How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas (8 page)

Felix

I couldn't help shaking my head at the wonder of it all. Nicholas, though, interpreted the head-shaking as a sign I didn't believe what I'd just heard.

“It seems impossible, I know,” he said. “Perhaps if you consider it a bit longer before you decide it's not true—”

“Oh, no,” I replied. “I believe every word. I mean, I see you here in front of me, and I saw your likeness carved on your tomb, and, of course, I've seen you so long in, well . . .” I was still too embarrassed to admit I'd been dreaming about him for years. I sat up a little straighter on my mat, composed myself, and said briskly, “So it was you all along who did the gift-giving that inspired me to do the same, and now I've met you. How splendid!”

Nicholas seemed both pleased and anxious. “Then you do believe everything I've told you?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. “No one could invent a story like that. So now you and your friend Felix, here, will spend eternity doing good, generous things. You're more than lucky—you're blessed!”

“But I'm lonely, sometimes, too,” Nicholas said, and I thought Felix, sitting on a mat beside his longtime companion, looked rather offended. “The challenge is so great, and so never-ending,” Nicholas continued, his eyes locked on mine. “So many people need so much, and I need your help. Will you join me?” He suddenly remembered Felix. “I mean, will you join us?”

“What exactly do you mean?” I asked. I hoped I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him say it.

Nicholas blushed and stammered, so Felix said it for him: “He's asking you to marry him, so I'm going to leave you two alone for a while.” He got up and left the room. In the silence that followed, I could hear his heavy feet thumping as he made his way down the hall.

Nicholas remained tongue-tied. It was almost comical to see him try to say something, consider his words, begin to make the first sounds, panic, and have to start all over again. He sputtered for some time, and I finally lost patience.

“Look, are you asking me to marry you or not?” I asked. “It would be nice to know.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes, I'm asking you to marry me. I'm sorry to make such a bad job of it. Even though I'm a hundred and thirty-two years old, I've never done this before.”

“Are you certain?” I couldn't help asking.

“Oh, yes,” Nicholas said. “I've never had such feelings for anyone. So, will you? Marry me, I mean. I know it's a complicated life I'm offering, and that there's a great difference in our ages. If you're thirty-five, why, I'm ninety-seven years older than you. Someone so youthful might not want to burden herself with someone so, well, senior.”

“I don't care how old you are,” I replied, feeling rather pleased that someone actually considered me to still be young. “I'll gladly marry you, but there's a condition. You must promise we'll be equal partners, in gift-giving and in marriage. I will always love and respect you. Will you feel the same toward me?”

“I already love and respect you,” Nicholas said, and my heart pounded and I found myself smiling so widely that the corners of my mouth hurt. I thought he would now come over and kiss me, but instead he suddenly looked uncertain again.

“What's the matter?” I asked, afraid that he was having second thoughts and might take back his proposal.

“It's just that I'm still learning about special powers and this gift-giving mission,” Nicholas said. “I mean, how long will you live, Layla? Felix and I have stopped growing older, but what about you? I couldn't stand it if we married and I lived on forever, only to lose you along the way.”

I hadn't considered this. The possibility of living forever, or at least for a much longer time than the average person, seemed almost unimportant compared to marrying Nicholas.

“Maybe, like Felix, I'll stop aging, too,” I said. “Maybe I won't. No one can know the future. We'll have enough to do giving gifts. Let's not waste time worrying about something we can't control.” Nicholas started to reply. Apparently, he wanted to keep talking. But I was a newly engaged woman and the time for talking was over. “Hush up and come kiss me,” I told him—and he did.

Nicholas knew a priest in Constantinople. He married us the next day. Felix was best man. After the short ceremony, the three of us immediately departed for Rome in Italy, a city Nicholas and Felix already knew well and one I had always longed to see. As a wedding present, Nicholas had told me we could go give gifts anywhere in the known world. He and Felix seemed delighted when I asked to go to Rome.

“There are plenty of needy people there,” Nicholas told me as we walked arm-in-arm to the dock where we would board a boat and begin the trip. “We're going to be busy. You may regret very soon that you ever married me.”

But I never did.

We left those as gifts for poor children in Naples to the south of Rome. The next morning we returned to their neighborhood, and how wonderful it was to see boys and girls shouting with sheer joy as they shot their marbles or played with their dolls or rolled hoops across the meadow.

CHAPTER
Four

 

 

 

 

Y
ou must be wondering when I'll begin telling about Oliver Cromwell. I will, very soon, but first I must explain about how our gift-giving mission gradually changed. Only if you know about how toys and Christmas and America came to be part of what we did can you understand why I happened to be in England without my husband in the 1640s when Oliver Cromwell tried to do away with the holiday, and why I was so determined that he wouldn't succeed. Things that happened as much as twelve centuries earlier had their effect—on me, on Cromwell, and on Christmas itself.

My early days with Nicholas were fascinating. I found it quite different to be traveling and gift-giving in the company of my husband and his friend. As a married woman, I was welcome in any clean, reasonably priced inn; a wife arriving with her husband was not looked on with suspicion in any community. We gave our gifts in small villages as well as large cities. And, of course, I loved traveling formerly impossible distances at equally impossible speeds.

