“I just want me a little cabin with some chickens and a plot of corn. Seems like that ain’t askin’ much,” Mariah added.
Beside her, Nancy arranged her tattered skirts and purred like a cat with a pot of cream, “I’m partial to a soldierin’ man myself.”
Dovie’s faded blue eyes lingered on each woman, her round face full of expectancy. “Why, Miz Roxanna, you ain’t said a word about why you’re travelin’ to the wilderness.”
A hush fell over the group as they huddled about the shanty stove. Roxanna expelled a little breath. “Well . . . my father’s at Fort Endeavor serving as scrivener. He’s always writing letters telling me how beautiful Kentucke is, how you can see for miles since the air is so clear, that even the grass is a peculiar shade of blue-green, and the forests are huge and still. Not leaping with Indians like some folks say.”
“Sure enough?” Mariah murmured as the other women huddled nearer.
“My coming to Kentucke is a surprise. Papa’s enlistment is near an end, and we’ll be going somewhere to settle, just the two of us.”
“Don’t you want to find a man—get married?” Mariah asked.
The innocent question stung her. Roxanna lifted her shoulders in a show of indifference. “I’m not so young anymore—spinster age, some say.”
The women exchanged knowing glances and began to titter.
“Seems to me you’re comin’ to the right territory then. A frontiersman ain’t gonna let a gal who’s a little long in the tooth stop a weddin’, ” Olympia said, her smile smug. She reached into the bosom of her dress, withdrew a Continental dollar, and waved it about. “I bet Miz Roxanna with her fine white skin and all that midnight hair won’t last five minutes once she sets foot in that fort.”
There were approving murmurs all around. Roxanna smiled ruefully as Nancy reached over and snatched the bill out of Olympia’s hand, tossing it into the stove. “That dollar’s worthless and you know it. Show me somethin’ sound.”
Still chuckling, Olympia lifted her soiled calico skirt and took a pound note from her scarlet garter. “Now, who’s to wed after Miz Roxanna?”
“I say Nancy ’cause she’s so sweet.” Mariah sneered, rolling her eyes.
This brought about such feminine howls a riverman stuck his head in the shanty doorway.
“I ain’t sweet but I’m smart,” Nancy said, tucking a strand of flaxen hair behind her ear. “I’ll take the first man who asks me, so long as he ain’t wedded to the jug and don’t beat me.”
Mariah rubbed work-hardened hands together, the backs flecked with liver spots. “I’ve got a hankerin’ for a cabin in the shade of a mountain with a spring that never dries up, not even in summer. If a man won’t take me, I’ll make do myself, just like I’ve been doin’ since I was nine years old.”
Roxanna felt a stirring of pity for every scarred soul around the hissing stove. “Why don’t we pray for husbands—for all of you?” she said on a whim, watching their faces.
Olympia smirked and shook her head. “With all due respect, Miz Roxanna, the only experience I’ve had with prayin’ women is the ones who’ve prayed me and my ilk out of one river town after another.”
“I ain’t never prayed before,” Mariah confessed.
“I like the idea. It ain’t gonna hurt none,” Dovie said quietly. “Maybe it’ll help.”
Reaching out, Roxanna squeezed her hand. Despite their worldly ways, these women could be surprisingly childlike, and they responded to any compliment or scrap of kindness like a half-starved cat.
“Praying isn’t hard,” she told them. “Sometimes when I can’t think of what to say, I just remember the words I learned as a little girl.” Opening the door of the stove, she added some dry willow chunks. “It goes like this. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ ”
Nancy nodded. “I learned that a long time ago in settlement school back in Pennsylvania.”
“Well,” Mariah urged, “keep on a-goin’. Might as well add that we’re all needin’ husbands.”
“Maybe we should hold hands,” Dovie suggested, reaching for Nancy’s. “Once I peeked in at a prayer meetin’ and it seemed that was what they did.”
Self-consciously they bowed their heads. Roxanna stayed silent as they made their petitions before adding her own at the very end. “Father, You know what we have need of before we even ask. But we ask anyway, knowing You are patient and kind and the giver of all gifts. I ask that You send each of these women a husband—but only men who are honest and kind and good. Help them to be the women You made them to be. Help them to know You.” She looked up, eyes searching the shadows. Curled up on a cot against a far wall, Abby was fast asleep. “And please bring Abby’s voice back—let her speak again. Amen.”
Dovie didn’t let go of her hand. “Why, Miz Roxanna, you left yourself out.”
Swallowing down a sigh, Roxanna dredged up a smile.
Truly, some things are past praying for.
“I ain’t goin’ to bed till you’re prayed up,” Olympia said, crossing her arms.
They joined hands again, the only sound the stove’s popping and water sluicing under the hull beneath their feet. One by one they all prayed again, this time for Roxanna, and it seemed she’d never heard such sincere whispered words. But it was Dovie’s petition that lingered the longest.
“Help my friend Roxanna, Mister Eternal. Prepare her a man she can’t take her eyes off of and who can’t take his eyes off her. And let it be right quick, if it pleases Ye.”
Laura Frantz is the ECPA bestselling author of A Moonbow Night, The Frontiersman’s Daughter, Courting Morrow Little, The Colonel’s Lady, The Mistress of Tall Acre, and the Ballantyne Legacy series. She lives and writes in a log cabin in the heart of Kentucky. When she’s not writing novels, she enjoys cooking, letter writing, traveling to Scotland, hiking, handwork, Bible studies, and flying to the West Coast to visit her firefighter son. Learn more at www.laurafrantz.net.
Books by Laura Frantz
The Frontiersman’s Daughter
Courting Morrow Little
The Colonel’s Lady
The Mistress of Tall Acre
A Moonbow Night
The Lacemaker
THE BALLANTYNE LEGACY
Love’s Reckoning
Love’s Awakening
Love’s Fortune
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Laura Frantz, The Lacemaker
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