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Winifred had hot water ready for tea and some soup warming on the stove. Sam set his burden down in the front hall and lifted the cloak away from the slim figure.
“Yan Li,” he said proudly. He spoke words to the girl and Winifred caught her own name, which she carefully pronounced aloud.
Yan Li lifted her gaze to Winifred’s and smiled. My heavens, she was a beauty! “You have done well, Sam. Your bride is lovely.”
Sam beamed and translated her words.
“She must be starving,” Winifred said. The girl was probably too terrified to get off the train and purchase food at the stops along the way. What a brave thing to do, board a ship and travel thousands of miles from her home to a new country, and a new life with a man she had never seen before.
“Sam, tell her I am glad she has come.”
Sam chattered to Yan Li in his own language.
“Now tell her she is safe here.” Sam translated and was met by a spate of Chinese from the girl’s lips.
“She say happy to be here. Not want to marry old merchant in village.”
Winifred laughed softly. “Tell her she is most fortunate to come here and marry a fine man.”
Zane burst into the hallway. “And for God’s sake, Sam, feed her!”
Sam bustled Yan Li into the kitchen and seated her at the small table while he poured a cup of tea and began ladling the thick potato soup into a bowl. The white kitten pounced on the tassels dangling from his black slippers.
“We marry tomorrow,” he said to Zane. “In church. Both Christian. But tonight, not proper to be together.”
“We have another guest room, Sam. Yan Li can sleep there. I’ll take her travel bag up now.” He lifted the girl’s small sack and headed upstairs.
Winifred sought Sam’s eyes. “Is that all she brought with her?”
He spoke a few words to Yan Li. “She say that all she own. Mother’s wedding dress inside and sleeping robe. Family very poor in China.”
Winifred made a note to herself to visit the dressmaker and arrange for more clothes for the girl. Surely Verena Forester could sew Chinese garments? They were a thousand times more simply cut than the ruffles and bows American women were wearing these days.
As the girl spooned up her soup and Sam danced about the kitchen waiting on her it began to grow dark outside. Night came early in winter, and Winifred’s apprehension began to gnaw at her.
Tonight she and Zane would drive out to the Jensens’ farm for a Christmas dance. Zane thought Sam and his bride should get to know each other with no one else around, and besides, Zane said he’d been asked to attend.
But a dance? Surely she had no place at a gathering of Zane’s friends and neighbors. She knew no one except for Rooney Cloudman, the man who had left those yellow roses on Cissy’s grave, and Rita at the restaurant next to the Smoke River Hotel. And the only formal dress she’d brought was the green velvet hanging in the hall closet. It had a bodice that buttoned up to her neck and long sleeves with no lace at the cuffs. She wondered what women out West wore to a dance.
* * *
The Jensens’ barn was lit up like a palace, with candles in tin cans illuminating the path to the wide barn door and kerosene lamps suspended on ropes from the rafters inside. The place glowed with soft light and a potbellied woodstove in one corner made the cavernous space toasty warm.
Children raced around the perimeter of the sanded and waxed plank floor playing tag, and the men were lined up at the refreshment table, two sawhorses with cloth-covered two-by-sixes spanning them.
What women wore, Winifred soon learned, was everything under the sun. Silk with ruffles and bouncy bustles, satin with floppy bows around the hem, even wool challis cut so low in front Winifred blanched. If the wearer took one deep breath, she’d pop right out!
“What’s funny?” Zane asked at her elbow.
“Nothing. Just...things are certainly different out here.”
“Not so different. People talk and drink and dance and gossip just like they do back East.” He opened his mouth to say more, but a manicured hand grabbed his forearm.
“Why, Zane! I didn’t know you would be here tonight.”
The young woman ignored Winifred and hung onto Zane’s arm. “I’m free for the first reel,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched, almost shrill. Whether it was that unmusical sound or the woman’s proprietary attitude, Winifred’s skin prickled.
Zane detached his arm from the woman’s grasp. “Darla, this is Winifred Von Dannen, Celeste’s sister. Winifred, Mrs. Darla Bledsoe.”
