The Mountain's Promise (The Goldpine Brides #2)

CHAPTER 1

A Proposal Not Her Own

Callie Reyes had learned, over three-and-twenty years as Esteban Reyes's only daughter, that her father conducted his family life the same way he conducted his mercantile business — with careful ledgers, firm handshakes, and a complete and unshakeable conviction that he alone possessed the judgment necessary to determine what was good for everyone under his roof.

It was a conviction that had served him admirably in trade, where he had built the largest dry-goods concern between Santa Fe and Albuquerque out of nothing but a mule cart and a stubborn refusal to accept the word no from any customer, supplier, or competitor.

It served him rather less admirably, in Callie's private opinion, when applied to the matter of his daughter's marriage, a subject on which he had apparently decided, without consulting the party most directly affected, that the question had already been settled.

“Don Rafael Alvarado,” her father announced, over a supper Callie found she had entirely lost her appetite for, “is prepared to make a formal offer within the month. He owns three thousand head of cattle and a controlling interest in the Alvarado freight line, and he has expressed, on more than one occasion, a considerable admiration for your accomplishments.”

“My accomplishments,” Callie repeated carefully, “consist chiefly of playing the pianoforte adequately and speaking passable French, Papa. I cannot imagine either skill proving of much use to a man managing three thousand head of cattle.”

“Don Rafael does not require a ranch hand. He requires a wife capable of presiding graciously over his household and his social obligations, and you are eminently suited to the role.”

“Don Rafael,” Callie said, setting down her fork with more deliberation than the gesture strictly required, “is two-and-fifty years old, Papa, and has buried two wives already, and treats his household staff, by every account I have gathered from the servants who once worked for him, with a coldness that would frost the inside of a stove. I have no wish whatsoever to become his third.”

The household in which this exchange took place had, in the eight years since Callie's mother's death, grown increasingly formal in its daily rhythms, her father having gradually replaced the warm, somewhat chaotic domesticity of his wife's era with a more rigid household management that mirrored, in its particulars, the careful bookkeeping he applied to his mercantile affairs.

Meals were taken at precisely appointed hours.

Conversation, when permitted at all beyond the practical business of the day, followed topics her father deemed suitable, generally excluding anything so frivolous as Callie's own opinions on matters he considered properly his own domain to decide.

It was a household, Callie had come to understand over the years, that ran with considerable efficiency and almost no genuine warmth, a fact she had learned to navigate with the same careful diplomacy she now attempted, with rather limited success, to apply to the subject of her impending marriage.

Her elder brother Rodrigo, some years her senior and already thoroughly absorbed into their father's mercantile operations, had long since demonstrated the particular safety of simply agreeing with whatever position their father advanced, a strategy that had earned him considerable trust and an increasingly significant role in the family business, though Callie had noticed, over the years, that this trust seemed to have cost him something of his own independent spirit in the exchange.

She did not begrudge him his chosen path, understanding that a son's obligations to a mercantile empire differed considerably from a daughter's more limited options, but she found herself determined, watching his careful, practiced deference at the supper table, that she would not purchase her own father's approval at quite so complete a cost to her own genuine self.

Her father's expression did not so much harden as settle, the particular settling of a man who has long since stopped expecting his decisions to be questioned and finds the questioning itself a kind of impertinence requiring correction rather than genuine consideration.

“You are three-and-twenty, Callie. You will not have unlimited offers of this caliber presented to you indefinitely, and I will not have you throw away a match of this consequence over girlish sentiment regarding a man's age or his manner with servants.

This family's standing in Santa Fe depends considerably on the alliances we secure, and Don Rafael's offer secures a great deal.”

“It secures a great deal for the mercantile,” Callie said, before she could properly stop herself. “I wonder whether it secures anything at all for me.”

The silence that followed this observation stretched long enough that Callie's younger brother Miguel, seated across the table with the particular studied blankness of a boy who has learned that family arguments are best weathered by appearing to have no opinion whatsoever, found sudden urgent interest in his own plate.

“You will receive a fine household, a respected position in society, and a husband of considerable means,” her father said finally, in the tone of a man reciting terms he considers thoroughly generous and cannot understand any reasonable person failing to appreciate.

“I fail to see what more a young woman could reasonably want.”

Callie could have enumerated, at some length, precisely what more a young woman might reasonably want — a husband nearer her own age, for a start, and one who did not inspire in every servant who had ever worked for him a visible flinch at the mere mention of his name, and perhaps, while she was compiling her list, some small say in the disposition of her own future — but she had learned, over three-and-twenty years, that enumerating such things to her father accomplished nothing beyond confirming his opinion that she was being unreasonably sentimental, and so she said nothing further, and excused herself from the table at the earliest opportunity that courtesy permitted.

She retreated to her room and sat a long while at her window, looking out over the darkening rooftops of Santa Fe toward the mountains beyond, and thought, not for the first time, of her old school friend Ruth Larson, who had left this same stifling social world some years back to keep house for her brother's ministry in some rough mining town in the Wyoming Territory, and who wrote, in her occasional letters, of a life that sounded to Callie's ears less like exile and more like liberation — a life where a woman's days were filled with actual purpose rather than the careful performance of purposelessness that passed, in Santa Fe society, for a young lady's proper occupation.

Ruth's most recent letter, received only a fortnight past, had mentioned, almost in passing, that a rancher of her acquaintance was in urgent need of a housekeeper, his previous arrangement having fallen through when the widow he'd hired had remarried unexpectedly and moved on.

Callie had read the line perhaps a dozen times since, turning it over with the particular attention of a woman searching a locked door for any keyhole that might yield to patience.

