The Mail-Order Brides. Bronwyn Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ away a cloud of midges, she trudged on, setting her sights hopefully on the gaunt structure ahead. The brisk, salt-scented breeze helped to clear her head but did little to steady her legs. She still felt as if she were on a rolling deck, although the captain had assured her that the effects would pass quickly.

      Evidently she was no better a drinker than she was a sailor.

      The closer she came, the more she dreaded the coming interview. To think that not long ago she’d been celebrating her engagement. Henry Carpenter Smythe, a young man her father had met on a business trip to Richmond and brought home with him, had seemed to be everything any woman could want. Handsome, with lovely manners and a delightful sense of humor, he had quietly let it be known, without actually boasting, that he was more than comfortably situated.

      Dora had been smitten at first glance. Intent on impressing him, she had arranged a dinner party and invited a dozen of her closest friends, praying that Henry wouldn’t fall instantly in love with her best friend, Selma, who was easily the most beautiful woman in their set.

      He’d been polite to all her friends, but no more than that. At her father’s invitation, he had extended his stay at Sutton Hall, and two weeks later, after a whirlwind courtship that had been encouraged by her father, Henry had asked her to marry him.

      On St. Valentine’s Day he had given her a handsome diamond ring and they’d begun making plans for the wedding. They had talked of June weddings and bridesmaid gowns and flowers, and who Henry’s best man would be.

      “If I’d seen him first,” Selma had declared, “he would have been mine.” She’d said it in jest, but there’d been something about the way she’d persisted in hanging on to Henry’s arm at every meeting, quizzing him about his friends and asking if he had a brother, that had made Dora rather uncomfortable.

      But then, at the time, Dora had been increasingly concerned over her father’s health. He’d lost weight and seemed distraught. Even if she hadn’t fallen in love with Henry, she would have encouraged him to stay because her father seemed to perk up in the younger man’s company.

      When Henry had asked for her hand, her father had beamed, offered his blessing and urged them not to wait. “I’m looking forward to seeing my first grandson before I die,” he kept saying, and each time, Dora would hasten to assure him that he would soon be teaching a raft of grandsons to ride, to hunt and fish.

      One or two, she’d thought privately. After a few years. First she wanted time alone with her husband who, seemingly every bit as eager to wed, had talked about the trips they would take together, the home they would build, the children they would eventually have…

      That had been in February. Now here she was, barely two months later—orphaned, seasick, tipsy and penniless—about to face a future as the mail-order bride of a man she had yet to meet, in the most godforsaken place she had ever seen in her entire life.

      Well…not quite godforsaken, she amended. There was the tiny, steepleless church.

      Standing on his wide front porch, a tall, dark-haired man slid a pair of leather-palmed hands into the hip pockets of his lean canvas trousers as he gazed with satisfaction over his windswept island. He’d watched as Dozier’s bugeye, the Bessie Mae & Annie, pulled alongside the dock. Watched the men swarm aboard, lift the hatches and begin unloading freight. Still others tackled a deck cargo of lumber, swinging bundles off onto the wharf. Clarence’s crew of warehousemen began logging in and transferring crates to the warehouse for future shipment, setting aside a few small parcels to be brought up to the house.

      Grey nodded in satisfaction. They knew what they were about, the men of St. Brides. A bit rough but, for the most part, good men, deserving of all he had done for them. All he planned to do.

      Today’s woman, however, couldn’t have come at a more awkward time. He needed to leave within the hour if he wanted to reach Edenton by tomorrow morning. His brother, Jocephus, after setting up a meeting with another ship owner with a view to consolidating their two businesses, had asked Grey to take part in the negotiations, even though Grey had no direct interest. While his brother might be better at reading fine print, Grey was the acknowledged expert when it came to reading men.

      Circumstances had made Grey St. Bride what he was. Some called him arrogant because he made laws as he saw fit and expected those laws to be obeyed. Grey didn’t see it as arrogance, but simply as the only way to keep peace among the tough, independent men who lived and worked on St. Brides Island.

      He’d been seventeen, Jocephus nineteen, when their father’s health had begun to fail. Calling his two sons to his bedside, the old man had given them their choice of his various and scattered properties. Jocephus, then a student at Chapel Hill, had chosen the family’s two small schooners and the warehouse in Edenton; Grey had chosen the island that had been granted by the state of North Carolina to his great-grandfather more than a hundred years earlier.

      By the time Grey had actually inherited the island that bore his name, there’d been little left but a single storm-ravaged house and a few dilapidated wharves and warehouses. More valuable was the dependable deepwater inlet on the north side, between St. Brides and Ocracoke Island, as well as a less dependable one to the south between St. Brides and Portsmouth.

      He remembered standing on this very spot—gazing out over the free-ranging livestock that had eaten down the vegetation to the point where blowing sand had covered half the maritime forest—and thinking something had to be done if the island was to survive, much less thrive.

      Left to the meager population of transient seamen, inlet pilots and seasonal fishermen who came late in the summer for the mullet, residing in bulrush-thatched huts bordering the North End, the entire island might have washed away before anyone could take measures to secure it. As it was there were tree stumps visible at low tide in both the sound and the ocean, a mark of the constant erosion.

      The first thing he’d done was to bring in a few stockmen to pen up the livestock so the scrubby vegetation could recover. Next, he’d brought in carpenters to rebuild the docks and warehouses and provide sturdier housing for the permanent men. Three years ago, it had occurred to him that something was still missing.

      Women.

      Actually, he hadn’t thought of it until Emmet Meeks had led a delegation up the ridge to ask what he could do about bringing out a few women.

      “Thing is, Cap’n—” the men gave him the courtesy title, saying damned if they were going to call him Saint. “—see, the thing is, it takes so long to go over to the mainland and meet up with a woman and court her, and then, when she finds out where we hail from, they don’t want nothing to do with us.”

      Not to mention the fact, Grey had told himself, that most of the men, as decent and hardworking as they were, lacked certain social graces, shyness being the least of their problems.

      It was Almy Dole, boatbuilder and general carpenter, who had expressed it best. “Maybe once we get ’em stranded out here for a spell, it won’t be long before we start looking right good to ’em.”

      That had planted the seed—because the men were right. In order to thrive, a community needed stability, and that meant creating families. To that end he had tracked down the circuit preacher who served the nearby islands of Portsmouth and Ocracoke, and convinced him to add St. Brides to his charge. Then he’d set about building a church and a parsonage. Next, he’d composed a carefully worded advertisement and sent it off to the newspapers in three different coastal towns on a rotating basis, as he lacked the amenities to deal with more than one or two women at a time.

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