Prologue

Tahoe City, California

Summer 1881

“Now you’ve gone and done it, you dunderhead!” Nine-year-old Ada pronounced her judgement upon her twenty-year-old uncle with a vocabulary enhanced by the novels that Carlos brought her from the Tahoe City library.

Her three uncles and her twin sister, Clara, looked away from the front door which her Uncle Mason had just slammed shut on his way out, almost preventing Colonel, the devoted collie, from following her master out.

“You, Uncle Jake,” Ada said calmly with the maddening assurance that she always displayed. The Holloway brown eyes of the uncle and niece met in a silent duel which inevitably Ada would win.

Jake Holloway stared in disbelief at his niece over the row of pitchers and glasses containing purple spreading phlox that Clara had arrayed down the center of the dining table. Impatiently, he moved a chipped yellow pitcher out of his line of sight. “What did I do? I didn’t do anything!”

“You reminded him,” Ada answered. “Uncle Mason doesn’t like to be reminded.”

“All I said was that I’d like to go to one of the dances in town. A fellow wants to do something besides take care of the accounts, you know,” Jake said in an aggrieved tone. “Reminded him of what?”

Ada stood up and began clearing off the table. Supper had not been a particular success, and that meant an abundance of slops to feed the hogs. With her fork, she scraped the leavings from the plate in her hand to a metal bowl in front of her. “You reminded him,” she repeated, “that he’s not married. He doesn’t think anyone would want to marry him. Because of his scars,” she added with exaggerated patience when her three uncles continued to stare at her without comprehension.

“Jiminy Christmas, Ada, his hair grows down to his shirt collar, and his beard hasn’t been trimmed since ‘bout the time I used a razor for the first time. Any gal who takes a gander at him is likely to think he’s a Ponderosa pine on legs!”

“That’s unkind,” soft-hearted Clara reproached her uncle. “He can’t help the scars.”

There was a moment of silence as the boys, older than their nieces, recalled that Uncle Mason had gotten those scars trying to save their oldest brother, Abe, and his wife during Lester Underwood’s attack on the ranch. It had been eight years ago, and time had gone on for them, but for Mason Holloway, it seemed as though time hadn’t gone anywhere.

Jake shifted in his chair, then stood up. “I’m going out to the barn,” he said. “See to the horses.”

“I’ll come with you.” Seventeen-year-old Adam followed quickly.

“Robert, if you stay,” Ada suggested, “you can help us clean up. Or,” she said, holding the metal bowl out to him, “you can see to it that the hogs are fed.”

As her uncles vacated the kitchen at the pace of racehorses, Ada watched their departure with satisfaction. Her sister studied her. “Why did you want everyone to leave?” she asked as she poured water into the basin for the washing up. The water had cooled from when Uncle Mason had first poured it from the pot heating over the stove. Clara knew that dishes washed in hot water came out cleaner than those washed in lukewarm water, but the pot was too heavy to lift, and none of the younger uncles ever thought of what was needed when it came to housekeeping.

She rolled up the sleeves of her dress. “I’ll wash,” she said, as she always did.

Ada didn’t argue. She didn’t have the patience that dishwashing required, and she realized that Clara didn’t like it when bits of food remained on the plates and forks.

“There aren’t any clean cloths for drying,” Ada announced as if this were an unfamiliar development.

Clara sighed. “We haven’t done the laundry,” she reminded her sister.

“I declare,” Ada said as she stomped off to the pantry where the baskets of soiled laundry were stored, “if it wasn’t for us, I don’t know what the uncles would do!”

She returned to the kitchen with a rumpled rectangle of cloth that had been used previously.

Clara winced. “We’d best do the laundry tomorrow,” she decided.

“It’s not Monday,” Ada replied. “Laundry can only be done on Monday. If Uncle Mason had a wife, she’d see to it that things were done properly. Then you and I could get real schooling!”

“Carlos is a good enough teacher,” Clara defended the ranch foreman who had been conscripted into giving the girls their lessons because Uncle Mason refused to allow the girls to attend school in town.

