A Creed Country Christmas

Footsteps passed along the hallway, past her door, bringing Juliana out of her rueful reflections. Another door opened and then closed again, nearer, and then all was silent.

The house rested, and so, evidently, did Lincoln Creed.

Juliana could not.

Easing herself from between the sleeping children, after gently freeing the fabric of her nightgown from Billy-Moses’s grasp, Juliana crawled out of bed.

The cold slammed against her body like the shock following an explosion; there was a small stove in the room, but it had not been lit.

Shivering, Juliana crossed to it, all but hopping, found matches and newspaper and kindling and larger chunks of pitchy wood resting tidily in a nearby basket. With numb fingers, she opened the stove door and laid a fire, set the newspaper and kindling ablaze, adjusted the damper.

The floor stung the soles of her bare feet, and the single window, though large, was opaque with curlicues and crystals of ice. A silvery glow indicated that the moon had come out from behind the snow-burdened clouds—perhaps the storm had stopped.

Juliana paced, making no sound, until the room began to warm up, and then fumbled in the pocket of her cloak for Clay’s crumpled letter. Back at the mercantile, she’d been too overwrought to finish the missive. Now, wakeful in the house of a charitable stranger—but a stranger nevertheless—she smoothed the page with the flat of one hand, hungry for a word of kind affection.

Not wanting to light a lamp, lest she awaken the children resting so soundly in the feather bed, Juliana knelt near the fire, opened the stove door again and read by the flickering flames inside, welcoming the warmth.

Her gaze skimmed over the first few lines—she could have recited those from memory—and took in the rest.

You will be twenty-six years old on your next birthday, Juliana, and you are still unmarried. Nora and I are, of course, greatly concerned for your welfare, not to mention your reputation….

Juliana had to stop herself by the summoning of inner forces from wadding the letter up again, casting it straight into the fire.

Clay had accepted the fact, he continued, in his usual brisk fashion, that his sister had consigned herself to a life of lonely and wasteful spinsterhood. She was creating a scandal, he maintained, by living away from home and family. What kind of example, he wondered, was she setting for Clara, her little niece?

He closed with what amounted to a command that she return to Denver and “live with modesty and circumspection” in her brother’s home, where she belonged.

But there was no expression of fondness.

The letter was signed Regards, C. Mitchell.

“‘C. Mitchell,’” Juliana whispered on a shaky breath. “Not ‘Clay.’ Not ‘Your brother.’ ‘C. Mitchell.’”

With that, she folded the single page carefully, held it for a moment, and then tossed it into the stove. Watched, the heat drying her eyeballs until they burned, as orange flames curled the vellum, nibbled darkly at the edges and corners, and then consumed the last forlorn tatters of Juliana’s hopes. There would be no reconciliation between her and Clay, no restoration of their old childhood camaraderie.

As much as she had loved the brother she remembered from long ago, as much as she loved him still, for surely he was still in there somewhere behind that rigid facade, she could not go home. Oh, she would have enjoyed getting to know little Clara and her brother, Simon. She had always been fond of Nora, a good-hearted if flighty woman who accepted her husband’s absolute authority without apparent qualms. But Clay would treat her, Juliana, like a poor relation, doling out pennies for a packet of pins, lecturing and dictating her every move, staring her down if she dared to venture an opinion at the supper table.

No. She definitely could not go home, not under such circumstances. It would be the ultimate—and final—defeat, and the slow death of her spirit.

“Missy?” The lisp was Daisy’s; the child could not say Juliana’s whole name, and always addressed her thus. “Missy, are you there?”

“I’m here, sweetheart,” Juliana confirmed quietly, closing the stove door and getting back to her feet. “I’m here.”

The assurance was enough for Daisy; she turned onto her side, settled in with a tiny murmur of relief and sank into sleep again.

Even with the fire going, the room was still cold enough to numb Juliana’s bones.

Having no other choice, she climbed back into bed and pulled the top sheet and faded quilts up to her chin, giving a little shiver.

Billy-Moses stirred beside her, took a new hold on her nightgown.

Daisy snuggled close, too.

Juliana stared up at the ceiling, watching the shadows dance, her heart and mind crowded with children again. At some point, she could send Joseph and Theresa home by train to their family in North Dakota.

But what of Daisy and Billy-Moses? They had nowhere to go, besides an orphanage or some other “school.”

