Minnie's Mail Order Joy (Home for Christmas Book 3) Read online

  Minnie’s Mail Order Joy

  Home for Christmas Book 3

  Bethany Rose

  Contents

  Free Prequel to the Brides of Dalton Series

  Home for Christmas Series Authors:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

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  Copyright © 2019 by Bethany Rose

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Home for Christmas Series Authors:

  Joyce Alec

  Rose Pearson

  Bethany Rose

  Annie Boone

  Natalie Dean

  Hanna Hart

  Sophie Mayes

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  Chapter 1

  Minerva Ellis peered out the window, shifting the curtain ever so slightly so that no one, watching from outside, could know that anyone within was looking out. Her sisters were silent, as if even a whisper could be detected by the man at the door. They waited, breathing as quietly as they could, although no one outside could possibly know that they were inside watching. Boston homes on Beacon Hill were as indomitable as castles in Europe, but with better plumbing and the Ellis home was no less splendid than its neighbors. The Cabots and the Lodges might have a longer pedigree in Boston, but the Ellises had made their mark and they too had the comforts of the age thanks to their father’s hard work and inheritance: water was piped in from outside, making the servants’ lives easier; the rooms were heated by steam which was powered by coal and did not need firewood for warmth. The Ellises, in common with the families of bankers and shipping company owners and aristocrats, had bathrooms in their mansion! Their father Johnathan Ellis Jr, was a believer in innovation and when anything was new, he purchased it, as excited as a child with a new toy. It was fortunate that he had been able to do it when they were young; there was no money for such expenses now.

  The knocking continued.

  “When will he leave?” fretted Hazel.

  Neither sister answered her. Minnie knew that, even when this one left, there would be another. Clara saw no point in responding to a question which they could not answer. They continued to wait while Minnie stood sentry at the window, her slender form braced against the wall and her gaze intent upon the front of the house.

  The front door! The effrontery of the man, she thought, to invade the decorum of their home in full view of the neighbors. The longer he stood there, knocking, the more likely that neighbors would wonder why no servants were coming to answer the knock. How long before neighbors realized that the Ellises were paupers now, all their money gone, their servants dismissed, their accounts with local merchants cancelled, and very soon, their house to be taken from them?

  Perhaps they already knew. They would have seen that the Ellis carriage was no longer used to transport the family to elegant social occasions. They would know that invitations were no longer being extended to the Ellises, who had committed that terrible, unforgivable sin in prim and proper, blue-blooded Boston: they had lost their money.

  Money was not discussed in polite circles. It was something that one had, like fine horses and exquisite jewels and trained servants. Of course it was necessary; one could not make the annual trip to Europe without funds for the ship that crossed the ocean. Nor could a woman order a new wardrobe, when in Paris, if she lacked the funds to do so. But one never spoke of it. Only vulgar folk spoke about money and the girls had been instructed by their mother that they must never be vulgar.

  Minnie, Hazel and Clara knew that to some of the hidebound neighbors on Beacon Hill, Father was vulgar because he had made his money and had not inherited all of it. Oh, Father had inherited a small amount from his father, and the Ellises had come over on the Mayflower more than two hundred years ago, which gave him an acceptable pedigree. The Ellises had never been among the wealthiest of the Boston Brahmins, but they were well regarded for their ancestry. What did it matter if they were not the wealthiest? But Father invented things, and he had an intuition for which new creations would one day become commonplace and he had built his knowledge into factories which produced the inventions that he and other enterprising young men had created. Boston, unsure of what to do with this novel sort of wealth, accepted Jonathan Ellis Jr because, after all, his family belonged.

  The Ellises lived in splendor and the Ellis daughters, beauties all of them, with top-notch educations and winning manners, were sought after in marriage even before they made their debuts. But that was before Mr. Jay Cooke and the railroads . . . Mother didn’t understand quite what had happened, and Father did not believe in upsetting ladies with financial matters which were beyond their ability to understand. It was called a panic, Minnie knew, and it appeared that it would have no end. Somehow, the panic which had burst in 1873 even affected Europe and showed no signs of easing although they were already into another decade. She was not sure how, but from that event, which seemed to have no connection to the Ellis factories, had come the impecunious situation in which the family now found itself. Mother had gone to the country for her nerves and Father was in New York for some purpose which likely had to do with efforts to get a loan.

  “He has left,” Minnie said, letting the curtain fall back into place so smoothly that it might never have stirred.

  “For the time being,” Clara replied.

  “I cannot endure this,” Hazel moaned. “Every day, watching out the window as if we are hostages, while yet another merchant comes to the door to demand payment. How long before they send a constable to dun us? And turn us out?”

