Chapter 2
Chapter Two
On Monday morning Hannah sat down at the boardinghouse desk and pulled a sheet of paper toward her.
By then she had read it often enough to recite it, though there was very little to recite.
Thomas Avery was thirty-five, a widower, a cattle rancher in Colorado.
He had a daughter aged ten and wanted to correspond with a respectable woman with a view to marriage.
That was all twelve lines of newsprint could make of him.
It was not enough to cross half the country on.
But it was enough to make her curious about the person who had written it, because she had read a good many advertisements in the days since, and most of them tried to sell something — their acreage, their prospects, their need dressed up as opportunity.
Thomas Avery had not sold anything. He had stated his circumstances and left them on the counter.
She sat at the little desk in her room at Mrs. Sheldon’s with a clean sheet of paper before her and considered how one began a letter to a stranger who might become one’s husband.
Dear Mr. Avery seemed too familiar. Sir made it sound as though she were applying for employment, which she most certainly was not, though the distinction was finer than she liked.
She settled on Mr. Avery and dipped her pen.
Mr. Avery,
I am writing in answer to your advertisement. I am thirty years of age and have spent the past ten years managing the household of Mrs. Eleanor Corliss of Peoria, Illinois, who died recently.
I have experience in cooking, preserving, sewing, household accounts and the care of an invalid. I have not lived on a ranch and would not pretend knowledge of work I have never done.
Before I would consider marriage, I should want to know what you expect of a wife, what circumstances I would be entering, and what arrangements you propose should we both wish to proceed.
Respectfully,
Hannah Bell
She sat back. Not much of a love letter. Good. If Thomas Avery wanted a woman who could manufacture affection for a man she had never met, he had better choose someone else. She posted it before she could improve it into something that sounded less like herself.
Then there was nothing to do but wait.
Eleven days was not a long time. Hannah knew that. A letter to Colorado and a reply back could not be managed in under a week even if the man wrote the same day he received it. She knew that too.
She listened for the post anyway.
At breakfast she caught herself watching the door when Mrs. Sheldon came through it, and when it was only the coffeepot she looked down at her plate and felt ridiculous, and the next morning did it again.
She told herself she was simply waiting on a business matter.
She had written the letter clearly, with her terms set out, and there was no reason for her pulse to move when Mrs. Sheldon’s step came down the hall.
She wondered how many other women had answered him.
There were mornings when that thought followed her to breakfast, and she looked at the advertisement folded inside her account book and tried to see it the way another woman might — a woman younger, or prettier, or more willing to pour feeling into a letter to a stranger, and her coffee went cold.
When Mrs. Sheldon mentioned that the Harrison Street family had found their housekeeper, Hannah said she was glad of it. She meant it. That surprised her.
On Thursday morning Mrs. Sheldon handed her an envelope with a Colorado postmark.
Upstairs, behind her closed door, she sat on the edge of the bed and turned the envelope over once before opening it, as she had once seen Mrs. Corliss turn a letter she was not quite ready for.
Thomas Avery’s handwriting was firm, without much flourish. The letters sat square on the line the way figures sat in a well-kept ledger — no tails or loops wasted on show.
Miss Bell,
Your letter reached me Tuesday. I will answer your questions as plainly as I can.
My wife, Sarah, died fourteen months ago. My daughter Lucy is ten. I am looking for a wife chiefly because Lucy needs a woman in the house and I want someone who will be good to her.
Hannah stopped there.
She read the line again. Not I need someone to care for my daughter.
He had written I want someone who will be good to her, and Hannah held those six words a moment, because there was a difference.
Need was a hole to fill. Want was a thing chosen.
A man who needed a woman in the house might take any woman who answered.
A man who wanted someone good to his daughter was looking at the answering more carefully than that.
She read on.
The ranch is in Wet Mountain Valley. The house is small and the work is hard. I will not tell you otherwise. I have a hired man for the cattle. I would expect my wife to manage the house, kitchen garden, cooking, washing and such care of Lucy as a girl of ten requires.
If we agree to marry, I will pay your railroad fare from Illinois.
Mr. Jessup, the minister at Silver Cliff, will marry us the day you arrive, so everything will be correct from the beginning.
I enclose a letter from Mr. Jessup. You may write to him yourself. He has known me nine years and can answer any questions you wish to put to him about my character.
I am thirty-five years old. I own my ranch and make my living from cattle. I do not drink except occasionally and I do not gamble.
If there is anything else you need to know, ask it.
Thomas Avery
She reached the end and stayed there a moment with the letter in her lap.
He had answered exactly what she asked — no more, no less, no attempt to make the ranch sound prettier than it was or to suggest that Colorado was a paradise awaiting the right woman.
The house is small and the work is hard.
I will not tell you otherwise. Most men would have told her otherwise.
Most men would have softened it, or skipped it, or buried it under something about the view.
Thomas had put the hard thing first and let it sit there on its own.
No compliments, either, though Thomas could hardly be blamed for failing to admire a woman he had never seen. She smiled despite herself. He did not appear to be a man given to unnecessary decoration.
She opened the second sheet. The Reverend Samuel Jessup confirmed the essential facts in a hand less spare than Thomas’s, a man more used to writing, or more willing to use words where Thomas would have used a silence.
Thomas owned a ranch in Wet Mountain Valley, his wife Sarah had died the previous year, his daughter was ten, and Jessup described him as sober, industrious and reliable.
Useful. But Hannah had been called reliable for ten years, and at the end of it she had sat in a parlour while a man with a trunk told her her name was not on the paper. Reliable was a word people put on the outside of a person. She wanted to know what was on the inside.