Oh, sometimes we had to make voyages on boats or travel in carts as part of caravans, but most often we simply walked, moving at night, and though there was no sense of hurry we would still find, by sunup, that we had gone eighty or one hundred miles. I was also amazed not to feel at all tired at the end of such lengthy treks. It seemed as though the act of walking refreshed rather than tired us.

I learned that Nicholas and Felix paid for the gifts they gave by carving elaborate wooden covers for books, which were relatively new in the early 400s. Most people still didn't read much, if at all, but those who did now wanted to protect their manuscripts from dust and decay. Every so often, Felix would announce our money was about to run out, and we would purchase a dozen small planks of treated wood. Then he and my husband would spend a few days carving designs on the planks, which were then sold to a friendly merchant they knew named Timothy. He, in turn, would bind the planks around sets of manuscripts, sell the finished books with covers to wealthy customers, and everyone was pleased.

“Though I started my gift-giving with the help of a good inheritance, even that large amount of money had to run out sometime,” Nicholas explained. “There was a time I feared my mission would have to end because I had no funds left.”

“I know the feeling,” I replied, and told him how we had met at the very moment my own money for gifts was completely spent.

“God's grace is a wonderful thing,” he replied before giving me a big hug. As a former priest and bishop in the Christian church, Nicholas never, ever doubted that his special powers came to him directly from the Lord. “Layla, there is truly no coincidence where this mission is concerned. When my money ran out, for instance, was the same moment Felix and I learned that we could carve book covers with the same speed that we could walk great distances. It was true—
is
true—of Felix in particular. You will have noticed how I might carve one cover in a night, and, in the same few hours, Felix can carve five or six.”

“Felix is amazing,” I said, making sure my voice was loud enough for Felix to overhear where he stood a few yards away. My sudden presence was not always easy for him. He'd been used to being Nicholas's only companion for almost seventy years, and now he had to share his friend with someone else. Though Felix and I were very cordial to each other, I sensed sometimes that he felt uncomfortable, if not resentful, now that Nicholas had a wife who received so much of his attention. So I went out of my way to make sure Felix understood how special he was to my husband, and how I very much wanted us to become good friends, too. I think, over the centuries, we eventually did.

There was another benefit to traveling and working with Nicholas. I stopped aging, too. I know that in the thousand and more years since, many of our later companions took this for granted from the start, but they had the benefit of our experience. Then, we had no idea whether the magic would touch me as well, and so for months and even a few years—all right, decades—a day didn't pass without me taking out a disk of polished metal—because we had no glass mirrors then—and peering anxiously at my reflection, looking for lines around my eyes or my first gray hair. They never appeared. By the time I had been with Nicholas for about forty years, making me seventy-five and extremely elderly by the standard of the day, I still looked exactly the same and knew I had stopped aging, too.

Those forty years were full of love and excitement and, I admit, some sadness and frustration. We gloried in our mission, and our ability to range so far across Asia Minor and Europe to give our gifts. We gave thanks for the special powers God had granted to us. But we were always aware that even these powers had their limits. Any time we came near wars, our speed was reduced to that of normal humans.

It seemed, in those years, that all the world we knew of was torn by war. The Roman Empire was gradually crumbling. Tribes with names like Vandals and Visigoths made bloody bids for supremacy. We were able to avoid capture, perhaps even execution, because in those days Christian priests were known to be noncombatants, and so were allowed to wander where they would. Nicholas and Felix were assumed to be priests, and, in the case of my husband, that was close to the truth. Any time we were stopped and questioned, we simply said we were on our way somewhere to minister to the poor—and that, too, was certainly true.

As he had promised, my wonderful husband treated me as an equal partner, both in our marriage and in gift-giving. No decisions were made by Nicholas alone. He always consulted me, and Felix, too. Sometimes Felix or I might suggest where to go next. Of course, in some ways having a woman along was very helpful. In a small village, I could casually join other wives washing clothes in a stream or gossiping by a well. I would hear about local families who were hungry or wearing ragged clothes. More and more, we concentrated on gifts for children. This was not because we didn't care about grown-ups. It was just that there was so much need that we had to set priorities, and, more than anything, we wanted all children to grow up feeling loved and hopeful about their lives. A constant source of frustration was that, no matter how hard we tried, we could never bring gifts to every deserving, needy child. There were so many children, and in so many places!

I had the great pleasure of seeing Rome, and Alexandria, and other famous cities. Gradually I became familiar with hundreds of towns and villages in what we called “the known world.” But all three of us never stopped feeling curious about those countries we had yet to visit, and finally in the year 453 we decided it was time to travel to the legendary, mysterious land of Britain. What we knew of the island nation was fascinating. The Romans had conquered some of it for a time, but according to most stories it was still inhabited by wild people who painted themselves blue and lived in trees. It sounded too interesting to resist, so we began making our way there. Under peaceful circumstances we could have made our way from Rome to Britain with three or four nights of magically fast walking, but there were battles all around us and we could only manage about ten miles a day. In particular, a famous Hun war chief named Attila was known to be marching toward Rome. As it happened, we met him, or, I should say, were taken prisoner by him. But after some conversation with Nicholas, Attila admitted he was tired of war. When Nicholas impulsively told him about our special mission, Attila asked to join us, along with Dorothea, his wife.

This was a turning point. Until that moment, we had never even discussed adding to our number. “Do we really
want
a warrior coming along?” Felix asked me, and I believe it was then that he finally accepted me as an equal rather than just as his best friend's wife.