Free Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) by Kate Whitsby

horse’s head as they went, and the conversation between the people on the ground settled into a familiar banter punctuated by laughter. The children still played around the periphery of the entourage, stopping to inspect insects and fungi along the way, sorting out stones and picking at the vegetation, before running to catch up with the main body of the group.
    Although she could understand nothing of their conversation, Penelope sensed nothing overtly threatening about their behavior, except that they took her with them, away from her intended destination and her home. As they trudged along the road, she hoped they would take her back to the ranch, but before they exited the forest, they veered off on a side track deeper into the trees and she quickly lost all notion of where they took her. Some time later, exhaustion overcame her heavy head and she slumped forward onto the shoulders of the horse, dozing fitfully. She would have slid off onto the ground had not some firm hand propped her up again.
    The chill of evening sinking over the countryside awakened her. She sat up and looked around her, recognizing nothing of the landscape. As she rubbed the last sleep out of her eyes, the band broke out from the trees of the forest into a wide, clear field, its bare clods lying exposed to the frost. At the other side of this field, she noticed a cluster of low hovels half embedded in the ground. As the group approached them, Penelope scrutinized these dwellings carefully, trying to comprehend their curious construction. Only their roofs protruded above the ground. No visible walls extended up from the ground to the roofs. Their doorways seemed to lead down into the earth. When her escort stopped her horse near one of these strange structures and handed her down from its back, the woman who appeared to be acting as Penelope’s custodian took her by the hand and ushered her through a doorway into one of the houses. A circular window in the very center of the roof sent a shaft of light into the dwelling, showing her it’s interior. Besides the round shape of the large single room and the fire burning on the floor in the center of it, everything in the building appeared to Penelope to represent nothing more than a poor family home, with bedrolls laid out here and there, bundles of herbs and haunches of meat hanging from the rafters, and a wide assortment of people seated all around. White-haired elders and little children lounged and talked and cooked and sewed throughout the room. Some of them glanced up at her as she entered, exchanged a few casual words with Penelope’s custodian, and returned to their own occupations as though her presence indicated nothing more unusual in their lives than the arrival of another familiar relative. Her custodian conducted Penelope to an empty mattress of blankets on the other side of the fire and, by pressing down on her shoulder, induced her to sit down on it. The woman drifted away and busied herself over the fire, cooking food and conversing with the other people in the room. After a little while, she brought Penelope a wooden bowl steaming with soup. The smell infused Penelope’s nostrils with aromatic fumes, reminding her of the gnawing hunger in her stomach she so diligently ignored on their long ride to the encampment. She drained the bowl in one gulp, and the woman chuckled pleasantly. She refilled the bowl and stood over Penelope as she drank that off, as well, before she took it away. As soon as she departed, the warmth of the soup spread its mysterious magic through Penelope’s battered body. She wondered briefly if the woman had poisoned her, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer anyway, and she tipped over onto the blankets underneath her. The undulating voices around her and the savory perfume of the wood smoke billowing up into the light of the roof hole tantalized the margins of her consciousness for another fleeting instant, and then she fell into a profound sleep.