You hear all kinds of horrible things about men taking advantage of vulnerable young widows. I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Nothing will happen to me,” Mary replied. “I’m not a vulnerable young widow. Besides, that’s what you’re here for. You’re going to make sure I wind up safely married to a good man and nothing happens to me.”

  “I just don’t like it.” Simon set his jaw and looked out the window. “You’ve been acting strangely ever since Albert died. I’m worried about you.”

  “You would act strangely, too,” Mary muttered.

  “Your mother died young,” Simon told her. “I didn’t go running off marrying someone I’d never met.”

  Mary rolled her eyes. She’d heard the same story every hour on the hour for the past six months. “You’d been married to Mama for almost twenty years. I was twenty-two, and Albert was twenty-three when he died. You can’t expect me to spend the rest of my life as a widow.”

  “But aren’t there eligible young men here in Colorado?” Simon whined. “Don’t tell me there aren’t. You could marry someone local if you really wanted to.”

  “There are plenty of eligible young men in Colorado,” Mary admitted. “But I don’t want to marry any of them. There’s no one here I want to spend any time with”

  Simon harrumphed. “No one you want to spend time with, huh?”

  She patted her father’s hand. “Don’t get me wrong. I want to spend time with you, but I don’t want to marry anyone from Colorado. I want to marry someone new to the West, someone fresh and enthusiastic to the Frontier. I want someone who’s looking forward to being a part of building this country. I want someone who’s going to be a living, breathing, growing part of this country.”

  Mary’s eyes flashed when she spoke about her future. She knew she had to carve out a new life for herself.

  She didn’t see the little town going about its dusty business outside her window. She didn’t even see her father sitting next to her. She only saw the days and months and years ahead. They floated before her eyes as a vision of promise. They called to her to bend her back to the work of building the land and the next generation on the fertile soil of the Frontier.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Simon insisted. “Lots of other young widows find husbands without throwing everything away.”

  Mary ignored him. Another thought crossed her mind. “Do you know I’ve exchanged more letters with John Webster than I exchanged with Albert before I married him? In a lot of ways, I know him better than I knew Albert.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Simon growled.

  “I know where he lives,” Mary continued. “I know what he does for a living. I know what his thoughts are on religion, and child-rearing, and the role of women in the family. I know how much money he earns. I didn’t know any of that about Albert before I married him.”

  “At least your family had something to say about your marriage to Albert,” Simon pointed out.

  Mary fixed him with a piercing gaze. “So that’s what this is all about, is it? You want me to marry someone you picked out for me, just like I did with Albert. This isn’t about me getting a mail-order husband at all. You want to arrange my second marriage, just like you arranged the first one. You want me to marry someone you know, the son of one of your friends.”

  Simon shifted in his seat and pulled his head down between his shoulders. “That’s nonsense, Mary. You know it is. You know I only have your best interest at heart.”

  “That’s what you said when you convinced me to marry Albert,” Mary shot back. “Well, we played it your way last time. I married Albert, and I did my duty to you and Mama. Now Albert is dead, and I’m going to marry a man of my own choosing. And that’s final.”

  She turned away from him with her lips pressed together. She had her mind made up. She would show him she didn’t care to discuss the subject of her mail-order marriage anymore.

  But the argument always ended the same way. They’d argued and argued about it endlessly ever since she first announced she was getting herself a mail-order husband. And she always ended the discussion as emphatically as this time.

  He would only bring it up again. She couldn’t stop him from doing that. He would bring it up over and over again until John Webster came to town. They would probably have the same argument while he walked her down the aisle. The only way to end the argument was to get married.., and even then, he might still harass her about it.

  She didn’t like to think she would sigh with relief when she married John Webster. But one of the main reasons she wanted to get married was to get out from under her father and late mother’s suffocating influence. They insisted on deciding everything in her life, right down to the clothes she wore to social events. They persisted in this oppressive control even after she married Albert. Her father became even more insufferable after her mother died.

  The only way out was to marry someone unknown to him and to build a life that didn’t involve him anymore. She didn’t relish the idea of hurting him but she couldn’t think of any other way to separate herself from him once and for all.

  Chapter 2

  Fort Collins paid no attention whatever to their family drama. Horses and cowboys and wagons and bar maids populated the streets. Mary stood on her veranda and surveyed the town.

