Mail Order Josephine - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides) (3 page)

“Oh, well, then, you can help me with these, because I’m going there myself,” the woman stooped to her bundle again, and between her and Josephine, she succeeded in lifting it back into her arms.

“Where is it?” Josephine peered around the poor little alley.

“It’s just here,” the woman nodded toward the end of the alley. “Do you need something laundered, Miss?” With her eyes, the woman indicated Josephine’s empty hands.

“No, I just want to see it,” Josephine whimpered, aware now of the inappropriateness of that request, so deceptively innocuous, to a lady of her class. The poor and the working class took offense at her desire to bridge the gap between those who work and those who do not. To them, her presence degraded them even more than the work itself.

The woman frowned at Josephine over her bundle, but unlike the man at the forge, she made no effort to discuss it with her. Maybe she understood enough to realize the futility of arguing about it. Or maybe she thought a lady so far above her own station ought to know her own business well enough not to explain it to the likes of her. “Well, it’s right over there,” she concluded. “You can follow me, if you like.”

Josephine nodded her assent and the woman continued down the alley to a rough door sunken into the side of the building out of sight. She dropped her parcel on the ground again to free her hand to rap at this door. When it groaned open from the inside, she tugged at the burden and indicated to Josephine with her eyes to heave it up again. Then the door swallowed up the woman and her package of linen. Josephine tiptoed up to the door and stooped to look inside. Immediately, an overpowering blast of hot steam hit her in the face, almost knocking her back into the alley. The scorching cloud reeked of a toxic mixture of laundry soap and unwashed human bodies. The stench alone compelled her to run for her life, but her curiosity restrained her. A morbid impulse seized her and thrust her back toward the darkened door where, as low as she leaned down to look inside and strain her eyes, she couldn’t penetrate the cavernous obscurity. She took one step inside,
then another, before a light of sorts brightened the interior of the room. As far in as she went, she still bent over to avoid cracking her head on the low ceiling.

Eventually, the character of the place revealed itself to her. More than a dozen women occupied the gloomy room, but contrary to her father’s interpretation of the senior Mr. Stockton’s letter, they were not Chinese, but ordinary white women, all bent over steaming wash tubs, their sleeves rolled up around their elbows, scrubbing laundry. Josephine judged by the cut and wear of their dresses, as well as the creased lines of worry scoring their faces, that they represented the poorest women in the town. Some appeared quite young, but their eyes could hardly be said to rest in sunken pools of black circles in their pallid faces, and when they glanced up from their work to identify the stranger in their midst, no flicker of righteous resentment or cowering deference enlivened their eyes. After acknowledging her presence with their briefest glances, they bent to their work. Josephine choked in the steam, more revolted and shocked by the scene in the laundry than by the scene at the forge. This encounter with the women of the town in the slavery of their employment rocked her sense of decency and the concept of justice in the system of social hierarchy that granted her privileged position of comfort and leisure. These women bore the unmistakable signs of lifetimes spent in the confinement of this laundry. Their dresses carried the stains of repeated soakings in sweat that never received any laundering of its own.

Josephine ran from the room into the air outside, her impulse to seek out and discover the details of life in this frontier town completely quelled. For some reason, she never fully comprehended the grueling intensity of hard physical labor, nor the grinding drudgery most people in the world employed to wring their very survival from an unwilling earth with the daily labor of their muscles. As she dashed back through the dusty streets toward the hotel, Josephine questioned whether she really wanted to participate in this life after all. Wouldn’t she be happier back in New York? Even if she lived the rest of her days as an old maid and ended up as respectable and conservative as Aunt Agatha, wouldn’t that be better than slaving away over a wash tub all her life? After all, wasn’t Aunt Agatha right that her upbringing suited her to little else? What did she really hope to accomplish by moving out to the Wild West and marrying a man she’d never met? No matter how rich and successful his parents were, she could hardly expect them to maintain her in the style to which her upbringing accustomed her.

