They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived

Chapter 2

A thousand miles away, Josephine Bennett read that advertisement in the last hour of daylight, sitting in the parlor of a house that had been quietly dying for five years.

She was thirty-one. She had her late mother’s brown eyes and her late mother’s talent for arithmetic and absolutely none of the other things the world had decided were necessary for a woman to have.

Josie was, by the precise and merciless standards of St. Louis high society, unspeakably fat.

She weighed near three hundred pounds. She knew the exact number because her father had weighed her on the livestock scale in the spring, in front of the hired man, for reasons she had never understood and had not asked about because asking would have required a conversation she wasn’t prepared to have. Her face was round and heavily-cheeked, her arms thick, her waist a circumference that strained every garment the dressmaker produced and sent dress seams to their deaths with regularity. She moved with a rolling, deliberate gait that society matrons imitated behind her back at dinner parties she was not invited to.

Her father, Thomas Bennett, had been wealthy once. The panic of 1873 had reduced him to the kind of man who sat in the study with a decanter of brandy and a grudge, and Josie had become the focus of the grudge because she was convenient and present. Unmarriageable, he said it the way other men said stupid or wasted — as though it were her fault, as though the problem were a choice she was making rather than a verdict the world had delivered.

The suitors who had come — three of them, over five years — had looked at her with the specific expression of men discovering a horse they’d been promised was lame. They had invented urgent business elsewhere before the second cup of tea.

Mrs. Harriet Montgomery, the worst of the social matrons, referred to her in company as the Bennett behemoth. Josie had heard it. You always heard it. The cruelty of people who think they are being discreet is that they are never quite as quiet as they imagine.

She read bearing the physical marks of a harsh life and read it again.

Not a man of fine appearance or well-favored or any of the other encoded language that actually meant something quite different. Just — the physical marks of a harsh life. An honest man, describing himself without self-pity and without apology.

Josie set the paper down. She looked around the parlor — the threadbare rug, the bare patches in the wallpaper, the decanter on her father’s study table visible through the open door.

She had never wanted the life she had. She had endured it because she had not seen another option.

She picked up the paper again.

She wrote back that same evening, before she could talk herself out of it.

Mr. Mercer. I must speak plainly. I am a woman of thirty-one years and substantial girth. I have been turned away by polite society because of my size, and I will not begin a correspondence under any false impression of myself. If you are a man who knows what it is to be judged by the eyes of strangers, perhaps we might find an understanding. I seek a quiet life, a hearth to tend, and a husband who will not look upon me with disgust.

She sealed it before she could read it again. Reading it again would have stopped her from sending it.

Three weeks later, Gideon sat by his forge with her letter in his scarred hands.

Substantial girth. He turned the phrase over. He pictured a woman who was perhaps sturdy, wide-hipped, the kind of frame that would be useful in frontier life. He did not care about that one way or the other. A woman’s weight was not what he had been thinking about when the hollow ache drove him to write an advertisement.