She was not a housekeeper. She had never in her life managed a household budget, or cooked a meal from raw ingredients, or done anything more strenuous with her own two hands than needlework and the pianoforte her father was so proud of.

But she was three-and-twenty years old, and facing a marriage to a man two-and-fifty who had buried two wives already, and she found, turning Ruth's letter over one final time by candlelight, that the prospect of learning an unfamiliar trade in an unfamiliar territory struck her as considerably less frightening than the alternative her father had already, without her consent, begun to arrange.

She wrote to Ruth that same night, her hand less steady than she would have liked but her resolve, once committed to paper, considerably steadier than she had expected.

I find myself in need of a change of scenery, she wrote, choosing her words with the particular care of a woman uncertain who else might read the letter before it reached its destination, and wonder whether the position you mentioned might still want filling.

I have no practical experience to recommend me, only a genuine willingness to learn, and a rather pressing need to be somewhere considerably farther from Santa Fe than I am at present.

She sealed the letter, and sat with it a long while in the candlelight, and found that her heart, for the first time in some weeks, was beating with something closer to hope than dread.

She did not sleep well that night, turning over the considerable risk of her plan against the considerable certainty of the alternative, and found herself, somewhere in the small hours, thinking of her mother, dead these eight years now, and of the quiet conversations they had shared before illness had finally claimed her — conversations in which her mother had spoken, carefully and in low tones her father was never meant to overhear, of her own girlhood dreams long since abandoned to the practical demands of a marriage arranged for her by her own family's interests rather than her heart's genuine desire.

“Be braver than I was, mija,” her mother had told her, in one of their final conversations, her voice thin with illness but her conviction undimmed.

“Don't let anyone else write the whole of your story, however kindly they mean it, however much they insist they know better than you what will make you happy.”

Callie had carried those words for eight years without properly understanding their full weight, filing them away as the tender but impractical sentiment of a dying woman rather than genuine counsel to be acted upon.

She understood them rather better now, sitting alone in her darkened room with a letter to Ruth sealed and ready for morning post, and found that the understanding, however many years delayed, arrived with its own considerable comfort — the sense that whatever fear attended her plan, she was not, in the pursuing of it, betraying her mother's memory but rather finally, belatedly, honoring it.

She rose before dawn to see the letter properly posted, choosing a route to the post office that avoided her father's usual morning walk, and stood a long moment afterward watching the sun rise over the mountains that ringed Santa Fe, feeling, for the first time in longer than she could properly recall, that her own future might yet belong to her rather than to whatever arrangement her father saw fit to construct on her behalf.

She had met Don Rafael Alvarado only twice in her life, both occasions arranged with the particular ceremonial formality her father favored for matters of business consequence, and she found, turning those two brief encounters over in memory as she walked home from the post office, that each recollection confirmed rather than eased her considerable dread of the arrangement being constructed on her behalf.

The first meeting had taken place at a formal dinner her father had hosted specifically to introduce them, Don Rafael arriving with an entourage of servants who moved with the particular nervous efficiency of people accustomed to swift and severe correction for any small failure, and Callie had watched, over the course of that long and stilted evening, as he spoke to each servant not once but repeatedly with a coldness that made her own skin crawl on their behalf, though he had been solicitous enough toward herself, in the careful, assessing manner of a man inspecting a purchase rather than courting a potential wife.

The second meeting, some weeks later, had proven rather more revealing still, Don Rafael having called upon her father's house to discuss what he termed, with a casualness that struck Callie as chilling in its very offhandedness, “the practical arrangements” of their eventual union — the household staff she would inherit, the social obligations she would be expected to fulfill, the particular wing of his considerable hacienda she would occupy, all discussed at length without a single question directed toward her own preferences or wishes in any of these matters.

She had sat through the whole conversation in a kind of numb disbelief, understanding, by its conclusion, that Don Rafael Alvarado viewed her not as a partner in any genuine marriage but as a carefully selected addition to a household he had already, in every meaningful sense, finished arranging without her.

It was this second meeting, more than any other single factor, that had finally crystallized her resolve to write to Ruth, understanding, in the days following it, that whatever uncertainty and hardship awaited her in flight, it could not possibly prove worse than a lifetime spent as an addition to another man's already-completed arrangements, however comfortable the material circumstances of that arrangement might prove to be.

She had confided something of this dread to Elena in the days that followed, the two cousins walking together in the mercantile district under the pretense of shopping for household items, their conversation carefully pitched low enough to avoid the attention of passersby who might carry word of their discussion back to Callie's father.

“You cannot simply refuse him outright,” Elena had counseled, with the particular practical caution of a woman who had watched her own family's fortunes rise and fall according to similarly arranged alliances.

“Your father has invested considerable pride in this match. A direct refusal will only provoke him to greater insistence, not less.”

“Then what would you have me do, Elena? Simply submit, and spend the whole of my remaining years as Don Rafael's carefully managed third wife, hoping I fare better than his previous two?”

“I'd not counsel submission either, hermana. Only that whatever resistance you offer wants careful planning, rather than the kind of open defiance that only strengthens your father's resolve to see the matter through regardless of your objections.”

This counsel, though offered with genuine care, had struck Callie at the time as offering no real solution beyond patient endurance of an arrangement she found genuinely unbearable, and it was this very frustration, compounding over the following days, that had finally driven her to consider Ruth's distant Wyoming Territory as something more than mere idle fantasy — a genuine, if frightening, alternative to the careful, constrained resistance Elena's practical wisdom otherwise counseled.