When she reached the hotel, the clerk at the front desk flagged her down at the foot of the stairs. “A message for you from the
Stocktons, Miss,” he called as she mounted the steps.

“Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed. She seized the envelope from his hand and rushed away to her room, where Aunt Agatha only just rose from her slumber and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Did you have a good sleep, dear?” Josephine asked to divert her aunt’s attention away from her absence from the room.

Aunt Agatha sighed heavily. “I don’t know why, but something about this town just wears me out. Maybe it’s the incessant wind. I feel absolutely exhausted all the time. I feel as though I’m swimming through mud. Every movement costs me an enormous effort. I won’t be sorry to get back on the train for home. Oh, I’m sorry, my dear! You must think me so heartless! I won’t be glad to leave you behind, of course.”

“That’s alright, dear,” Josephine assured her. “I quite understand what you mean. But look here! We have a message from the Stocktons.”

“Open it, please, dear,” Aunt Agatha instructed her.

Josephine slipped the sheet of paper out of the envelope, unfolded it, and read the contents. “They welcome us and all that sort of thing. Hope we had a pleasant journey, etcetera, etcetera. Oh, here we go! They invite us to a luncheon tomorrow afternoon. They’ll send a gig—whatever that is—to pick us up and bring us back. They say we can discuss everything in person then. Oh, that’s just capital! So you won’t have long to wait, dear.”

“Excellent!” Aunt Agatha concurred. “Thank Heaven for that! I don’t think I could stand to wait any longer. We should check out of the hotel before we go. That will save us another trip coming back to collect our luggage.”

“Wait a moment, Aunt Agatha,” Josephine countered. “Not so fast. We can’t be sure the Stocktons will want us staying at their house. Not yet, anyway. We should wait until after the luncheon before we make such a decision. And another thing, we don’t know how much space this gig will have for our luggage. I propose we wait until the Stocktons expressly invite us to stay with them before we check out of the hotel.”

“Very well, my dear,” Aunt Agatha slumped back onto the bed. “Now, speaking of luncheon, let’s go down to the dining room and see what we can find to eat. I’m famished.”

Josephine tucked the letter and envelope into the leaves of her book and accompanied Aunt Agatha to the lunch table, where they refreshed themselves. Afterwards, Josephine happily stayed in their room with Aunt Agatha, no longer anxious to explore the town or experience any more startling revelations about its residents and their lifestyles. She confined herself to watching the comings and goings of the people from her balcony. Her subdued manner greatly satisfied Aunt Agatha, who refrained from making any further commentary on Josephine’s marriage prospects. Later in the afternoon, Aunt Agatha took another nap, and Josephine once again slipped out of the room after she fell asleep. This time, however, she did not leave the hotel. She meandered the hallways of the upper floor, finding nothing but closed doors, until she reached the very rear corner of the building. A window let streaming sunshine into the hallway, and a strange mixture of sounds caught Josephine’s attention there.

One sound she recognized as the whistle of the wind under the eaves of the hotel’s roof, and the other sound also struck her as familiar. It was the metallic twang of the blacksmith’s hammer ringing from the forge behind the hotel. Peering out of the window, she found herself looking down on the forge from above, and the whole scene of the smith, his young assistants, and the odd customer milling around outside the forge appeared in miniature below her. She pressed up on the window sash, and the pane slid upwards out of the way. The relentless pounding of the hammer resounded through the window, and she leaned out through the opening to view the proceedings from this safe vantage point. She looked closely for the man who addressed her, but didn’t see him.

The two women passed the remainder of the day in quiet waiting. Josephine read her book and took in the air on the balcony a few times, but the knowledge of the next day’s meeting with her future parents-in-law pacified her enough to keep her indoors. She woke the next morning fresh and glowing with excitement about the day’s adventures. Aunt Agatha, on the other hand, appeared worse for a night’s sleep. While Josephine chattered to her elderly relative during breakfast about the weather and their luncheon date, Josephine marveled that, as Aunt Agatha attested, every hour they spent in the town seemed to age her and drag her down with care and dejection. Josephine wondered how the same environment could affect the two of them so differently, as she herself felt more vital and energetic than at any previous time of her life. Every attempt she made to cheer her aunt or turn her thoughts to some light subject met with a depressed rebuff. Even the food produced a scowl on Aunt Agatha’s face each time she bit off a piece of toast and chewed it between her mealy jaws.