Thomas had invited questions. Hannah intended to ask them.
Her letter to Mr. Jessup took the better part of an afternoon.
She asked whether Thomas had any reputation for violence.
Whether drink or gambling had ever caused difficulty despite what he had written.
Whether there were debts against the ranch serious enough to threaten Thomas’s ownership of it.
She wrote each question out plainly and did not soften any of them, because a softened question invited a softened answer, and a softened answer was no answer at all.
She had spent ten years in a house where important things were said gently and meant vaguely and never put on paper, and she was done with that.
Then she came to Sarah Avery.
Her pen stopped above the page. She sat with it there a while, the ink drying on the nib.
There was no delicate way to ask whether a dead woman had been happy with her husband.
Hannah was a plain-spoken woman. But she was about to ask a minister to tell her something about a marriage that was no longer anyone’s business but God’s and the two people who had been in it, one of whom was in the ground, and she sat with that before she wrote.
She asked whether, to Mr. Jessup’s knowledge, Sarah Avery had been well treated during her marriage.
She sealed the letter and posted it, and on the walk back to the boardinghouse she thought about Thomas learning every question she had put to his minister. She hoped he did. A man who objected to a woman taking care before marrying him was not a man worth the train fare.
Mr. Jessup’s reply came the following week.
Upstairs again, the door shut. She had given up pretending she could read these letters at the breakfast table with Mrs. Sheldon watching her face.
Jessup answered without taking offence on Thomas’s behalf. Every question she had asked — violence, drink, debt, the ranch — came back clean. Then she turned the page.
Thomas was devoted to Sarah throughout their marriage and particularly during her final illness. I have no reason to believe she had cause to fear or regret her husband.
She read the sentence twice, then sat with the letter on her knee and the bedroom quiet around her.
Devoted. Fourteen months ago he had been devoted to his wife, and now he was writing to a stranger in Illinois because his daughter needed someone and he could not do it alone.
She tried to imagine the deciding. Sitting down at a table in a house that still had Sarah’s curtains in the windows and Sarah’s garden going to seed outside and writing twelve careful lines to a newspaper asking for someone new.
She wondered whether he had written it at night, after Lucy was in bed, or in the morning with the coffee.
She wondered whether he had put the pen down partway through and picked it back up, or whether he had written it straight through the way he seemed to do everything — without stopping, because stopping would have made it harder.
She was furnishing a stranger’s house with things that might not belong in it. But devoted to Sarah was in the letter on her knee, and she did not try to make it mean less than it did.
She turned the page.
Avery is a quiet man and may appear stern until you know him.
He carries his responsibilities seriously.
I have never known him to give his word lightly or fail to keep it once given.
I would have no objection to a sister of mine entering his household, provided she understood that ranch life here is not an easy one.
A quiet man who carried his responsibilities seriously and might appear stern.
That sounded almost unbearably solemn. She found herself hoping he laughed sometimes, and then caught herself hoping, and put the letter down, because she had not yet decided to marry him, and a woman who was hoping a man laughed was a woman who had begun to care what kind of man he was, and that was a different thing from checking his references.
She gathered Thomas’s letter, Jessup’s reply, and the list of questions she had written before writing either man, and spread them on the desk — everything visible at once.
She had answers. The ranch existed and belonged to Thomas.
His account of himself appeared truthful.
Jessup was prepared to put his own name behind Thomas’s character, which was more than most references amounted to — Hannah had written enough of them for Mrs. Corliss to know the difference between a name given freely and a name given because it had been asked for.
One question remained.
She had written it at the bottom of her list in her own hand, and she looked at it now: Money after marriage.
Hannah knew exactly how much she possessed.
Danforth’s wages had covered the boardinghouse, but postage and sundries had come from her own purse, and what remained was rather less than the eleven dollars and forty cents she had carried from Mrs. Corliss’s house.
Once she married she would no longer earn wages.
Thomas had explained what his wife would be expected to do.
He had not said how the household money was managed or whether she would have anything for her own use.
She drew a clean sheet toward her and began:
Mr. Avery,
Thank you for your frank reply. I have also received an answer from Mr. Jessup —
Her pen stopped.
She sat looking at the question on her list. Her father had taught her about money — by dying without telling her mother where it had gone.
Mrs. Corliss had taught her the rest — by loving her for ten years and leaving her nothing.
Hannah knew what happened to a woman who did not ask about money. She knew it in her hands.
But she also knew, sitting at the desk with the pen cooling, that she was about to trust this man with a good deal more than money.
She was about to get on a train and travel halfway across the country and marry him the day she arrived and live in his house and raise his daughter and eat at his table every morning for the rest of her life.
If she could not ask him about thread money face to face, across a table, with her own voice — if she needed a letter to do it — then she had no business marrying him at all.
Whether she bought her own thread or put it on a household account was something two people living beneath the same roof ought to be able to settle between them. If they could not settle so small a matter, Hannah suspected they would have much larger troubles.
She looked at the line on her list: Money after marriage. She left it there, folded the list into her pocket, and finished the letter. She told Thomas Avery that if his offer remained open, she was willing to accept it.
The telegram was waiting at the desk when she came down to breakfast.
OFFER STANDS. WILL SEND FARE AND TRAVEL DETAILS. AVERY.
Hannah read it once, and then again, in case four additional words had somehow appeared between the first reading and the second.
They had not. Not pleased. Not I look forward to meeting you.
Certainly nothing so extravagant as I shall be glad to have you.
Just the fact, bare as a bill of sale, set down and sent.
She folded the telegram, but a smile had already escaped her. Apparently Mr. Jessup had not exaggerated about the quiet part.