  What did these people see when they looked at her? Smaller than average with black hair and clear white skin, she pee
red out at the world around her through dark blue eyes. Her direct expression and soft-spoken manner belied her age and reflected her experience of losing her husband at a young age.

  And her father? What did they see when they looked at him? Graying, bowing under his years with the damp eyes of advancing age, he didn’t see as clearly as his daughter. He’d spent the better part of his life in the town. He’d barely set foot off the sidewalk in almost sixty years. He’d acted as a marshal of business, finance, and culture, but since he left the Army, he’d never gotten his hands dirty even bridling his own horses.

  Mary loved her father even more tenderly now her mother was gone, but she understood his lack of experience better than he did himself. Even now, she saw his uncertainty in the face of the rustic, hard-living residents of Fort Collins. Mary took personal responsibility for protecting him and ensuring his comfort. He thought he could act as her guard and chaperone but in reality, their roles were reversed. Mary thought of her father as a little boy, and she acted as his governess and guardian.

  She had to take him by the arm and lead him through the streets when they went out walking. He frowned around at the streets of the town as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Even though Fort Collins contained all the same wagons, laundresses, dogs, housewives, velvet-coated dandies, and blacksmiths Simon Costello saw there all his life, he couldn’t bring himself to mingle with them as a fellow man.

  Mary stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street on their way back to the house. The sun glared down mercilessly on the dry, brittle earth. Mary took a few steps before she noticed her father wasn’t following. She went back and looped her hand through his elbow. “Come on, Dad.”

  The familiar position of conducting a lady on his arm set him in motion, but Mary led the way. As soon as his foot touched the dust of the street, his mind lost the ability to navigate. Mary didn’t draw his attention to his deficiency. She simply changed the pressure on her hand to steer him where she wanted him to go.

  They reached the front porch of the house and they both sighed when they entered the shade. Mary started toward the door when the familiar sound of voices and music caught their attention from the hotel next door. Simon perked up his ears and hesitated on the doorstep.

  “They’ll be having a poker game over there tonight,” Simon observed.

  Mary set her jaw. “That’s right.”

  “I guess I’ll go over later on,” he continued. “I’ll see if any of the boys from the Saddle 8 are there.”

  Mary didn’t answer.

  “They might have a pool game, too.” He talked to himself in a sing-song voice, but then he shifted to the more direct speech he used to address Mary. “I know you don’t approve, my dear.”

  “I don’t mind the poker and the billiards,” Mary replied. “It’s the noise at all hours I don’t like. It’s bad enough living next door to the hotel, with its bar girls and its fights. When the cowboys from the ranches out of town come in to spend their pay, they can stay up all night, and I don’t usually stay up past ten.”

  “You shouldn’t resent them wanting to have fun, Mary,” Simon told her.

  “I don’t resent that,” Mary replied. “But they get up to all sorts of mischief. They get up to drinking, and singing, and fighting, and chasing women. When they have money to spend, they go wild.”

  “It’s only natural,” Simon explained. “They’re just boys, most of them.”

  “It might be natural for them,” Mary grumbled. “But it isn’t natural for a man of your years to try to keep up with them. You should be in bed asleep at that hour.”

  “I’m not as old as all that.” Simon broke off the conversation and went inside. “I’ll go over later and see who’s there.”

  MARY FOLLOWED HER FATHER into the house and shut the door on the noise and dust outside. The cool dark halls of the house insulated them in their domestic isolation, and Mary could forget everything going on outside.

  Simon shuffled through the house with no apparent objective. Mary followed him, hoping to steer him upstairs to his room.

  “Is there anything we need to do before the wedding on Sunday?” Simon asked.

  “We’ve done everything there is to do,” Mary told him. “John Webster should be getting into town on the train tomorrow or the next day. He might call on us before Sunday. I don’t really know what his plans are once he gets into town.”

  Simon muttered something unintelligible, and Mary saw her cue to take control. She stepped forward and took her father by the elbow. She nudged him around the corner to the bottom of the stairs. He took the signal and started up the steps.

  Mary opened the door to her father’s room first. Its two big windows opened onto the main street. He often sat in the wicker chair and watched the horsemen and wagons and stage coaches coming and going through the town.

