by Carla Kelly
CHRISTMAS PROMISE
Carla Kelly
Dear Reader,
I love to write Christmas stories. Technically, I consider them an exercise in restraint, rather like a poem. The shorter length demands concentration of ideas, which appeals to me. Mainly, though, I like to write Christmas stories because they are a personal “gift” to the season.
“Christmas Promise” is a logical story for me to write, considering my recent series on the men of the Channel Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars, and the women who loved them and waited for them.
The story poses an interesting dilemma for a career naval officer who sailed and fought during some of England’s darkest decades: What does a frigate commander do when peace breaks out?
That is Captain Faulk’s dilemma. Christmas seems like an appropriate time to resolve it. I promise.
Merrily yours,
Carla
To Scott and Jody Barrett of Fargo,
who took in three refugees when the Sheyenne River rose and we were homeless.
Prologue
The long war was over. Napoleon, under protest, had set up housekeeping in his central-Atlantic change of venue. Surely it was high time for Parliament, free from war’s alarms, to attempt some social legislation, namely, a law about procrastination.
I cannot be the only procrastinator in England, Ianthe Mears thought as she sat on her bed, staring at her open wardrobe and bureau drawers stuffed with ten years of accumulation. Never mind that she was far from a wealthy widow. She had acquired too much stuff, and she had put off disposing of it until now, when she had informed her solicitor to put her home on the market.
She had to move. Trouble was, she had also put off explaining to Jem why she had just recently placed a deposit on rented rooms over one of Torquay’s unpretentious eating places. True, he was only ten and saw the matter as an adventure, which made him puzzled when she swore him to secrecy.
“When you go to Plymouth to escort Diana home, don’t say a word about what I have done,” she had insisted when she put him on the coastal carrier, warmly dressed against December, and warmly admonished to avoid all sailors and other shady-looking characters. Better she told Diana herself. Selling the house went hand in glove with the not-so-minor detail that economic retrenchment at home also meant no more tuition for her beloved daughter at Miss Pym’s Female Academy in Bath.
Of course, when she had both children together under the same roof, she could tell them why she was uprooting them from the only home they had known, and ending Diana’s academic career, or at least, her studies of Italian, embroidery and approved world literature.
Frustrated with herself, Ianthe flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, wishing for the umpteenth time she could think of another way to set by enough money for a dowry for Diana—fifteen now—and leave enough to entice a merchant in Torquay or Plymouth to take on Jem as a shop apprentice. There would be no future for either of her darlings if they did not sacrifice now.
She took several dresses stylish in earlier times and tossed them into the giveaway box until they covered her late husband’s old uniforms. Ten years it was since Trafalgar and his death, and she still had not the heart to look at the navy blue uniforms or discard them. Better to cover them with another layer of clothing. A casual observer would have pitied Ianthe Mears’s devotion to her dead naval hero—wasn’t everyone at Trafalgar a hero?—but never have understood her own conflict.
Ten years had been enough time for the raw pain of James’s death to evolve into the occasional sigh. Immediately after his death, it had taken all her will not to express the anger she felt at her husband leaving her impoverished and with a baby growing inside her. She had hated Jim briefly, until sorrow took over, grief that would have survived any sharp-eyed matron’s scrutiny because it was genuine.
The mundane business of save and discard soothed her. She was setting aside the box of Jim’s letters when she noticed the letter underneath the box, the one Jeremiah Faulk had sent to her after Trafalgar, and which contained Jim’s last, half-finished letter. She opened the letter box to place it with the others and was closing the lid when she saw another letter.
She sat down on her bed again, turning it over in her hands, trying to decide whether to keep the letter, which was only the barest scrawl from Miah, dated six months after Trafalgar, telling her he had been given leave to send her Jim’s portion of the prize money awarded for Trafalgar.
“Liar,” she said softly. “You sent me your prize money.”
Even after ten years, his generosity in the face of his own slim resources made her dab at her eyes with her apron. When she received the bank draft, she knew she should send it back, but she had used the money to buy the house up for sale now. She had sent a thank-you note, care of the Channel Fleet, but never heard from him again. She had wanted to write, but knew how improper that would have been.
Ianthe decided she couldn’t throw away the scrap, and added it to the letter box. She looked out the window at Tor Bay, wintry and sterile. Her mother had never understood why she had not moved with her to Northumberland after her father’s death. Mama would have been shocked if her proper daughter had confessed she was staying in Torquay because Captain Faulk might someday appear on her doorstep.
He never did. She knew he was alive somewhere in the world, because she asked her vicar to check the Naval Chronicle regularly, not approved reading material for ladies. Maybe just knowing he was alive was her only consolation. After all, she was a practical woman, and a better widow than most.
Chapter One
In twenty-two years of war at sea, Captain Jeremiah Faulk had only indulged in introspection when he had time to write in his journal. As he walked through the nearly empty HMS Spartan, his frigate and home for eight of those years, he began to indulge: Was peace to be the worst event in his naval career? Jeremiah wondered as he stood for the last time on his quarterdeck and watched the skeleton crew sway off the big guns. My ship is no longer mine and I am homeless, he thought.
