CHAPTER 3
Letters Across the Territory
Ruth's reply reached Callie within the fortnight, and Callie read it standing in the mercantile doorway where she had arranged to have her correspondence delivered rather than to her father's house, a small precaution that had already begun to feel, in the reading of it, considerably less like paranoia and more like plain good sense.
Dearest Callie, Ruth had written, in the warm, unhurried hand Callie remembered fondly from their years together at Miss Everly's Academy, I have found you precisely the position you asked after, and I will confess I was glad of the excuse to arrange it, having missed your company more than I generally let myself dwell on.
The rancher's name is Nathaniel Cross, a widower of good character with two children, a boy of nine and a girl of five, and a household that has apparently proven rather too much for the two housekeepers who've attempted to manage it these past two years, both having left to marry, which I gather has left the household somewhat gun-shy of hiring anyone the local bachelors might take a fancy to.
I have told him only that you are a capable, kind woman in need of a fresh start, and nothing further, trusting you to share whatever else you judge wise, whenever you judge it wise to share it, and not one moment before.
Callie read this last sentence twice, feeling something in her chest ease at the careful discretion of it, and continued on to the practical particulars — the wage offered, generous enough by Callie's admittedly inexperienced reckoning; the travel arrangements Ruth had already begun making on her behalf; a final, gently worded caution that Nathaniel Cross was, by Ruth's own description, a decent man but a guarded one, still carrying the weight of his wife's death two years past, and that patience would likely be required in equal measure to whatever domestic competence Callie could muster.
I have not told him you're fleeing an arranged marriage, Ruth added, near the letter's close, as that seemed rather your own story to share or withhold as you see fit, but I will say, dear friend, that Goldpine has proven a rather forgiving place for women arriving with complicated histories and few practical skills to their name.
I arrived here myself with considerably less domestic competence than you likely possess, and have managed well enough.
You will manage too, I have no doubt whatsoever, and I confess I am simply glad beyond words at the prospect of having you nearby again.
Callie wrote back within the week, her own letter considerably shorter than the considerable gratitude she felt warranted, explaining only that she would need to arrange her departure with some care, her father being unlikely to receive the news of her intended position with anything resembling equanimity, and that she hoped to arrive within the month, provided she could manage the practical business of leaving without alerting anyone to her destination before she was safely on her way.
The practical business of leaving, it transpired, required rather more careful engineering than Callie had initially anticipated.
She could not simply announce her intention to travel to the Wyoming Territory to keep house for a rancher, this being precisely the sort of decision her father would move swiftly and thoroughly to prevent, likely by accelerating Don Rafael's formal offer to a timeline that left her no room to maneuver at all.
She settled instead on the pretext of a visit to her aunt in Denver, a woman elderly and infirm enough that a lengthy visit would raise no particular suspicion, and arranged, through a cousin sympathetic to her plight and discreet enough to be trusted with the full truth, to have her trunk forwarded not to Denver at all but to the rail terminus nearest Goldpine, where she would collect it upon arrival.
“You're certain of this,” her cousin Elena asked, the night before Callie's planned departure, watching her pack with the particular worried attention of a woman who loved her cousin dearly and harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of the whole undertaking.
“A housekeeping position, in a mining territory, for a man you've never met, based on nothing but a schoolgirl friendship and a single letter?”
“I am certain of considerably less than I'd like to be,” Callie admitted, folding a shawl with hands that trembled only slightly.
“But I am entirely certain, Elena, that I cannot marry Don Rafael Alvarado, and I am fairly certain that whatever uncertainty waits for me in the Wyoming Territory is preferable to the considerable certainty of what waits for me here, should I stay and let Papa's arrangements proceed to their natural conclusion.”
“And if this Mr. Cross proves unkind? Or if the position itself proves more than you can manage?”
“Then I shall have learned that lesson at considerably less cost than the lesson Don Rafael's two previous wives learned, by all accounts, before their own respective deaths.” Callie said this more grimly than she'd intended, and softened it with a small, rueful smile.
“I don't mean to make light of real danger, Elena. I mean only that I have weighed the risk of the unknown against the risk of the known, and found the unknown considerably the lighter burden, whatever Papa would say of my judgment in the matter.”
Elena helped her finish packing in a silence that carried more support than further argument, and embraced her fiercely at parting, extracting a promise of letters as frequent as the territorial post allowed, and Callie left Santa Fe before dawn the following morning with a single trunk, a modest sum of her own savings carefully sewn into the lining of her traveling case, and a letter from Ruth Larson tucked against her heart like a small, steady flame against a considerable darkness.
She left, too, a brief note for her father, composed with considerable care over several discarded drafts, that neither confessed her true destination nor entirely deceived him as to her state of mind.
Papa, it read, I have gone to seek a life of my own choosing, having found I cannot in good conscience proceed with the arrangement you have made on my behalf.
I do not do this to wound you, nor to bring dishonor upon our family, but because I cannot spend the whole of my remaining years married to a man I do not love and cannot respect, for the sake of alliances that serve the mercantile rather than my own heart.
