Chapter Two
Two
Fall River, Massachusetts
Eleanor Neale tore off her apron the moment the factory bell rang, signaling the end of another long day at the looms of Chattaway Mills.
The start bell had sounded at seven that morning, and it was now seven in the evening, full dark outside.
Ellie had been itching to leave all day; she was expecting a letter and needed to get back to the boardinghouse to see if it had arrived.
Snatching up her coat and hat, she jammed her way through the crush.
Today she was going to get an offer of marriage, and she was going to accept it.
That is, if the letter had arrived. The thought of it filled Ellie with a turbulent feeling, like a rushing river.
She couldn’t quite believe she was going to be a mail-order bride.
Her! Plain old Ellie Neale! Like some kind of heroine in a book.
The aisles were full of loud, tired girls, complaining and joking as they flooded out of the mill and into the sharp Fall River night.
Ellie elbowed through them impatiently, pulling on her calico bonnet as she searched for her friend Diana.
Diana wasn’t hard to spot; she was taller than most of the other girls, and prettier than all of them.
She was just like a heroine in a book. She could be the lost child of a duke or a marquis, the result of a deliciously tragic affair, abandoned to the gutter after her unwed mother was swept aside by the misfortunes of circumstance.
It gave Ellie a thrill just to think about it.
Ellie herself could never be mistaken for an aristocratic love child.
Unfortunately, she looked every inch the mill girl that she was.
She was pale from hours indoors at the looms, and thin from the frugal serves at the boardinghouse table.
Sometimes she liked to imagine that she had the romantic pallor of a heroine recovering from a wasting disease, but most of the time she had to accept that she was just ordinarily pale.
Just like she had ordinary brown hair and ordinary brown eyes and a face that was pleasant, but nothing to set a man’s heart on fire.
She was average height, average build and average everything.
She was like wallpaper. Attractive enough, and useful, but not something people particularly paid attention to.
Not like Diana. Diana was the kind of girl who turned people’s heads. And she had charm by the bucketful; everyone loved her. Even Mrs. Tasker at their boardinghouse liked her, and as a rule Mrs. Tasker didn’t like anyone.
Despite Ellie’s daydreams about Diana’s ancestry, in actuality Diana was just another mill girl like herself, sent off to work because her parents couldn’t afford to keep her.
And there were no dukes or marquises around here, that was for sure—just a steady stream of cheeky mill boys who flocked to Diana like a moth to a flame, ignoring old Wallpaper Ellie.
But Diana had grander plans than marrying a Fall River man and settling into a tenement house; Diana was escaping this town and its myriad mills, headed for the mountains of Montana as a mail-order bride, so desperate to get away from the mills that she was prepared to marry a stranger.
And now so was Ellie…
She certainly had no intention of being left behind. Ellie wasn’t about to let Diana marry herself off to a wild man without her there. Diana was the one person in the world who mattered to Ellie, and she planned to be there for her, no matter what.
After all of Ellie’s years at the mill, Diana was the only real family she could count on.
She thought of her mother, crammed into a tenement with a pack of kids, not to mention with Ellie’s violent stepfather, who drank away most of the money he earned at Sagamore Mill and was prone to roughing her mother up when he was out of coin.
Sometimes he’d roughed Ellie up too. Ellie’s real father had died in the fire of ’74, after which things had been hard and hungry, and then Mama had married Hank, who had been a nightmare from the first, and they’d had kid after kid after kid.
So many kids there wasn’t enough space, or enough food.
And Hank drank more, and Mama cried more, and there was always another mouth to feed.
Eventually Ellie had been sent off to work at Chattaway Mills.
She’d been twelve. That was nearly ten years ago.
Working at the mill meant living in one of the orderly brick row boardinghouses owned by the company.
It had changed Ellie’s life immeasurably, for the better.
The boardinghouses were directly around the corner from the mills—so the girls could hear the bells and get to work fast—and room and board was deducted from their pay in advance.
Mrs. Tasker was as inflexible as iron, but also sober, predictable and fair; she ran the house like clockwork to the timing of the bells.
None of Mrs. Tasker’s girls were ever late to work.
If a girl overslept, Mrs. Tasker was prone to chasing them out of bed with her broom.
Ellie never needed to be chased out of bed, not even when she’d been up most of the night reading.
The girls boarded four to a room, sharing beds, and their employment depended on their temperance, attendance at church on Sundays, and their chastity.
It was a cloistered existence, and the others generally hated it.
But for Ellie it was a revelation. No one was ever drunk and angry, there were no days without food, and there was fresh linen on the bed that smelled of Mrs. Tasker’s vinegary laundry soap—not the bodily odors of small children.
At the boardinghouse Ellie only shared a bed with one other person, not a whole tangle of hungry little kids, and it felt like sheer luxury.
Mrs. Tasker served a pleasant if slightly stingy table, with a dollop of hot oats in the morning and a two-course supper with soup and soda bread to start followed by a main meal that mostly featured meat.
It was far better than Ellie had ever had at home.
Best of all, there was quiet time after supper, where the girls gathered in the parlor with their books and mending and whispered gossip to one another.
That was Ellie’s absolute favorite time of day.
There were no screaming children, no staggering stepfather, no threadbare weepy mother, no neighbors hollering through the thin walls.
She was safe, and she felt like she could breathe.
Diana had come to Fall River in Ellie’s second year at Chattaway Mills.
She was a year younger than Ellie and had been so homesick for the first week that she couldn’t sleep at all.
They’d been assigned to the same bed because both their surnames started with N and Ellie’s previous bedmate was moved on to the next room, where the rest of the Os were.
Ellie had been glad to replace dour Marian Osborn with the sweetly pretty Diana, and she’d taken to whispering stories to the homesick girl, mostly scraps of things that she remembered from her books.
It gave Ellie a warm feeling, like holding cold hands to a homely fire, to comfort Diana.
After the company docked room and board, Ellie sent half her income to her mother to help feed all those kids, but the other half she used to indulge her reading habit, subscribing to Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith for the latest dime novels.
Ellie’s whispered retellings of those dime novels got Diana through the worst of her homesickness, and after that they were fast friends. More than friends. Sisters, really.
And Ellie absolutely couldn’t miss her best friend’s wedding. Nor could she abandon Diana to an unknown fate.
No. Ellie had to get herself to Montana too.
And given she had no money and no prospects of getting herself west, she’d resorted to answering an advertisement in the Matrimonial News , just like Diana had.
If it was good enough for Diana, it was good enough for her.
Her only requirement had been that the man had to live in Montana, specifically in the Elkhorn mountains, where Diana was headed.
Now, as her shift ended on this chilly fall night, Ellie was eager to get home to see if she’d finally received a proposal. She caught up with Diana in the after-work surge toward the train station and grabbed Diana’s arm, dragging her along. “Come on,” she urged.
“Calm down,” Diana said, refusing to hurry. “My feet are sore. The mail may not even have come today. You know how patchy it can be from Montana.”
Ellie did. Which is why she’d rushed home every day this week, sure that this was the day, only to find the letter hadn’t come. But today was surely the day. She needed that proposal.
The whole mess of Diana’s impending flight west was Ellie’s fault in the first place.
She was entirely culpable if Diana was led to ruin by this hare-brained adventure.
It had never occurred to her that bringing home the Matrimonial News would lead to such a catastrophe.
Ellie had only brought the paper home for voyeuristic entertainment, not to actually answer any of the ads.
It was fodder for daydreams, that was all.