Page 7 of Seven Brides for Beau McBride (The McBrides of Montana #3)

Ellie saw the fatal flaw in that plan but bit her tongue.

Diana was hot enough under the collar as it was—Ellie didn’t need to go pointing out her shortcomings, which included the fact Diana hadn’t had much schooling.

While she could read, her penmanship was illegible—which was perhaps a blessing, given her spelling.

Diana read her mind again and looked even more rebellious. “Fine, so I can’t write well. You write to him for me, then. I’ll tell you what to write and you can put it down nice.”

“But I don’t want you to go,” Ellie had said, appalled.

“I’d be miserable without you! And I couldn’t live with myself, imaging the horrors you might encounter in the wilds!

” Ellie’s imagination was in full flight.

She imagined a leaking cabin in bear-infested woods; a beast of a woodsman with unchecked lusts; hunger and threats galore.

And poor Diana, wilting like a stomped rose…

Diana’s ink-blue eyes stared deep into Ellie’s, knowing very well Ellie’s propensity to flights of fancy. Diana flapped the newspaper to get her attention. “These advertisements are offering lives away from the mill. Freedom, Ellie. Imagine living in Montana!”

“I am imagining it.” Ellie’s heart was thudding, she was imagining it so vividly. “You could end up living in a swamp, Diana!”

“Does Montana have swamps?”

“See, you don’t even know! It could have swamps in deserts on glaciers for all you know! With bears and bugs and bobcats!”

“So, write to him for me and ask him to describe where he lives. You can get him to describe it in detail, swampy glaciers and all.” Matter-of-factly, Diana folded the paper around the advertisement and handed it back to Ellie. “I’ll get the writing paper.”

“This is ludicrous.”

“No. Staying here until we’re as old as Mrs. Tasker is ludicrous!” Diana was half buried in the writing desk in the corner, digging through it for paper.

“Is she that old? I know she looks old, but someone told me she wasn’t even forty yet.” Ellie felt ill at the thought of Diana leaving her.

Diana gave a cross shriek, dropping the lid of the desk with a bang. “I don’t want to look old before my time because I let Chattaway Mills suck the blood out of me! I want romance and adventure before I shrivel up and die. Don’t you?”

Ellie supposed so… but Diana was talking about taking a terrible risk. And the only kinds of risks Ellie liked were the imaginary kind.

Diana changed tack. She put the writing paper down and took Ellie’s hands.

“They’re only letters, El. What can it hurt to write a letter or two?

” Her voice was softly cajoling, like she was talking to a child.

“Won’t it at least pass some time, exchanging letters with some lonely man out on the frontier? We don’t have to promise anything.”

And because Ellie hated to see Diana unhappy, and would do anything in the world for her, she gave in and let Diana push her down in the chair at the writing desk and press a pen into her hand. She let herself be coaxed into writing that letter, all the while imagining the worst that could happen.

She had told herself that Diana would soon come to her senses. That this was just a diversion to get her through her latest mood.

But that had been months ago. Summer had long since curled on the bough; it was now a fitful fall with erratic showers and scudding clouds, and Ellie had done more than merely write to Diana’s Mr. Copious Symmetrical Attractions for her—she had secured him .

Because she was an idiot.

The thing was, Diana dictated the most boring letters, and Ellie hadn’t been able to resist, well, helping her. So, she’d embellished a little here and there. And then maybe she’d been a little seduced by the whole adventure and embellished, well, a lot .

And the man on the other end had been smitten.

It was possible her letters had been a little too good.

Was it her fault that writing to Mr. Copious Attractions had turned out to be fun? The man was just as charming as his ad promised. Funny too. And the way he described his home was so vivid that Ellie felt like she’d been there.

We live close to the top of a mountain, he wrote, in a meadow that is an ocean of seedy grassheads in summer.

They wave about in the wind in little flicks and it’s the prettiest sight in the world.

When I was a kid, I used to lay down in it, so I could look up at the big sky, all painted with clouds, and watch the bugs jumping and the butterflies flitting.

Lying there I could hear the creek chattering by and the sound of the wind in the woods, whispering secret messages, which I liked to imagine were from Ma and my sweet sister Maybud, who we lost long ago.