Ada bestowed an expression of utter disdain upon her sister. “Clara, you are a such a flibbertigibbet!” she said in exasperation.

Clara scrubbed the plate in her hands vigorously, as much to clean it as to vent her ire at her sister’s insistence on using words whose meaning was lost to everyone else.

“I am not!” she retorted. “Carlos does the best he can, and he knows more than we do.”

“I should hope so; he’s quite old. He’s thirty years old, after all. A proper teacher could give us proper instruction. How can I become a lawyer and help Uncle Jake manage the accounts if I’ve never studied geography or Latin?”

Clara’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. “How will knowing Latin help Uncle Jake with the accounts?” she queried.

“It’s part of a proper education,” Ada told her. “Students in real schools learn those things. I know it’s so. I’ve read it in the novels Carlos brings me.”

It was no use disputing one of Ada’s facts, and Clara didn’t bother to try. “I don’t want to learn either of those things,” she said. “I’d rather learn about plants and herbs and which mushrooms are poisonous to eat and which are good.”

“That’s in books, too, Clara,” Ada, ever the proselytizer, insisted as she finished drying the plate Clara handed her and put it away.

“Carlos tells me what to look for.”

“But Clara, wouldn’t it be better if we had a—a second mother who could do the chores so that we could learn what we want to learn?” Ada coaxed. Her eyes were bright with enthusiasm, her features animated with the root of an idea that she had been watering with her hopes ever since the summer had begun.

“We don’t have a mother,” Clara sniffed. She didn’t really remember their mother and didn’t like to think about being motherless, even if her uncles had grown up fatherless.

“We’re a family of orphans,” Ada said in dramatic tones, her voice low and somber.

“Yes, we are, and it isn’t the least bit funny!”

“I’m thinking of a solution.”

Clara’s eyes turned wary. Ada’s solutions seldom matched the zeal with which Ada presented them.

She handed her sister a glass, grimacing as she saw the crusted corner of the cloth that Ada was using to dry the dishes. Perhaps, she thought, a second mother might be just what they needed. Someone who would see to it that the laundry was always done, and the dishes were put away clean, and there were no specks of egg or potato left on the edges of the pans. Someone who knew how long to let bread bake over the fireplace and how long a piece of meat should cook in the Dutch oven before it got too dry.

Someone who could reach the cobwebs in the high corners of the ceilings and could get the uncles to take the parlor carpet outside and give it a thorough beating to get rid of the embedded dust. Someone who would get rid of the fleas that found their way into Colonel’s golden white fur. Someone who would think well of Clara for her love of drying flowers and brewing teas and would put up with Ada’s fanciful thoughts and unfamiliar words.

She turned back to Ada and asked, “What sort of solution?”

***

Writing an advertisement for a mail-order bride was a more difficult challenge than Ada had envisioned. A piece of paper was in front of her, an inkwell by her side, and several of the novels she was reading were stacked beside her. She and Clara were in their bedroom, and Uncle Mason assumed that they were in their bed. But he never checked after he kissed them good night and listened to their prayers. Once the door closed behind him, Ada and Clara were at liberty to put the initial stage of her plan into practice.

He always left the candle lit so that they could get ready for bed by its light. Thanks to that candle, the twins were composing an advertisement for a mail-order bride, the “second mother” that Ada had described and Clara, who was rarely supportive of her sister’s schemes, had surprisingly given her approval.

Ada sighed. Little Women was her very favorite novel—Jo March was a heroine after Ada’s own valiant heart—but she couldn’t find anything in the narrative which precisely suited the needs of the advertisement, even though three of the March girls found husbands in the course of the story. There was nothing at all of use in The Prince and the Pauper, even though it was a marvelous adventure.

If only Carlos would let her read grown-up stories, Ada thought rebelliously. She’d asked him to bring her a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne from the lending library, and he’d agreed to do so. But when he returned from Tahoe City later that day, he’d been very cross with her and complained that she hadn’t told him it was “that sort” of a story and he’d gotten very suspicious stares from Miss Adeline, the librarian. Ada didn’t know what the fuss was about; a novel entitled The Scarlet Letter would surely offer useful examples of the kinds of missives that might be copied for the advertisement she was trying to create.