  She conducted her father inside, but she sat him down on the bed instead of in the chair. “Here, Dad. Sit down here. I’ll take your shoes off, and then you can lie down and have a nap. You must be tired after our walk.”

  Simon sighed. He looked very old and worn out. His shoulders hunched and his chin sagged onto his chest. “Yes, I think I will. I’m very tired. Who would have thought a short walk around town would be so exhausting?”

  Mary knelt down on the braided carpet and took off her father’s shoes. Then she laid him back on top of the quilt, adjusted his pillow under his head, and covered him with a blanket. She glanced up at his face to speak to him again, but she changed her mind when she saw his eyes closed.

  Chapter 3

  Mary shut the door behind her without another word to her father. She glanced into her own room. Her room looked down on a deserted alley on the opposite side of the house from the hotel saloon.

  She wanted to spend some time alone before the wedding on Sunday, and she didn’t need her sleep disturbed by drunken brawls between cowboys. But first, she’d take advantage of her father’s rest to walk around the town alone. She might never get another chance. She had to take the opportunity now. Her father walked too slowly, and he never stayed out long enough, to satisfy her.

  She tiptoed past her father’s door and down the stairs. She ducked out through the door and hurried through the clouds of dust in the street. The farther she got from the house, the faster she walked. She couldn’t understand why. Some nameless phantom haunted her, as if it tried to stop her from seeing and smelling and tasting the town.

  But there wasn’t much to see or smell or taste, other than the dust everywhere. There was the unmistakable smell of horse and male sweat and wood smoke and grease and leather. She knew all those smells.

  Yet something about Fort Collins rendered them foreign to her. What was it? Was it the torturous dry of the Western summer? Was it the air? Or was it just the dust that got into everything, so that everything smelled and tasted and looked like dust?

  She passed another saloon with garishly painted females hanging out of the windows. They shouted down into the street, and Mary averted her face to hide her embarrassment. Then she heard the answering shouts of men and realized the women weren’t addressing her. They probably weren’t even aware of her.

  Mary rushed past the saloon, but the men hanging around the door caught sight of her and called out to her. She didn’t understand what they said, so intent was she on getting away. At the end of the block, she slowed down to get her bearings and maybe start working her way back to her house.

  Just then, one of the men from the saloon jogged up to her. She hadn’t seen him leave his fellows with a jaunty smirk and a passing word of challenge from his friends. She only saw a lanky form appear beside her and a twangy voice speak to her.

  “Where ya goin’, Miss?” he asked. “Are you from around here?”

  Mary didn’t even bother to look at the strange man. “I’ll thank you to leave me alone.”

  “Are you lost?” the stranger asked. “Maybe I can help you.”

  “I’m not lost,”
Mary snapped.

  “Where ya goin’, then?” he insisted.

  “That’s none of your business.” Mary stamped on toward….where? Where was she going? Where was the house? Was she even heading toward it?

  She should make her way back before her father woke up, but she dared not look around with this…this person walking next to her, interrogating her about her business.

  “I’m just tryin’ to help, Miss,” the stranger replied. “Seems like you’re lost and you don’t know where you’re goin’.”

  Mary walked faster. Why didn’t he leave her alone? Couldn’t he see she didn’t want to talk to him? “I don’t need your help. I’ll thank you to leave me alone.”

  Thankfully, he drifted away into the clouds of dust. She never even got a good look at his face. The instant he disappeared into the background, she got her bearings and turned her footsteps toward home.

  She shuddered at the memory of the strange man accosting her. She despised the crude cow hands populating the beer halls and gambling dens of central Fort Collins. No, she didn’t want anything to do with the men of this town. She’d seen enough of them to make her choke.

  And she’d had enough of living next door to the hotel. Maybe after the wedding, she could convince John Webster to move out of town. They could buy a little block of land out in the hills where the air was clear and clean, away from the noise and the filth.

  Sure enough, when she crossed the street to her own house, another blast of raucous music and braying laughter erupted from the door of the saloon. A cluster of men in dusty work clothes with their hands full of garish painted women tumbled out of the door. They almost collided with Mary, and she flew the rest of the way up onto her porch and slammed the door behind her.

  She peeked into her father’s room and found him still asleep. She went back to her own room and closed herself in. This was the time she felt most at peace, with the burden of caring for her father and all her cares on the other side of that door. She could concentrate on her own thoughts and her plans for the future.