He did something unthinkable then, and leaned his forearms on the quarterdeck railing, watching the guns rise from the deck. He knew he was a hard captain, but he also knew his indomitable will had kept his ship and crew on the water on many fraught occasions, when other leaders would have faltered. Still, he hadn’t been prepared for what had happened earlier in the day, before his men took jolly boats and gigs to shore and an alien world.
He hadn’t been prepared for them to gather around him for a hip hip hooray, and for his bosun to come forward with a timepiece from his crew. God knows where they had found the money for such a gift, or even the opportunity to buy it. He would treasure that token as he treasured nothing else in his life. It came from men he had flogged, and chivied and dressed down, and also commended and cajoled and encouraged. He knew they called him The Old Man. Maybe they suspected he regarded them as a father would his sons. At least they had been kind enough to overlook the tears in his eyes, as he had been to overlook the same in theirs.
“Captain?”
Arms still on the railing, he turned to look at his sailing master. The man sounded uncertain, and Faulk wondered if he was ill. Then he noticed the direction of his master’s eyes, and straightened up. “Yes, Mr. Benedict?” he asked, trying to sound frosty enough to discourage any comment on his precedent-shattering posture.
“I just wondered, sir,” the master began, then stopped because the world must have ground to a halt to see his captain let down his discipline to such an extent.
“I am fine, Mr. Benedict.” Could he admit to a qualm? Perhaps. “Well, I own to a feeling of dismay. It’s hard to leave her.”
His master nodded.
“We’re supposed to be happy, you
know,” Faulk said, and risked his credit with his senior warrant officer by resuming his casual pose at the railing. “This will be your first Christmas with your family in how many years?”
“Too many to recollect, Captain,” Benedict said. “My wife sent me a letter yesterday.” He sighed. “She said our house will be full of relatives bent upon seeing me.”
He sighed again, more gusty, and Faulk had to turn his head to hide his smile. He had a kindred spirit in his crusty sailing master.
“You’re not overjoyed, I take it?” Faulk asked.
The men looked at each other in perfect understanding. Still, Faulk thought, there would come a moment when all the company was gone or abed, and it would be Benedict and Mrs. Benedict. Faulk silently wished them joy of each other and a happy coupling. As for himself, he would take himself to the Drake in Plymouth. After that, he had no idea. He could easily find for hire what Benedict got for free, but he was not willing—at the moment, at least—to lay down his blunt for a prostitute. It had been more than a year since his last bedding, and heaven knows he had thought about it, but he doubted he could perform to anyone’s satisfaction, not the way he was feeling now.
“You’ll be at the Drake, sir?”
“Aye.”
“And then?”
“Not sure, Mr. Benedict.”
Suddenly he wished his sailing master would leave, because he knew what was coming. Brace yourself, Miah, he thought.
“Sir, you’d be welcome at my house for Christmas dinner.”
He knew it was true; the Benedicts were kindness itself. Still, there would come that moment when the goodbyes were said, and he would be outside in the street, walking back to a hotel or—in former days—his frigate. All it served was to remind him how alone he was, and now, how homeless.
“Please thank Mrs. Benedict for her kindness to me, but I think I will just stay at the Drake this time,” he said.
“Very well, Captain,” Benedict said. Still he stood there on the quarterdeck. He cleared his throat. “I’ll take my leave, sir.”
Faulk knew it would startle his sailing master, but he went to the man and held out his hand. “Let us shake, David,” he said, further breaching all naval etiquette by a Christian name. “You have been as fine a master as ever served a ship.”
It was easier to say than he would have thought, probably because he meant every word. Neither man chose to look the other in the eye.
An hour later it was Faulk’s turn to leave the Spartan; a captain was unnecessary now. There were no guns to serve, no need to pace the deck, no French and Spanish ports to blockade anymore. The Spartan’s small crew would keep wood rot away, and burn sulphur in the hold to drive out rats. Possibly the Spartan would be refitted, or sold to a merchant, or even broken up as scrap. If it was the first, he would only be jealous of her new captain; if the last, he didn’t want to know about it.
His dunnage had already been taken ashore to the Drake. Better to get the whole thing over with, Jeremiah thought, especially now that night was coming so early. His log tucked under his arm, Faulk took a last look around, then let his bosun pipe him over the side of the Spartan into a gig bobbing below, ready for the short pull into Devonport. When he put his feet on dry land, there was no returning to the sea that had been home.
He received his first jolt of the new order of things on land when he peered into the game room at the Drake, scene for the past two decades of what every officer called “the perpetual whist game.” The room was empty. He didn’t linger, because it felt amazingly like a tomb.
He had feared dinner that night at the Drake would be gall and wormwood, considering his bleak state of mind, but Mrs. Fillion had exerted herself. The roast was tender, the potatoes cooked just the way he liked them.
He ate alone and silent, which was nothing out of the ordinary. Although the room was nearly empty, he had time to observe two young ones in the dining room, probably a brother and sister, but looking on the outs with each other. For want of anything better to do, he watched them.