“Why can’t you just write that a rancher in Tahoe City is looking for a wife to help with the housekeeping?” Clara inquired. She was tired and wanted to go to sleep, but Ada insisted that they had to compose the letter together.

“Because,” Ada said as she dipped the pen into the inkwell, “there has to be something…something of the heart in the letter. It can’t just be about housework. He’s offering marriage. What lady is going to leave her home to marry a stranger if she thinks all that’s in it for her is a heap of work?” Ada, frustrated with her efforts, couldn’t even come up with a grandiose word to describe her plight.

“Once she gets here,” Clara said, not bothering to stifle her yawn, “she’ll have to stay. She won’t want to go back and admit to her family that she couldn’t keep a husband.” The town hadn’t yet stopped gossiping about Miss Adeline, who had left Tahoe City before the girls were born to marry a man in San Francisco, only to come back, still single, because he smoked smelly cigars. Now Miss Adeline ran the library, a fate that the girls knew was a sure sign of defeat.

“We want her to stay,” Ada replied. “We want her to be happy here.”

“How are we going to send the letter? We never go into town, and Uncle Mason will never let us send a letter on our own.”

“Carlos will send it,” Ada answered.

“He’s going to send the advertisement to the magazine?”

“Who else would do it? I can’t ask Uncle Mason, and the uncles won’t be any help. Besides, they’d tell Uncle Mason, and he’d lose his temper and probably punish us both. I’d lose my books, and you’d lose your mushroom searching.” She gave her sister a knowing glance. Venturing beyond the permitted boundaries of the property came with risks. Clara was reluctant to break the rules except when her beloved mushrooms and herbs were located beyond the fencing that marked the acreage of the Holloway horse ranch. Ada was not one to let the fence remain an obstacle if there was something beyond it that her twin coveted.

“Isn’t he going to find out when his bride arrives?”

“By then, when she’s here,” Ada assured her sister, “it would be rude for him to send her away.”

“Uncle Mason doesn’t mind being rude,” Clara countered. “He’s rude all the time.”

“Yes, but that’s only to us, and we know he doesn’t really mean it. He wouldn’t be rude to a grown lady.”

“Just finish the advertisement, won’t you?” Clara begged. “I want to go to bed. We have to do laundry tomorrow.”

“Laundry is done on Mondays,” Ada reminded her sister. “Everyone knows that.”

“It’s not a law!”

Ada sighed. Clara could be very, very obstinate at times. “When our mail-order bride comes,” she promised, “she’ll take care of doing the laundry on time. She’ll take care of everything!”

***

“Why do I have to give the advertisement to Carlos?” Clara protested.

“Because I’m going to gather the eggs.”

Ada had stayed up late the night before finishing the advertisement, while Clara, overcome by her yawning, had fallen asleep on the floor. It was necessary that the twins were partners in this endeavor, and therefore, Clara had to deliver the advertisement to Carlos.

“He’s coming now for our lessons!” Ada spotted the foreman crossing the yard from his cabin. He paused for a moment as he examined the progress of the cucumbers in the Holloway garden. “You go tell him what we’re doing. Don’t let the uncles see you!” she hissed before skipping down the front steps, egg basket in hand and her straw hat dangling down her back.

Clara’s shoulders sagged. Carlos was very nice, and she liked him, but she was not the twin who got into scrapes. That was Ada, and Clara preferred it that way. She trudged grudgingly to meet him, her straw hat properly positioned on her head.

“Hola, Clara,” Carlos called as he caught sight of her. “These cucumbers are ready for picking. If you wait too much longer, they’ll rot on the vine. Someday, you’ll learn how to make pickles, no?”

“No,” she said mulishly.

“Ah, Clara,” the good-natured foreman said. “You know you like pickles. Did you know that you can pickle mushrooms?”

For a moment, Clara’s interest was piqued. Then she remembered her mission. She thrust the paper at him.

“What is this?” Carlos asked as he shifted the cucumbers to one hand.

