Pearl lifted a forkful of food to her mouth, but said before she took it, “Mrs. Fetterman received a letter from that doctor in Brownville today.”
That perked him up and his eyes snapped up to connect with hers. “Is everything all right? Pebs?”
Pearl waved her fork in dismissal as she finished chewing and swallowed. “Yes, it wasn’t about Pauline. It was about that friend of hers…Mary?” Dwight nodded; his fork poised near his own mouth. “Seems she is in…” she paused with a quick glance at the twins, “some sort of trouble and the doctor asked Elvira for help.”
Dwight pondered this for a moment. From the look on his mother’s face, he quickly surmised what kind of trouble the girl was in. Despite himself, his interest was immediately captured, as if an invisible line had been tossed out with a hook on the end and it had become lodged in his heart. Abstractly, he wondered why he felt more empathy than judgment toward her. It was as if, somehow, he knew she wasn’t to blame. Odd that.
“What kind of help?”
“The doctor asked if Elvira knew of anyone who would agree to temporarily marry the girl,” she paused with a twinkle in her eyes. “Seems that man has a real affinity for proxy marriages.”
Dwight’s eyes widened. “He’s looking for a husband for her…like…in name only?”
Pearl nodded as she took another bite, swallowing it before she answered, “Yes. Reading between the lines, I imagine he’s attempting to save the girl from shame and censure by finding a husband for her that isn’t a townsman. Alas, at the moment, Elvira doesn’t know anyone to suggest.”
“What does censure mean, Mama?” Grace asked, brows furrowed.
“Never mind, child. Eat your dinner,” Pearl admonished, flashing Dwight a look beneath her raised eyebrows that he knew meant, we don’t need the twins pondering a subject like this!
The twins glanced at one another, shrugged, and went back to their meals.
To Dwight, the answer was simple. After all—what was wrong with him doing it? From the little he’d seen of her, and from what Pauline had indicated, this Mary was just a girl who had fallen on hard times, lost her father and brother—if he remembered correctly—and had been attacked to boot. If she now found herself in this kind of trouble, he could only imagine it had something to do with the attack she had suffered on the main street in Brownville.
He knew Pauline had formed a friendship with her, and he trusted his sister’s instincts and opinion. At any rate, from the sound of it, the marriage would be brief and just to help the girl out, right? Putting two and two together, he figured the doc wanted to get the girl married to smooth out the rough patches and to give the child a name—providing that was the trouble—and an annulment would be forthcoming, just like they had set up for Pauline and Tobias.
“Tell Elvira I’ll do it,” he stated, his voice flat and brooking no discussion.
He half expected his mother to immediately react in the negative, but she surprised him with a serene smile. “All right, son. I’ll do that.”
Blinking at the suddenness of her answer and what he had just agreed to, Dwight sat back in his chair with a thud.
Well, seems I’m about to be married. I’d say that was the fastest courtship in history.
Chapter 3
“Y ou want me to marry a man that I don’t really know…and it be a proxy wedding?” Mary asked the next day, once again sitting in Doc Reeve’s office.
She cast a skeptical eye between Doc Reeves and Pauline Keller, her friend and the closest thing to a sister she’d ever had. “Like you did?” she added, her eyes searching Pauline’s for assurance.
“Well yes, but less than what I did, actually. In this case, it’s not like he’s a stranger, Mary,” Pauline insisted. “It’s Dwight—my brother. You remember seeing him at the wedding, don’t you?”
Mary did, indeed, remember seeing Pauline’s older brother, or rather, surreptitiously watching him from afar. She recalled that his features were quite similar to Pauline’s—warm brown hair, rich honey eyes and full lips. She remembered that his face was square-jawed and handsome, his teeth, when he smiled, were straight and attractive, his nose average, and his hair was thick and soft looking…so much so that it made her want to run her fingers through it. To Mary, he was strikingly handsome—but oh, so far out of her league.
Besides that, they hadn’t even exchanged greetings or anything—and now, she was supposed to marry him?
“He agreed to this?” she asked, incredulous eyes scanning between her friend and the doc.
Pauline gave a definitive nod. “From what Mama said in her telegram, he suggested it.”
“But, w…why?” Mary stammered. “Does he know what he’s agreeing to? Does he know,” she paused and sucked in a big breath of fortifying air, “that he will be giving his name to the spawn of an outlaw?”
Immediately, Doc Reeves reached over and covered one of Mary’s hands with his own as Pauline did with the other.
“Mary, you mustn’t think of your baby that way,” the doctor urged. “The child you are carrying is just as much yours as it is the begetter’s. And how the child turns out will be largely up to you and how you raise the little one.”
“But…I don’t know anything about Dwight,” Mary hedged, desperately trying to wrap her mind around this development. When Doc Reeves had said to leave everything to him, she hadn’t dreamed he would come up with such a solution.
