The Christmas Brides

by Linda Lael Miller

  Even when John Holden had died suddenly, a year before, permanently disqualifying himself as a possible husband for the sister Clay had once adored and protected, teased and laughed with, he had not given ground. After months of working up her courage, she’d written to ask for a modest bank draft, since her salary was small, less than the allowance her grand mother had given her as a girl, and Clay had responded with words that still blistered Juliana’s pride, even now. “I won’t see you squandering good money,” he’d written, “on shoes and school books for a pack of red-skinned orphans and strays.”

  A burning ache rose in Juliana’s throat at the memory.

  Clay would cease punishing her when she stopped teaching and married a man who met with his lofty approval, then and only then, and that was the unfortunate reality.

  She’d been a fool to write to him that last time, all but begging for the funds she’d needed to get Joseph and Theresa safely home to North Dakota and look after the two little ones until proper homes could be found for them.

  The situation was further complicated by the fact that Mr. Philbert, an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and there fore Juliana’s super visor, believed the four pupils still in her charge had been sent back to their original school in Missoula, along with the older students. Sooner or later, making his rounds or by correspondence, Philbert, a diligent sort with no softness in him that Juliana could discern, would realize she’d not only disobeyed his orders, but lied to him, at least in part.

  As an official representative of the United States government, the man could have her arrested and prosecuted for kid nap ping, and consign Daisy and Billy-Moses to some new institution, far out of her reach, where they would probably be neglected, at best. Juliana knew, after working in a series of such places, all but bloodying her very soul in the effort to change things, that only the most dedicated reformers would bother to look beyond the color of their skin. And there were precious few of those.

  To keep from thinking about Mr. Philbert and his inevitable wrath, Juliana turned her mind to the students she’d had to bid farewell to—Mary Rose, seventeen and soon to be entering Normal School herself; Ezekiel, sixteen, who wanted to finish his education and return to his tribe. Finally, there was Angelique, seventeen, like her cousin Mary Rose, sweet and unassuming and smitten with a boy she’d met while running an errand in Stillwater Springs one spring day.

  Part Black foot and part white, Blue Johnston had visited several times, a handsome, engaging young man with a flashing white smile and the promise of a job herding cattle on a ranch outside of Missoula. Although Juliana had kept close watch on the couple and warned Angelique repeatedly about the perils of impulse, she’d had the other children to attend to, and the pair had strayed out of her sight more than a few times.

  Privately, Juliana feared that Angelique and her beau would run away and get married as soon as they got the chance—and that chance had come a week before, when Angelique and the others had boarded the train to return to Missoula. Should that happen—perhaps it already had—Mr. Philbert would bluster and threaten dire consequences when he learned of it, all the while figuratively dusting his hands together, secretly relieved to have one less obligation.

  Foot steps 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 night gown 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 news pa per 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 news pa per 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 over wrought 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 birth day, 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 con signed 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 care fully, 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 some where 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 goodhearted 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 cir cum stances. 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 ad dressed her thus. “Missy, are you there?”

  “I’m here, sweet heart,” Juliana con firmed 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 night gown.

  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 de lighted 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 sub stance and heft.

  Lincoln had carried in an armload of wood and laid kindling on the hearth of the big stone fire place 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 crack ling 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 under stood 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 along side 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 with drawn into bitter silence in protest, becoming an invalid by choice. Though the in stances 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 ex pounded 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 Some where Else, had muttered something, shaken her head and then made a tsk-tsk sound.

  “Someone had better start supper cooking,” Cora Creed had huffed, rising and stalking off toward the kitchen.

  Waited on by servants all her short life, Beth had never learned to cook, sew or even make up a bed. None of that had bothered Lincoln, though it troubled his mother plenty.

  He had merely smiled, kissed Beth’s over heated forehead and said something along the lines of “I hope she was careful not to bite down on the thorns. The lady in the book, I mean.”

  Beth had laughed then, and hit him play fully with the tome.