“It’s an advertisement for a mail-order bride for Uncle Mason,” Clara answered, squinting up at Carlos to avoid the sun.

Carlos’ brown eyes widened. He tugged the brim of her hat lower so that her eyes would be shielded from the glare. “Mason, he wants a wife?”

“Ada says he does.”

“Ahhhh, of course. Ada is behind this.”

“She wants you to mail it.”

Carlos handed Clara two cucumbers to hold. “I think I will look it over first,” he said with a smile. “Before it goes to the post.”

“Ada spent a lot of time writing it,” Clara defended her sister. Even if she didn’t always concur with Ada’s plans, it was her duty as a twin to stand behind them.

“Yes, I’m sure she did,” Carlos said as he read over the letter. “You know, most men, they prefer to do their own wooing.”

“Ada says that Uncle Mason will never think of it. He’s so busy working and taking care of all of us that he hasn’t any inclination to think about marriage,” Clara replied as if reciting Ada’s remarks on the subject.

“You think that he needs a wife?”

“I don’t know what he needs,” Clara said. She hadn’t expected to be asked what her opinion was of the matter. “Ada thinks we need Uncle Mason to have a wife.”

“Yes, I can see how Ada would think that. I think, Clara, that our lesson for today will be to rewrite this letter, yes? With the proper spelling.”

“What’s wrong with the spelling? Ada knows ever so many words.”

“Yes, yes, she does, but if we send this letter as it is, this bride you seek for your uncle will be convinced that he is an illiterate rustico, a yokel. You are wooing for your uncle in his place, yes? You want to make sure that the lady keeps reading the advertisement. If she is an educated woman, she will do what I am going to do as soon as we go inside.”

“What’s that?”

“Take a pen and fix all the mistakes. Come now, let’s get started before your uncle comes home for lunch. If I am doubtful about the wisdom of what you are planning to do, your uncle will be even more so, and as we know, Mason does not like to be in doubt of anything.”

Chapter One

Nevada City, Nevada

Summer 1881

Billie Morris screwed her face, her green eyes vivid with utter derision as she rolled the dress up and thrust it into the carpetbag. Isabella Morris wore dresses. Billie Morris wore trousers and shirts, comfortably loose so that she could pull a calf from its mother if the birthing was problematic. If the villagers had trusted her to take up the doctoring done by her grandfather, she wouldn’t have had to serve as the veterinarian, but the townspeople were not as tolerant as Grandfather had been. A woman, even if she’d accompanied her grandfather on his medical calls since she was old enough to carry his doctor’s bag, could not be a doctor.

Billie put more care into folding the trousers that she was taking with her. Grandmother wouldn’t approve, but Grandmother had always been disapproving of Billie serving as Grandfather’s assistant. Grandmother always had a verse of scripture to match her disapproval so that Billie had grown up thinking that God didn’t approve of her any more than Grandmother did.

But Grandfather and Grandmother were gone now. Billie stood still for a moment, fighting the grief that surged up within her. She missed her grandfather and the purpose that she’d known when the two of them went out on calls. She missed her grandmother in a different way, a complicated, nuanced way that she didn’t quite understand.

What she did understand was that there was no way to make a living in Nevada City for a twenty-five-year-old woman who wanted to be a doctor. Women, Grandmother had preached, were meant to be wives. The Bible said so. There were no lady doctors in the Bible, Grandmother had reminded Billie. Their neighbors agreed.

The result was that Billie had no option but to become what her grandmother had said was a woman’s destiny. However, Billie had no intention of marrying a joyless, narrow-minded Presbyterian farmer who wanted a wife to give birth to babies, not to deliver them.

Billie fastened the carpetbag with her belongings inside. She fixed her bonnet in place over her black hair. Her plans were made. She had her train ticket. She was on her way to Tahoe City, California, to marry a horse breeder named Mason Holloway.

***

“You can’t get there by train, ma’am,” the railroad clerk explained with weary patience. “It’ll cost you eight dollars and twenty-five cents to take the stagecoach from here to there. There ain’t no other way to get to where you want to go. Horse ranchers,” he added patronizingly, “don’t live in town.”