The young lady was a pretty chit, with guinea-gold hair swept up in what he reckoned was the latest fashion, but which hung bedraggled now. He could only surmise that she had been traveling recently, and her hair had suffered the slings and arrows of the mail coach. He thought she might be fourteen or fifteen.
His attention was caught more by what must have been her younger brother, because he looked vaguely familiar. That couldn’t be, though; how would he know a boy that young? Still, there was something about the way he wore his brown hair, and the way he was frowning at his sister that made Faulk wonder.
Not for long, though. Mrs. Fillion herself brought out the cheap navy cheese that she knew he preferred to fancier Stilton and plunked herself down with it, ready to eat a slice of it with him.
“Captain Faulk, will you be staying with us long this time?”
It was a question she had asked off and on through two decades. Usually his answer was a shake of the head, and the request that she have her laundress wash all his clothes in fresh water as soon as she could, because he was outward bound soon. Beyond that, all he ever required of her was fresh water to drink, and a place to store a few more of his journals.
“I’ll be here through Christmas,” he told her, slicing off a sliver of cheese. “Maybe through New Year’s.”
“Where away then?” she asked, allowing their familiarity as hotelier and guest to give her privilege not even his first and second mates had dared.
“I’m not precisely certain,” he said, then said no more.
She was too shrewd to inquire further, or possibly too kind. They ate cheese together companionably, maybe because she was softhearted enough to not want him sitting alone. Or so he thought, until she finally came to the point.
“Captain Faulk, I wonder if you would do me a favor, at some time during your stay here.”
“Ask away,” he said, willing to be useful to someone.
“That storeroom where you keep your journals,” she began, accepting another slice of cheese from him. “I’m certain you have noticed all the other things tucked away in there.”
He had. For years, Mrs. Fillion had allowed officers based in Plymouth and Devonport to leave their extra dunnage in an unused room off the scullery. It never ceased to amaze him what world travelers could collect, although he admitted to a shiver down his backbone at shrunken heads and pouches made of parts that would have made the ladies blush.
“What I ask you to do is take a look at what is named and labeled,” she said. She couldn’t quite meet his gaze then. “I’m certain there are items stored and their owners are no longer alive. If you could mark those, I would have them sold at auction, or put in the ash bin.”
“That’s grim duty,” he told her.
“That is why I have never asked it of anyone before,” she said, equally forthright. “Now that there is peace…” She let the thought dangle.
“I can do that,” he said, not because he wanted to, but because he had never shied from unpleasant tasks in a career of unpleasant tasks on a worldwide scale. “You’d probably like me to move my journals, too.”
“There is no hurry,” she said, and he could not overlook the sympathy in her voice. She knew he had nowhere to go except the Drake. “Do you know, I almost read one once.”
“You would have been welcome,” he replied, flattered that she had almost done something no one had ever been interested in before. Some of what he wrote might give a lady the blushes, but Mrs. Fillion was no lady. She would probably only have smiled at his descriptions of women bedded in foreign ports, right down to distinguishing characteristics. He had written less of that later, either because the novelty had worn off, or because a captain had less time for fornication.
Or so he thought, even as he admitted to some warmth under his collar at some of his more spectacular recollections. Time for a massive change of subject. With the cheese knife, he indicated the two young persons across the dining r
oom.
“There seems to be a quarrel going on,” he said in a low voice.
Mrs. Fillion looked where he gestured. “I think the boy has been sent to escort his sister home from school in Bath.” She shrugged. “They can’t stiff me for their lodging, because I have already collected it. As for dinner, they only ordered tea.”
Mrs. Fillion spent a few more minutes in pleasantries and then took the cheese with her and left the table.
He took himself from the dining room before the remaining inmates, who by now were looking at each other with expressions he could only classify as mulish. The thought crossed his mind that they may have needed a loan to get the rest of the way home, wherever home was. You needn’t take care of the entire world, Captain Faulk, he reminded himself. If they still looked concerned in the morning, he could step in and help, if they would permit him.
He spent the next hour walking, enjoying the freedom of stretching his legs and moving in a direction larger than his quarterdeck, which he had paced with regularity for so many years: So many steps this way, then that way.
He passed St. Andrew’s Church, stood a moment, then went inside. Faulk would have protested had any man accused him of being religious, but he was. He knew only divine intervention had kept his ship from more than one lee shore. As captain of his flock, he had buried many a man at sea, and meant every word he read from the Book of Common Prayer, every scripture that sent his lads into the welcoming arms of the deep.
It was a small matter to light a candle, then kneel in a pew, his forehead down on his hands as they rested on the pew in front, as he thanked the Lord for a final safe voyage. He prayed for the souls of all the dead whose faces he still saw in his dreams, and wished he could have done better for them.
He sat back finally, stared at the altar, then went to his knees again. “And bless those two foolish children,” he whispered.
There was no particular rush in the morning to rise, because he had nowhere to go. Still, he was up early as usual, half listening for four bells to indicate six o’clock and his time to rise. He fancied he heard bells far away, on some lucky ship anchored in the sound with a full crew yet.
