“Still, an older woman might be better.”
“Don’t look at me, Horace Bagby, baby-tending is a full time job. I’ve got commitments. Papa’s crew spent half their time keeping me from climbing the ratlines, and me barely out of the cradle. Many’s the time he had to send a man overboard to fish me out. I liked to walk the pinrail, to prove I could do it. Tripped on a pin or two and went over the side more times than I can remember.”
Horace’s smile was indulgent. He had known Bess for half a century. “Still proving yourself, too, aren’t you? You’ve not changed all that much, Bessy my girl.”
“Ballocks. Now, back to what I was saying—a woman with my responsibilities don’t have time, and a young one, leastwise a decent one, can’t be expected to go live among a houseful of men. ’T’wouldn’t be seemly. So here’s what I have in mind.”
Five minutes later, Horace shook his head admiringly. “It’s legal, all right, but I doubt if your nephew would agree to it.”
“You leave Matt to me. If a man’s drowning, he’ll grab aholt of the first thing that floats past.”
It took three weeks and any number of wires and letters. In the first letter, Bess laid out the bare bones of her plan. She knew of a young widow, a hard worker, clean, decent, sound of limb and meek of disposition, who stood in desperate need of a home. And while Bess couldn’t very well send a respectable young woman to live in an all-male household, if Matt would be willing to marry her for the sake of the baby, his troubles would be over.
Matt would not, he wrote back immediately, with appropriate emphasis.
To which Bess replied that in that case, neither she nor her friend Horace Bagby, the lawyer who represented the young woman in question, could recommend the position to her, which was a shame as she was capable, trustworthy, honest as the day is long, and an excellent hand with children and infants.
“If you can’t take over Annie’s care yourself, try to find me someone else,” Matt wrote back. “I’m not taking on a wife.”
Meanwhile, nearing the age of three months, Annie was given her first taste of solid food against the advice of the goat owner, who said a child couldn’t take real food until it was at least a year old.
Annie took to what Crank called burgoo, a thin oatmeal mush, like a cat to raw fish. She had a few wisps of colorless hair and had learned to smile. Luther took credit for the smile, said he’d taught her how, but to Matt’s way of thinking, her smile was Billy, all over again.
It made him sad. Which was some better than being angry and frustrated, but not a great deal.
Bess wrote that the only women she’d found willing to move so far from civilization were either too decrepit to get a job on the mainland or else they were running away from trouble. She added that she was sorry not to be of any more help.
“Dammit, Bess,” Matt wrote back. They had long since dispensed with the formalities, as Bess didn’t fit anyone’s notion of a maiden aunt, and he detested being called “boy.” “Help me out here. It’s on your conscience that Annie’s stuck here with no proper care.”
“Don’t see what I can do. You say you don’t want a wife. My friend don’t want another husband, either, so a proxy wedding would satisfy propriety without committing either of you to more than you’re wanting to take on.”
Reading Matt’s answer to Horace, Bess broke into a broad grin. “There, I told you it’d work. Sneak up on ’em, one step at a time, then spring the trap.”
“Bess Powers, you’re a wicked woman,” Horace said admiringly. “You should’ve been a lawyer.”
“All it takes is a creative mind to come up with the plot and a lawyer to work out the details.”
“We’re a pair, all right. Now, all we have to do is convince Rose.”
Convincing Rose wasn’t as difficult as it might’ve been a month earlier, when Bess had first told her about the motherless infant left in the care of four rough seamen. Rose had been able to see it all too clearly—the barren island, the weathered shack, a helpless infant left to the tender mercies of four rough men who cursed and scratched and bathed once a year, if at all.
Although Bess had mentioned visiting the place a few times….
But then, Bess had also written about crocodile-infested rivers and dugout canoes paddled by men dressed in feather headdresses and small straw baskets to cover their private parts.
Still, the place wasn’t all that far away. She’d heard of a few fishermen who lived there with their families. Presumably, they fared well enough.
Probably better than she did at the moment, here in civilized Virginia. Of her two most recent situations, neither had lasted more than a few days. First she had found a position as assistant housekeeper in a girls’ boarding school. After wheezing and sneezing for two days she’d discovered she was highly allergic to chalk dust.
Her luck seemed to have changed when she had taken the job of governess to seven children between the ages of five months and eleven years, until the night the children’s father had come to her room wearing a silk bathrobe and suggested it was time they had a quiet conference.
Rose had shut the door in his face, packed her bags and left.
After that, she’d been forced to lower her expectations. Hunger did that to a body. Even so, her last job—she no longer thought of them as positions—had lasted less than four hours. Having had her bottom pinched black and blue and her bosom, modest as it was, loudly admired by an oaf who called himself a chef, she had finally whipped off her apron and marched out of the town’s finest dining establishment.
She was getting better at making choices.
And now, having reluctantly been forced to borrow funds for her room and board from Bess, she had no choice but to sit quietly and listen as Bess and Mr. Bagby presented their proposal.
She had heard it before. Her answer the first time had been a flat refusal. “Thank you, but I’m not looking for another husband. Things may be a bit discouraging at the moment, but that’s only because so many people are looking for work at the same time. I read that in a newspaper recently.”
That was yesterday. Today she had agreed to hear the proposition again. Not that she expected to change her mind, because one husband had been more than enough, but Bess had been kind, and she owed her more than she could easily repay.
“It’s merely a business arrangement for your own protection,” Horace explained. Rose sensed that Bess had the poor man twisted around her little finger.
She opened her mouth to reply, but Bess broke in. “You see, Matt doesn’t want marriage any more than you do, but by now, he’s desperate enough to wed the devil. That’s what makes it so perfect.”
Rose, wondering if she’d just been insulted, tried again. This time it was Horace who shut off her objections before she could voice them. “Happens all the time, this kind of arrangement. Just a convenience, like I said before, done by proxy and properly witnessed, it’s as legal as any other contract, which is not to say the whole thing can’t be dissolved at the behest of either party.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Rose said hesitantly.
Bess carefully avoided looking at Horace, but they both knew the battle was won.
And what a story it would make, Bess thought gleefully. Of course, she would have to allow a decent interval to pass before she could set it to paper. By then she’d have learned all the gory details of that so-called accident. And naturally she would change the names of all parties involved.
Rose’s courage held up until nearly the end. It was when she looked down and saw her own shaky signature, Augusta R. L. Magruder, on the marriage certificate, that her knees threatened to buckle and her breakfast threatened to return on her.
Except