  Her sisters had faced these questions as well but they had adopted the Bostonian manner of addressing them, which required them to keep their fears locked deep inside and not to mention them aloud. Money was vulgar. To speak of it made one vulgar. One must never be vulgar.

  “We must do something,” Clara said.

  “But what?” Hazel wailed. “What can we do? We cannot go out and find work. Father would never let us and even if he would, what could we do? We have no training in anything.”

  A glint of something between malice and mischief showed itself in Minnie’s blue eyes. “I doubt that factory girls have training before they are hired to work sixteen hours a day,” she commented.

  Clara frowned. “We are not going to work in a factory,” she said in a disapproving tone. “You know this very well, Minnie; I cannot think why you suggest such impractical solutions to our dilemma.”

  Minnie ignored her sister. “We must devise a plan and set it into operation before Father returns,” she said.

  Their affectionate, impractical father was convinced that things would improve, even though the Panic had already dominated the economy for a number of years now and showed no signs of relinquishing its hold on the business community, the Stock Exchange, or the once-thriving commercial network which had seen the United States flex its financial muscle.

  “What do you have in mind?” Clara asked, aware that Minnie was too farsighted to ever propose an idea if she had not already investigated it beforehand.

  Minnie reached beneath the mattress of her opulent four-poster bed and pulled out a magazine. “Mail-order brides,” she replied, brandishing the magazine as if it were evidence.

  Hazel’s green eyes widened. Clara’s brown eyes narrowed.

  “Marry strangers who live in the miserable lands out west?” Clara scoffed.

  “It’s not as if anyone we know in Boston is going to marry us,” Minnie replied, “now that we are poor and Father is bankrupt.”

  “We do not know that he is bankrupt,” Clara corrected her. “We only know for certain that he is suffering certain financial difficulties at this time.”

  “This time and for years before. We know that we lost our horses three years ago,” Minnie recalled, using one slender finger to tally the loss. “We know that Father gave up the carriage just before that. Since that time, we have seen Father sell paintings, dismiss the servants one by one, explain to us that we cannot have a new wardrobe because ‘things are not optimum at the present time’ . . . if he is not bankrupt, then he will be,” Minnie finished. “We can do nothing to help and the burden of providing for us makes matters worse. Mother is in a sanitorium for nervous collapse—yes, she is Hazel; Clara, you know it too.”

  “She is in the country for her lungs,” Clara insisted. “Father said so.”

  “Her lungs are not what ails her. Her lungs do not make her cry for no reason. It is not beca
use of her lungs that she could not get out of bed,” Minnie was matter-of-fact, once again, as she marked the proof of her claims. “She cannot bear what is happening and Father will not admit that we are near to being destitute. You all know it.”

  She did not flinch from the gaze of her sisters. They were close, even when quarreling. They had each been born within a three-year span so that differences in age meant nothing. They had grown up together, shared nurses and dancing masters and French tutors; they had worn one another’s clothing when they became old enough to share the same size; they had told one another secrets and kept them from their parents. Harmless, girlish secrets that had cemented the strong ties between the sisters as they were poised upon the brink of womanhood, ready for the destiny that they had expected: an excellent match, a magnificent wedding, a stunning trousseau, a splendid honeymoon . . . and then a return to Boston to take their place as the next generation of society leaders.

  “And marrying a ruffian from an uncivilized part of the country will rescue us?” Clara demanded.

  “Staying here will not!” Minnie replied. “You may wish to stay whilst we wait, daily, to see which merchant with an unpaid bill comes to the door to demand what is due to him. I would rather seek another course.”

  She pointed to the magazine. “There is a shortage of women in the West,” she said.

  “There is a shortage of manners, gentlemen and cleanliness in the West as well,” Clara retorted. “Ought we to go as wives or maids?”

  “Clara,” Minnie said, gentling her tone because she knew that Clara’s tone was driven by fear, not temper. “We must do something and we are women. What can we do except to marry? If we have husbands, Mother and Father will not have to worry at what will become of us. They will leave Beacon Hill and yes, it will be hard on them. But they will have each other and they will make do. With three daughters to marry off and provide dowries for, how can they possibly manage?”

  “But Minnie, Clara is right . . .” Hazel said, her voice quavering. “The West is very vulgar, I am told. People there . . . they do not obey the customary rules of society. They are . . . ill-bred, I have heard. The women know how to shoot rifles and some of them smoke cigarettes and do not wear corsets.”

  “Lucretia Bodkin smokes cigarettes,” Minnie said. “I have seen her do it.”