I hope, in time, you might come to understand this choice, if not forgive it outright. Your daughter, Callista.
She had debated, until the very last moment, whether to leave any note at all, weighing the risk of providing her father even this small clue against the cruelty of vanishing entirely without a word of explanation.
In the end, her mother's memory had settled the matter — the conviction that whatever pain her departure caused, it ought not compound itself with the additional cruelty of leaving her father entirely without understanding, however much he might reject that understanding once offered.
Her younger brother Miguel, sensing something of her intentions in the weeks preceding her departure though she had confided in no one but Elena, sought her out the evening before she left, finding her in the garden where she had gone to sit alone with her thoughts among her mother's carefully tended roses.
“You're leaving,” he said, without preamble, settling beside her on the garden bench with the particular directness that had always characterized their relationship, closer in age and temperament than either sibling shared with their more distant elder brother, who had long since taken up his own position within their father's mercantile empire and shown little interest in matters beyond it.
“I am. I'd rather you didn't tell Papa before I've gone, Miguel, though I understand if your conscience won't permit the silence.”
“My conscience permits it just fine,” Miguel said, with a small, fierce smile that reminded Callie, not for the first time, how much of their mother's spirit had settled into her younger brother despite his careful outward conformity to their father's expectations.
“I've watched Papa arrange your whole future without once asking what you actually wanted, same as he's begun arranging mine, and I'll not be the one to stop you from claiming some measure of choice for yourself, whatever it costs either of us in his eventual displeasure.”
“Thank you, Miguel. I'll write to you as well, once I'm settled, though I'd ask you to burn the letters rather than risk Papa discovering my whereabouts before I'm ready to have that particular conversation.”
“I'll guard your secret same as I'd want mine guarded, hermana. Only promise me you'll write honestly, about whatever life you find out there, good or difficult both. I'd rather know the truth of your circumstances than a comfortable fiction meant to spare my worry.”
Callie promised, and embraced her brother with a fierceness that spoke of how much she would miss him, whatever freedom her flight might bring, and found, walking back into the house that evening to complete her final preparations, that Miguel's quiet blessing had settled something in her resolve that even Elena's more practical assistance had not quite managed to touch.
She spent her final evening in her childhood bedroom sorting through the considerable accumulation of a lifetime's belongings, forced by the practical limitations of a single traveling trunk to make hard choices about what she could carry forward and what she must leave behind.
She kept her mother's small collection of jewelry, modest in value but precious in memory, and a handful of books that had shaped her private understanding of the world beyond what her formal education had offered.
She left behind the elaborate gowns her father had commissioned for what he'd anticipated would be a grand wedding to Don Rafael, understanding that whatever life awaited her in the Wyoming Territory would have little use for silk and lace, however fine the workmanship.
She paused longest over a small portrait of her mother, painted some years before her death, and found herself weeping quietly over it in a manner she had not permitted herself in some considerable time, the accumulated grief of the past eight years mingling with her present fear and hope into an emotion too large to properly name.
She packed the portrait last, wrapped carefully in one of her softest shawls, understanding that whatever else she left behind in Santa Fe, she could not bear to leave this particular piece of her mother's memory behind as well.
Elena arrived early the following morning, well before the household staff had properly begun their own day's duties, to help Callie navigate the considerable logistics of an unobserved departure.
The two cousins moved through the darkened house with careful, practiced quiet, Elena having arranged, through her own connections, a hired carriage waiting several streets distant to avoid drawing the attention of the household's more observant servants.
“You'll write the moment you're safely arrived,” Elena said, one final time, as they paused at the garden gate that would carry Callie away from everything familiar. “I'll not sleep properly until I know you've reached Goldpine without incident.”
“I promise, Elena. And thank you, for everything — the arrangements, the discretion, the courage to help me when a wiser woman might have counseled patience and compliance instead.”
“I'd rather help my favorite cousin toward genuine happiness than counsel patience toward a marriage that would have slowly extinguished everything I love about your spirit, Callie. Go now, before the household wakes, and may God watch over you on this considerable journey.”
They embraced one final time, and Callie slipped through the garden gate into the pre-dawn darkness, her whole future carried in a single trunk and a heart considerably more frightened than her outward composure suggested, beginning the long journey that would, against every reasonable expectation, deliver her to precisely the life she had not properly known to hope for.
The hired carriage carried her through Santa Fe's darkened streets toward the rail terminus, past the mercantile her father had built from nothing, past the church where she had been baptized and confirmed and had once, briefly, imagined celebrating her own eventual wedding to a man of her own genuine choosing, past the whole familiar landscape of a childhood she was leaving behind with a finality she had not fully permitted herself to properly consider until this actual moment of departure.
She did not look back as the carriage rounded the final corner that would carry her out of the neighborhood entirely, understanding that looking back now, with her resolve already so carefully, precariously assembled, might undo the whole of her careful planning in a single unguarded moment of grief for everything familiar she was leaving behind.