The Snowfall Bride (A Prairie Christmas #1)

Chapter 1 The Advertisement

The advertisement took Elias Caldwell four nights to write.

He was not a man who struggled with words, ordinarily.

He could name the ailments of cattle, read weather in a cloud bank, calculate feed requirements through a hard Colorado winter without consulting anything but his own judgment.

Language was a tool he used as he used all tools — without flourish, without waste.

But this was different. This was asking a stranger to come and be his wife, and no amount of practical thinking made that sentence sit comfortably on the page.

The first draft began: Rancher in Colorado Territory seeks a woman of sound constitution and Christian faith for the purpose of matrimony. He had read it back over the candle and thrown it in the stove. It sounded like a notice for breeding stock.

The second draft was worse. He had attempted warmth, and warmth on paper came out of him like a man translating a foreign language he had only ever read and never spoken.

"I am a decent man with a good property.

I have a daughter aged six who is in want of a mother's guidance.

" He had stopped at the word mother. He had sat looking at it until the candle burned low and the kitchen had gone cold around him, and then he had added that draft to the fire as well.

The third attempt he had abandoned midway through the second sentence, because he had written, without meaning to, the words since the loss of my wife Ruth, and the ink had blurred under his thumb where he'd pressed it to the page, though he told himself afterward it was only the cold in his hands, the way skin cracked in December.

The fourth version — the one he finally folded and gave to the post rider for the Denver paper — was stripped to its bones:

RANCHER, WIDOWED, 34 YEARS, residing in Pinecrest, Colorado, seeks a Christian woman of honest character, age 22–32, for purpose of marriage.

Must be willing to live rurally and to assist in the rearing of one child, a daughter age 7.

Respondents may write to E. Caldwell, General Post, Pinecrest, Larimer County, Colorado Territory. Replies held in confidence.

He had re-read it once, decided it was honest if not flattering, and paid the three cents to send it before he could change his mind a fifth time.

That had been October. It was now the twenty-third of November, and in the kitchen drawer beside the stove there were eleven letters.

He had not read all of them. He had read the first three on the evening they arrived together — a widow of fifty-three, a young woman who called Colorado a great adventure three times in two paragraphs, and a third letter, written on pale blue paper in a careful, upright hand, that was the first one that made him stop.

It was from a woman named Clara Holt, of Boston, Massachusetts. She was twenty-six. She was a schoolteacher. She had written:

Dear Mr. Caldwell, I will not pretend to eloquence I do not possess, so I will say plainly what I believe you deserve to know.

I am a woman of moderate looks and immoderate opinions, and I have been told on more than one occasion that I am better suited to a schoolroom than a parlor.

I believe this was meant as criticism. I have chosen to take it as a compliment.

I am a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, not because I was raised to it — though I was — but because I have tested that faith against grief and found it holds.

I mention this because your advertisement specified Christian character, and I wanted you to understand I do not come to faith lightly or by accident.

I can cook adequately, sew well, and teach a child to read.

I cannot ride a horse and have never lived farther west than Albany, New York, on a school excursion seven years ago.

I believe in honesty at the outset of things, so I tell you this willingly.

I am not running from anything. I am running toward.

If that matters to you, you may write back.

If it does not, I wish you well in your search. Respectfully yours, Clara Holt

Elias had read this letter three times. Then he had folded it back into its envelope and put it under the other eight. In the morning he told himself he had not thought about it in the night. That had been a lie.

* * *

He was a man who understood land more readily than people, and what he understood about land was that it did not forgive hesitation.

You planted before the last frost or you did not plant.

You cut hay before the rain or you lost it.

He had tried to apply this same practical logic to the letters in the drawer and had failed for three weeks running.

Pastor Elmore had not helped.

"You wrote the advertisement," the pastor had said, after the Sunday service two weeks prior. "Writing the advertisement was the hard part. Reading the letters is just reading."

"Some of them don't merit reading," Elias said.

"And some of them do." Pastor Elmore was not a man who could be redirected once he had the scent of something.

He had married Elias and Ruth nine years ago in this very churchyard and had stood at Ruth's graveside two years past and had watched Nora grow from a joyful, noisy creature into a girl who went whole days in a silence that made grown men look away.

"You cannot raise that child alone, son.

You are a good father in all the ways that count and a ghost in all the ways that matter. "

Elias had looked at the mountains. This was a technique he had developed for conversations he did not wish to continue. The mountains were always obliging.

"There's a woman among those letters," Pastor Elmore said. "I'm going to wager you already know which one."

"You're a minister. You're not supposed to wager."

"I'm not wagering money." The old man clapped him on the shoulder. "Write her back, Elias. Worst that can happen is she doesn't come."

* * *

He had written Clara Holt back the following Tuesday. Three paragraphs: the ranch, the land, the cattle. Then Nora — her intelligence, her stubbornness, the silence that had followed Ruth's death and the slow return from it. And then:

I appreciate your honesty. I will offer you mine in return: I am not seeking a romantic arrangement.

I am seeking a partner of good faith for the benefit of my daughter and my household, and I believe that is something that can be built honestly, if both people are willing.

What I cannot offer is certainty that I will be easy to live with.

What I can offer is that I will try. If you are willing to come to Pinecrest by the first of December, Reverend Hobart can perform the ceremony upon your arrival.

You will have your own room until you are comfortable.

I will not rush you. Yours faithfully, Elias Caldwell

He had sent this and then stood at the fence for a long time looking at nothing, the cold coming off the mountains in slow, heavy waves. He had thought of Ruth — not with the usual sharp guilt but with something quieter. Something more like permission. He was not sure he deserved it.

Clara Holt had written back in five days. She would be on the stage from Denver on the first of December.

Today was November thirtieth.

He stood at the kitchen window with his coffee and watched the first light spread over the snow on the peaks above Pinecrest and tried to remember the last time he had been nervous about something, and could not.

He had trained the nervousness out of himself after Ruth died, along with several other things he'd decided he could not afford.

"Papa."

Nora stood in the doorway in her nightgown, her dark hair loose, her feet bare on the cold floorboards. She was looking at him with Ruth's eyes — that particular quality of attention that suggested she was measuring something she didn't yet have words for.

"You should have socks on," he said.

"Are you nervous?" she asked.

He considered lying. He was good at it in the practical sense, not in the moral one. He and Nora had an agreement, unspoken and absolute, that he would not lie to her, because her mother had always told her the truth, even the hard parts, and Nora remembered.

"A little," he said.

She padded across the floor and leaned against his side, looking out at the mountains. After a moment she slipped her small hand into his. "I think she'll be nice," Nora said. "Teachers know lots of stories."

Elias looked at his daughter's profile — the small determined set of her chin, so like her mother's that it sometimes stopped his breathing — and thought about Clara Holt's letter and the twelve hundred miles between Boston and Pinecrest and what it meant that a woman had crossed them based on three paragraphs from a stranger.

"Get your socks," he said.

"You're going to like her," Nora said, and went to get her socks.

Elias looked back at the mountains. They stood the way they always stood — enormous, certain, indifferent to any particular human concern. He had always found this comforting. Tomorrow, one way or another, everything was going to change.