As they sipped their coffee after breakfast, the desk clerk stuck his head into the dining room and announced, “The
Stocktons’ gig is here for you ladies.”

Josephine jumped up excitedly, while Aunt Agatha dragged after her to the veranda of the hotel. The vehicle they found waiting for them in the street resembled a small cab, trimmed on all four sides with a decorative pattern in painted wooden panels and driven by a speckled sort of stable boy. No sooner had the two women seated themselves in the gig than the boy clucked his tongue to the two horses in front of him and they started out of town. Aunt Agatha barely cast a glance to either side through the entire trip, but Josephine inhaled deeply of the smells and sights and sounds around her, admiring the tree-lined fields and the quaint cottages on both sides of the road, and relishing the intoxicating pressure of the breeze on her face and neck. She repeatedly turned to her aunt to point out each new vision presenting itself around every corner, but when she beheld Aunt Agatha’s pinched mouth and down-cast eyes, she held her peace and celebrated the experience in her own private heart.

Their journey ended at a lovely house behind a white picket fence where the farmland fell away into open country. The boy drove the gig up the cobbled driveway, dropped his two passengers off in front of the house, and then drove away without a word. A graying couple emerged from the house and greeted them at the porch.

“Come in! Come in!” gushed the man. “You must be exhausted from your journey. Come in and sit yourselves down! I can’t bear to think of you waiting at that hotel in town when you could have come here!”

“We had no transportation,” Aunt Agatha groused, “although we tried to arrange something. It appears the town leaves much to be desired for one accustomed to the refined services of big city life.”

Josephine leapt to assuage her aunt’s tactless remarks. “Please, think nothing of it. We are perfectly comfortable at the hotel, and we’ve even seen something of the town while we waited to hear from you.”

“It’s a good little town, when you get used to it,” the man returned. “Please, come in.” He conducted them into the house and into a dining room where a big table in the center of the room displayed a range of platters heaped with food. “You must sit down and eat something. You must be absolutely perished after your long journey.”

“Not at all,” Josephine assured him. “We just finished breakfast.”

“Well, sit down anyway,” he insisted. “We have a lot to discuss. As I guess you’ve figured out, I am Paul Stockton, and this is my wife Betsy. I’m sorry our sons aren’t here to greet you. They work out on the ranch during the day. They might come in for lunch later, but there’s no guarantee.”

“Of course!
How inconsiderate of me!” Josephine extended her hand. “I’m Josephine Parker, and this is my aunt, Agatha Parker, my father’s sister.”

The four shook hands all around, and after completing all the introductions, sat down at the table.  “Now, then,” Paul Stockton, Sr., clapped his hands, “we should get down to business right away. I regret we’ve had no communication with you since you left New York, or we could have avoided an uncomfortable misunderstanding. Your message two days ago was the first we heard from you, and I felt it only fair to inform you in person. The sad truth is that my son, Paul, whom your father contracted with me for you to marry, died of the typhus two weeks ago. Your father’s last letter, in which he informed me that you had departed from New York in the company of your aunt, was dated the very same day my son passed away. I’m sorry I couldn’t get word to you sooner, or you might have saved yourselves the inconvenience of this trip.”

Agatha and Josephine stared at him in stunned surprise as the elder Paul Stockton made this revelation. “Do you mean to tell me,” Agatha snarled, “that this trip, which cost us no small expense and difficulty, was a complete waste of time?”

“Aunt Agatha, please,” put in Josephine when she saw the distress on Betsy Stockton’s face. “These people have just lost their eldest son and heir. Please excuse my aunt. She isn’t feeling very well these last couple of days. Please, accept our most heartfelt condolences on your loss. Is there anything we can do for you? You must be absolutely distraught.”