Conscious of the dwindling supply of money in her carpetbag, Billie allowed herself a moment of suppressed irritation that her prospective husband had failed to send sufficient funds along with his letter to thank her for accepting his proposal for a mail-order bride. If she’d had the money to afford this trip in any comfort, she wouldn’t have had to become a mail-order bride at all, Billie thought peevishly. Mr. Clemens at the bank would be handling the sale of her grandparent’s house and belongings, and in time, there would be some cash coming her way. But not yet; settling estates, he had explained, even the small Morris estate, took time.

Billie was no more endowed with time than she was with money. She’d paid for her train ticket by selling Tulip, Grandfather’s horse. Tulip was old and did not fetch a generous price, but she knew that the Calhouns would treat the docile mare kindly.

“That’s an outrageous price!” Billie exclaimed in response to the railroad clerk.

“Maybe so, ma’am, but it’s a steep road and not easily traveled, even by a team of horses. The road runs along the Truckee River Canyon. It’s a beautiful view,” he added proudly.

Billie nearly told him that she had come to Tahoe City to be married, not for the view, but she held back. It was maddening to have no independence of her own because she was a woman. She had grown up at the mercy of a community of narrow-minded people who disapproved of her for wanting to be a doctor. Now she was on the begging end of a stagecoach!

Billie carefully counted out the eight dollars and twenty-five cents. “When will it be here?” she asked.

The clerk re-counted what she’d handed him, as if, Billie thought, he didn’t trust a woman to know how to count. “’Bout an hour or so, ma’am. There’s a storm heading our way that might slow him down. You can wait inside,” he said. “I reckon a lady needs a little time to rest up after being on a train so long.”

“I am perfectly healthy, sir,” Billie snapped, her patience bridled for too long. “Although I am a woman, I am not a weakling. I can do what a man can do.”

“Is that so? Well, ma’am, unless you want to answer nature’s call out in nature, you might want to know that the privy is located out back. Ladies,” he emphasized the word with relish, “prefer the privacy of a building to a tree.”

Billie flushed.

“I reckon that’s one thing you can’t do that a man can,” he told her as he put the money she’d given him into the till. “Pleasant journey, ma’am. It’s looking like rain.”

***

It no longer just looked like rain, Billie thought. The skies had turned into a giant washtub whose contents were rapidly being emptied out on the land below. The inclement weather had not improved her mood. Nor had it inspired a spirit of cooperation in the stagecoach driver.

The driver was a stocky man with skin that had been tanned to the hue of the saddles on his horses and a demeanor devoid of patience.

“Miss, I’ve gone as far as I’m bound to. The rain what’s coming down is going into that lake over yonder.” He pointed to a body of water to the right of the road. “That means flooding. If I break a wagon wheel or my horses go lame, I can’t feed my young’uns. I’ll let you out here. There’s a bit of shelter by that broken fence over there. You can ride the storm out.”

Billie’s gray traveling cloak was soaked through to her navy-blue frock beneath. The pelting rain had gathered in the upturned brim of her black bonnet, and rivulets of water trickled down her cheek. The long black braid, carefully plaited that morning on the last leg of the train journey with the hope of making a pleasant impression on her husband-to-be, now hung against the side of her damp cheek like a slick rope.

“You suggest that I ‘ride the storm out’ beneath a torn-down fence?” she demanded. “I thought the men of the West were gentlemen.”

The driver shrugged. With his rain slicker and his broad-brimmed hat, he was not as soaked as Billie was. “I got a wife, miss. I treat her right fine. I ain’t looking to impress no other woman.” As he returned to his post atop the stagecoach, he said, “The rain will let up after it’s done. Sit tight.”

“What about flooding?”

The driver paused and looked across the road where the clouds continued emptying raindrops into the lake below. “I don’t reckon it’ll overflow its banks,” he said. “You’re not far from the Holloway ranch now; it’ll just mean a bit more walking. As wet as you already are,” he said philosophically, “a bit more water won’t make much difference.”