In her more optimistic moments, Juliana could convince herself that some kindly couple would be delighted to adopt these bright, beautiful children, would cherish and nurture them.

This was not an optimistic moment.

Poverty was rampant among Indians; many could not feed their own children, let alone take in the lost lambs, the “strays,” as Clay and others like him referred to them.

A lone tear slipped down Juliana’s right cheek, tickled its way over her temple and into her hair. She closed her eyes and waited, trying not to consider the future, and finally, fitfully, she slept.

THE COLD WAS BRITTLE; it had substance and heft.

Lincoln had carried in an armload of wood and laid kindling on the hearth of the big stone fireplace directly across from his too-big, too-empty four-poster bed that morning before dawn, the way he always did after the weather turned in the fall. He’d gotten a good blaze crackling in the little stove in Gracie’s room, so she and Theresa would be snug—he’d seen children sicken and die after taking a chill—but that night he didn’t bother to get his own fire going.

He stripped off his clothes and the long winter underwear beneath them, and plunged into bed naked, cursing under his breath at the smooth, icy bite of the linen sheets. It was at night that he generally missed Beth most, recalling her whispery laughter and the warmth of her curled against him, the sweet, eager solace of their lovemaking.

Tonight, it was different.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Juliana: her new-penny hair; her eyes, blue as wet ink pooling on the whitest paper; the way she’d rested against his side, under his coat, soft with the innocent abandon of sleep, on the wagon ride home from town.

He reckoned that was why he wouldn’t light a fire. He was punishing himself for betraying Beth’s memory in a way that cut far deeper than relieving his body with dance-hall girls in other towns. God Almighty, he’d had to study the little gilt-framed picture of his late wife on Gracie’s night table earlier just to reassemble her features in his mind. They’d scattered like dry leaves in a high wind, the memory of Beth’s eyes and nose and the shape of her mouth, with his first look at Juliana that afternoon, in the mercantile.

Beth would have understood about the loose women.

Even a mail-order bride.

But he’d vowed, sitting beside this very bed, holding Beth’s hand in both his own, to love her, and no one else, until they laid him out in the cemetery alongside her.

Lincoln’s eyes stung as he remembered how brave she’d been. How she’d smiled at his earnest promise, sick as she was, and told him not to close his heart, for Gracie’s sake and his own.

She hadn’t meant it, of course. She’d read a lot of novels about love and chivalry and noble sacrifice, that was all. A woman of comparatively few flaws, at least as far as he was concerned, Beth had nonetheless been possessive at times, her jealousy flaring when he tipped his hat to any female under the age of sixty, or returned a smile.

He’d been faithful, besotted as he was, but Beth’s wealthy father had kept a mistress while she was growing up, and her mother had withdrawn into bitter silence in protest, becoming an invalid by choice. Though the instances were rare, Beth had fretted and shed tears a time or two, certain that it was only a matter of time before Lincoln tired of her and wanted some conjugal variety.

He’d reassured her, of course, kissed away her tears, made love to her, sent away to cities like New York and San Francisco and Boston for small but expensive presents he hadn’t been able to afford, what with beef prices bottoming out and his mother spending money as if she still had a rich husband, and his brother Wes running the ranch into near bankruptcy while he, Lincoln, was away at college.

No, he thought, with a shake of his head and a grim set to his mouth, his hands cupped behind his head as he lay still as fallen timber, waiting for the sheets to warm up. Beth hadn’t meant what she’d said that day, only hours before she’d closed her eyes for the last time; she’d merely been playing out a scene from one of those stories that made her sniffle until her face got puffy and her nose turned red. She’d believed, being so very young, that that was how a lady was supposed to die.

If it hadn’t been for the seizing ache in the middle of his chest and the sting behind his eyes, Lincoln might have smiled to remember the earlier days of their marriage, when he’d come in from the barn or the range so many evenings and found his bride with a thick book clutched to her bosom and tears pouring down her cheeks.

“She died with a rose clasped between her teeth!” Beth had expounded once, evidently referring to the heroine of the novel she’d been reading by the front room fire.

His mother, darning socks in her rocking chair, wanting them both to know she disapproved of such nonsense, and saucy brides from Somewhere Else, had muttered something, shaken her head and then made a tsk-tsk sound.