  Now, alone in the bed where they’d conceived Gracie and two other children who hadn’t survived long enough to draw even one breath, Lincoln thrust out a sigh and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

  Morning would come around early, and the day ahead would be long, hard and cold. He and Tom and the few ranch hands wintering on the place would be hauling wagonloads of hay out to the range cattle, since the grass was buried under snow. They’d have to break the ice at the edge of the creek, too, so the cattle could drink.

  He needed whatever sleep he could get.

  Plainly, it wouldn’t be much.

  JULIANA HAD BEEN an early riser since the cradle, and she was up and dressed well before dawn.

  Even so, when she wandered through the still-dark house toward the kitchen, there was a blaze burning in the hearth in what probably passed for a parlor in such a masculine home. The furniture was heavy and dark and spare, all hard leather and rough-hewn wood, the surfaces uncluttered with the usual knick knacks and vases and doilies and sewing baskets.

  Perhaps Lincoln’s mother—gone traveling, Gracie had said at supper, with marked relief—had packed away her things in preparation for a lengthy absence. As far as Juliana could tell, the woman had left no trace at all—even her room, where she and the children had passed the night, was un adorned.

  Entering the kitchen, Juliana stepped into lantern-light and the warmth of the cook stove. Lincoln stood at a basin in front of a small mirror fixed to the wall, his face lathered with suds, shaving. He wore trousers and boots and a long-sleeved woolen under shirt, and suspenders that dangled in loose, manly loops at his sides.

  He was decently clothed, but there was an intimacy in the early-morning quiet and the glow of the kerosene lamps that gave Juliana pause. She stopped on the thresh old and drew in a sharp breath.

  He smiled, rinsed his straight razor in the basin, ran it skill fully under his chin and along his neck. “Mornin’,” he said.

  Juliana recovered her inner composure, but barely. “Good morning,” she replied, quite formally.

  “Coffee’s ready,” Lincoln told her. “Help yourself. Cups are on the shelf in the pantry.” He cocked a thumb toward a nearby door.

  Juliana hurried in to get a cup, des per ate to be busy. Came back with two, since that was the polite thing to do. She poured coffee for Lincoln, started to take it to him and was suddenly tongue
-tied again, and flustered by it.

  He chuckled, rinsed his face in the basin, reached for a towel and dried off. His ebony hair was rumpled, and glossy in the lamp light. “Thanks,” he said, and walked over to take the steaming cup from her hand.

  Tom entered while they were standing there, staring at each other, his bronzed skin polished with the cold. Behind him walked Joseph, carrying a bucket steaming with fresh milk.

  Juliana smiled, feeling as though she’d been rescued from something intriguingly dangerous. “You’re up early,” she said to the boy. At the school, Joseph had been something of a layabout mornings, continually late for breakfast and yawning through the first class of the day.

  “Tom needed help,” Joseph said solemnly.

  Juliana felt a pang, knowing why Joseph was so eager to be useful. He hoped to land a job on Stillwater Springs Ranch, earn enough money to get himself and Theresa home to North Dakota. With luck, the Bureau of Indian Affairs would leave them alone.

  “We can always use another hand around here,” Lincoln said.

  Juliana shot him a glance. “Joseph has school today.”

  Some of the milk slopped over the edge of the bucket as Joseph set it down hard in the sink. A flush pounded along his fine cheek bones.

  “School?” Lincoln asked.

  Just then, Gracie burst in, dressed in a light woolen dress and high-button shoes and pulling Daisy behind her by one hand and Billy-Moses by the other. Both children stared at her as though they’d never seen such a wondrous creature, and most likely they hadn’t.

  “School?” Gracie chirped, her eyes enormous. “Where? When?”

  Juliana smiled, rested her hands lightly on her hips. She hadn’t bothered to put up her hair; it hung in a long braid over her shoulder. “Here,” she said. “At the kitchen table, directly after breakfast.”