Billie watched as he flicked the whip in the air and the horses responded to the sound, their hooves plodding carefully through the mud of the road.

With no other options available to her, and no familiarity with the geography, Billie had no choice but to surrender to the dictates of the foul weather. She hurried over to the fencing that had fallen upon the ground. By tugging at the wood, she was able to insert herself into the hole where the post had been before its fall. She pulled loose boards over herself to manufacture a rudimentary shelter.

Her traveling boots were saturated with rain and mud, and she couldn’t help shivering, even though it was a summer day. The rain itself was cold, spilling its chill over everything it fell upon. Billie huddled within her wooden shelter and gazed out upon the landscape in front of her.

The existence of the fence alone was proof that she was on someone’s property, presumably that of Mason Holloway, her intended husband. Not far in the distance, she could see the outlines of a dwelling through the veil of rain that obscured a better look. Above the rooftop of the dwelling was a bigger building, red; its height indicated that it was a barn.

Someone who placed a great deal of emphasis on fencing. As far as her eye could see, fencing stretched out upon the land. The fencing was higher than what she’d have expected for a horse farm. What horse was going to leap a fence as high as a man’s height?

The stable where the horses were kept was probably somewhere near the barn, she supposed. She saw an enclosure, its fence lower in height, which was probably the paddock. It was a well-maintained property from the little that she could see through the rain. Not expansive, not like a cattle ranch, but time and effort had been made to keep the grass trim. There were trees everywhere.

This was to be her home. She didn’t know if she would feel at home in this place. The pelting rain emerging from sullen gray clouds that seemed to have swallowed the sun was not an auspicious omen. Fencing that appeared to be designed to keep strangers out was hardly a welcoming sign. Why this particular stretch of fencing was in obvious need of repair when, from what she could tell, the rest of the fencing within view was tall and sturdy, puzzled her.

As she sat in the muddy hole, cold, wet, and miserable, with no reason for optimism regarding what now seemed like a reckless decision to pull up stakes and leave home, a low rumble of thunder added to her dismay. When a sudden knife-edge of lightning slashed the bleak opacity of the sky, Billie gave way to a small, involuntary shriek of alarm. The rain that had been inconvenient was now dangerous.

Billie had assisted her grandfather once when he’d been called to the deathbed of a young man who’d been struck by lightning. There was nothing that could be done for the dying boy. It was the heart, Grandfather had explained as they rode home afterwards. The lightning struck the heart with all the force of its current. Billie hadn’t understood quite what that meant at the time, but her grandfather had given her advice on what to do if she was ever caught outdoors in a storm.

“Don’t stand under a tree,” he’d explained to his attentive sixteen-year-old granddaughter. “The lightning will strike the tree and travel through it to you.”

There were trees everywhere. The landscape itself apparently wished her ill.

Billie stood up. Whatever she did, she had to get away from the trees, even if that meant abandoning the ersatz shelter provided by the downed fencing. But when she stood up, her boot got caught between the bottom edge of the fence and the thick mud. She struggled to wrench her foot free as another peal of thunder broke into the steady rhythm of the rain.

Suddenly, Billie froze. The opaque veil of rain and darkness had shifted its form, and the outline of a creature could be discerned as it slowly advanced in her direction. The rain was too heavy and the absence of light too pervasive to let her identify the animal. Was it a wolf? Billie yanked her leg free from its imprisonment. The wood scraped against her ankle and tore her stocking. She felt the quick sting of broken skin, but she kept pulling until her leg was free.

The animal drew nearer. Billie picked up her carpetbag to use as a weapon.

The creature veered closer, then stopped.

A few steps closer, then, it stopped again.

Its tail wagged. The animal barked.

It wasn’t a wolf, and she wasn’t alone! “Nice dog,” Billie crooned, praying that the compliment was deserved. “You must live somewhere around here. Show me where you live.”

As she followed the collie’s wagging tail toward the buildings in the distance, Billie could not help but feel that a venture which left her wetter and muddier with each step, dependent upon a dog’s wagging tail for a compass, could hardly be regarded as a success. What was next, she wondered?