  Hazel gasped. “No! Truly? And Mrs. Bodkin is so prim!”

  “There is much that Mrs. Bodkin does not know about Lucretia,” Minnie said cryptically. “But the Bodkin money is not tied up in the Stock Exchange; it is not invested in unreliable ventures and it is not at risk. They have always been wealthy.”

  “Don’t speak of wealth,” Clara corrected automatically. “It is a vulgar subject.”

  Minnie opened her mouth to remonstrate with her sister then noticed that Clara’s skin was drawn tight over her fine-boned features. Her sister’s worrying in silence was draining the vitality from her youth.

  “I won’t speak of it,” she said. “But I mean to marry a man of substance, one who is willing to work to earn his keep. I don’t care where his parents came from or when they came here, so long as he is able to put food on the table and a roof over my head.”

  Chapter 2

  Clara stared at her sister as if Minnie had just spouted heresy. “Minerva Allerton Ellis!” she exclaimed. “That the day should come when I should hear you speak such ill-bred words.”

  “Clara, I want to marry a man who has earned his own place in the world, not one he inherited from ancestors who have been dead for centuries. What does is matter if one’s ancestors came to Massachusetts with the Pilgrims? That will not pay the tradesmen’s accounts.”

  “Father has earned his own way,” Hazel pointed out. “He took his inheritance and built factories.”

  “We are very proud of him,” Minnie said. “But can you not see where that dependence has left us? Father has gone to every bank in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to ask for a loan and he has been turned down. He is going farther from home to procure the money that he needs to keep the factories running, but it will not be enough to restore us to the prosperity that we were used to. We can stay here and bemoan the fact that circumstances are dire, or we can make our own way in the world.”

  “I hardly see how marrying uncouth strangers is making our own way in the world,” Clara challenged her sister.

  “We are women,” Minnie said. “Women marry and it is by marrying that they make their way. What else can we do?”

  She looked from sister to sister. Neither appreciated her brusque logic, but neither had an answer to her challenge. It had never occurred to any of the Ellis sisters that it would be necessary to do anything at all except make the transition from daughters to wives, with the assurance that they would enjoy the same security throughout their lives. They were learning just how precarious a thing security was.

  “Where would we go?” Hazel asked.

  “Colorado,” Minnie said promptly. “It’s booming. The silver mines are turning prospectors into millionaires. The land is good for ranching. There are—“

  “Colorado,” Clara echoed as if her sister had said Hades. “Colorado? Why should anyone want to go there?”

  “Colorado will one day be in the west what Boston is in the east,” Minnie predicted. “They have the railroads, the mines, the ranchlands. They have newspapers and telegraph lines connecting the state to the east—“

  “Is Colorado a state?” Clara asked.

  “In 1876,” Minnie replied, choosing to ignore her sister’s haughty tone. “There are even telephones!”

  The Ellis girls knew of the telephone that had been invented; their father was eager for the day when everyone had one of the marvelous machines which would allow people to talk to each other even though they were not in the same room. Others were dismissive of the novelty, Clara among them.

  “Who does one talk to in Colorado? The cattle?”

  Hazel studied her sister. “You have been thinking about this for a long time,” she realized. “You have been studying this.”

  Minnie scooped up her flowing skirts and sat next to Hazel. “Dear,” she said kindly, “I cannot bear to think of us wasting our lives here, hoping for something that will never return. We are young. Do you know what happened in the South after the end of the war?”

  “Of course,” Hazel replied. “The slaves were freed.”

  “Yes, of course, but not only that. What happened to the women?” Minnie said. “There were many young women left, but fewer young men. They had died on the battlefields. There were not enough men to marry all the women who were left.”

  “The North also lost men in war,” Clara reminded her. “Our own uncle died at Antietam.”

  “Yes, Clara, I know that. But my point is that we must be filled with courage and resolve and go west.”

  “Why Colorado?”

  “Because it is growing. One of us can marry a rancher, another a miner, another farmer or anything! And we need not be far apart,” Minnie said. “It would be as if we were here. If one of us lived in Boston, another in Providence, and another in Manchester. We would be quite close.”

  Minnie’s parents had not sent her to Madame DeLaCourt’s Finishing Academy in order for her to become proficient in geography and for young girls raised in New England, where states bordered one another with a proximity that made them seem almost like nearby neighborhoods, the distances of the West could not readily be envisioned. Neither Hazel nor Clara had any knowledge of the terrain with which to refute her, and the first point in favor of what Clara still regarded as folly began to seem at least somewhat less forbidding.

  “What else do you know?” Clara asked suspiciously.