I don’t know if Massachusetts is anything like Montana, but here the air is always in perfume.

You got the spice of the pine and the sharpness of the mustard leaves, the sweet jumping of the flowers in your nose, and the sun-smell, which I don’t quite know how to describe except that as it warms everything it lets loose an eddy that just about knocks me senseless.

My older brother was always itching to leave Buck’s Creek, but I couldn’t ever understand it.

There ain’t nowhere that could be as beautiful as here.

“See, El? Afternoons in the sun!” Diana had wriggled gleefully as they read his letter, side by side. Her eyes had been shining like summer lakes. “No looms, no bells, no wretched cotton! Imagine, I could lay about in a meadow half the day.”

It did sound idyllic, Ellie had to admit.

She’d never been in a mountain meadow, or smelled a creek, or lain flat on her back and looked at the sky.

Reading his letters, Ellie felt like she had a sense of this Beau McBride.

His epistolary efforts were so good she even forgave his fixation on symmetry in women.

He was poetic and sensitive, and when he spoke about his family, Ellie felt like she’d met them.

I got a little sister who dresses like a boy, swears like a sailor, and is crafty as a fox.

I figure about half of what she tells me is falsehood, but she’s a good kid for all that.

You’ll like her. Everybody does, although mostly against their better judgment.

My brother Jonah is the absolute opposite (except he too dresses like a boy and swears like a sailor).

Jonah is as honest as the day is long. He’s kinda puzzled by people a lot of the time and prone to wandering off by himself a lot.

Although that might be because our town ain’t nothing but McBrides and we’re a fractious lot.

Although he’d stressed looking for “copious attractions” in his ad, he was solicitous and hungry to get to know Diana beyond how she looked.

Tell me about your day. What do you do when you get up in the morning—I’m keen to know all the machinations of your schedule.

I ain’t never left these mountains and got no clue what factory work might be like.

What do you do? What do you think about when you’re at your work?

What’s your favorite flower? Song? I like music a great deal and I hope you do too.

Ellie may have taken artistic license with the answers. Diana wasn’t much of an orator and tended to give answers like, “Tell him I like roses, and while I’m working I think about putting my feet up.”

Ellie didn’t lie exactly, but she did give some life to Diana’s responses, life that may have been drawn from her own experiences, rather than Diana’s…

I don’t know if you have many roses in Montana, she wrote to him, her nib swirling across the page in enthusiastic loops, but here in Fall River the mill owners have gardens bursting with them.

The bosses mostly live on the Hill, in houses that look like something out of a storybook.

There’s one icing sugar-white house on a corner that’s positively exploding with roses from early June to the first frosts in fall.

On our Sunday afternoons off I walk up to the Hill and soak in the scent, all powdery sweet.

That sugar-white house has roses winding and twining around its porch posts and up the siding, just a waterfall of fat pink and yellow flowers.

When I’m at work sometimes I think about that house and imagine that one day I’ll live there, and when I open my windows, I’ll be swimming in their perfume.

Don’t you think that would be a thrill? Nothing bad could ever happen to you in a house like that.

We have wild roses up here, he wrote back, they grow in tangles and are flat-faced pink flowers with only four petals. But they’re very pretty and they smell of magic. We could plant some around our house.

She’d been so caught up in her imagining that it had taken Ellie a moment to realize our house meant his and Diana’s.

Not hers. But for one shimmery moment she’d envisioned it— their house —decked with wild roses, and her heart had skipped a beat.

She’d pictured a modest little cottage by his creek, whitewashed the shining white of icing sugar, surrounded by meadow grass and flitting butterflies.

The windows would be flung open to the scent of roses and they’d…

That’s when she’d caught herself. There was no they. It would be Diana inhaling all those wild roses, not her.

She was happy for her friend, she really was. But she might also have been a little bit sorry for herself, she admitted, when she saw Diana twirling around the room with the letter. And not just because Diana was leaving her.

Perhaps Diana had been onto something answering one of these ads.

Because Beau McBride was just the kind of man who might make you swoon, with all his talk of planting roses.

Sometimes, while Diana slept, Ellie surreptitiously re-read his letters, and in her secret heart she pretended he was writing to her.