In Need of a Good Wife by Kelly O'Connor McNees Page A

Deborah promised that she could bring along a silver tea service. Molly seemed to come from humbler circumstances, and her expectations would be fittingly realistic for the wife of a farmhand like Nit LeBlanc. He would have to work hard to earn her trust, however. Molly explained that she planned to write to him under a nom de plume until she was sure his intentions were pure.
    Anna Ludlow might very well become the minister’s wife, for she could weave and he kept sheep, and they both stated that “reading the Scripture” was a pastime. Clara felt a little satisfaction on behalf of the town that it had proved that mole of a man Reverend Potter wrong—Destination did have a church after all. Two, in fact.
    The bashful brewery worker Walther Luft would appreciate Bethany Mint’s claim that she “didn’t care a thing about her husband’s looks.” Cynthia Ruley seemed to fit the curt list of requirements given by another brewer, Bill Albright, since her tintype showed her to be slender and, according to her description, she was a talented violinist. Lucretia Blackstone might do for Jeremiah Drake, the brewery’s owner and the only man who seemed entirely fixated on hair color. She was a blonde.
    By morning, Clara had written a short reply to each man’s letter, introducing her suggested companion. It was nothing to Clara to stay up all night long. She preferred short, intermittent dozing to the danger of submitting to true, deep sleep. In sleep, Clara’s dreams were full of the memories she spent her waking life trying to evade.
    All the time she worked, she waited to feel remorse for concealing from Rowena the tiny fact of Daniel Gibson’s five children, but the remorse never came. The bachelors, not the brides, were Clara’s customers, and it was the bachelors’ happiness she had been hired to tend. If a presuming creature like Rowena learned a little humility in the process, well, so be it. Clara couldn’t lose sight of the purpose of all her hard work; on the backside of one of the discarded applications, she sketched the outline of the little white cottage in the center of a meadow, not a single tavern or glass of ale in sight.
     

The maids’ quarters of the Channing mansion occupied the east side of the garden level of the house, which was partly underground with small, high windows looking up toward the daylight. There were ten narrow rooms, each containing a cot and a row of hooks on the wall. The Channings were considered the most generous of all the wealthy Manhattan families. It was a lavish thing to give the maids their own rooms. At the west end of the floor was a large open room lined with laundry tubs and wringers. One long table for folding, ironing, mending, and knitting occupied the center of the room.
    Half the maids worked upstairs serving in the dining room, bringing weak tea to Mrs. Channing in her bedroom late at night and whisking the silver tray away a half hour later without waking her up, opening the drapes each morning and washing the glass with vinegar water, pulling the drapes closed at night. The other half spent their days in the laundry room. Elsa was one of them.
    Each week the laundresses washed linens for twelve bedrooms upstairs and tablecloths and napkins for three meals a day, along with the family’s underclothes, towels, and Mr. Channing’s numerous shirt collars. They lived in a cloud of lye-tinged steam, and it was for the good of their lungs that the doors and windows remained opened to the back garden all day long, whatever the weather. In winter, a laundress could be at once flushed in the face from the heat and numb in her fingers and toes from the cold.
    In the garden was a bench where Elsa liked to take her midmorning break to rest her swollen feet. Today, she pulled a letter out of her boot—it was no use keeping paper in her apron pocket when it was, perpetually, damp, along with the front of her heavy linen dress, and, beneath that, her shift, and, beneath