A McKettrick Christmas (9 page)

As the moon rose, spilling shimmering silver over the snow, Morgan stuck the trunk of the tiny tree between the slats of Mr. Christian’s empty crate, and Whitley donated his watch chain for a decoration. Lizzie contributed several hair ribbons from her handbag, along with a small mirror that seemed to catch the starlight. Mrs. Thaddings contributed her ear bobs.

They sang, Lizzie starting first, Mrs. Halifax picking up the words next, her voice faltering, then John and Whitley and the children. Even Woodrow joined in.

“‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…’”

“We ain’t gettin’ our oranges,” Jack announced stoically, as his mother tucked him and Ellen into the quilt bed, after many more carols had been sung. “There’s no stockings to hang, and St. Nicholas won’t find us way out here.”

Ellen gazed at the little tree as though it were the most splendid thing she’d ever set eyes on. “It’s Christmas, just the same,” she said. “And that tree is right pretty. Mr. Christmas went to a lot of trouble to bring it back for us, too.”

Jack sighed and closed his eyes.

Ellen gazed at the tree until she fell asleep.

Morgan moved back and forth between John Brennan and Mr. Christian. He’d given Whitley more laudanum after supper, when the pain in his injured leg had contorted his face and brought out a sheen of sweat across his forehead. Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings, having settled Woodrow down for the night, read from a worn Bible.

Watching them, Lizzie marveled at their calm acceptance. It seemed that, as long as they were together, they could face anything. She knew so little about the couple, and yet it would be obvious to anyone who looked that the marriage was a refuge for them both.

She wanted to be like them. To get old with someone, to live out an unfurling ribbon of years, as they had.

Presently, she turned to Morgan.

“I thought they’d come,” Lizzie confided, very quietly. She was kneeling in front of the tree by then, breathing in the scent of it, remembering so many things. “I thought my family would come.”

Morgan moved to sit cross-legged beside her. He said nothing at all, but simply listened.

A tear slipped down Lizzie’s cheek. She dashed it away with the back of one hand. Straightened her spine.

“Maybe in the morning,” she said.

“Maybe,” Morgan agreed, gently gruff.

She got to her feet, retrieved the bundle she’d brought from the baggage car earlier. She folded Whitley’s expensive overcoat neatly, placed it beneath the tree. John Henry’s paint set went next, and then the pocket watch. Her beautiful velvet-collared coat found its way under the tree, too, and so did the pipe and the book and a few other things, as well.

She sat back on her heels when she’d finished arranging the gifts. Was surprised when Morgan reached out and took her hand.

“Lizzie McKettrick,” he said, “you are something.”

She bit her lower lip. Glanced in Whitley’s direction to make certain he was asleep. He seemed to be, but he might have been “playing possum,” to use one of her grandfather’s favorite terms.

“He’s going to ask me to marry him,” she said, without intending to speak at all.

Morgan was silent for a long moment. Then he replied, “And you’ll say yes.”

She shook her head, unable to look directly at Morgan.

“Why not?” Morgan asked, his voice pitched low. It seemed intimate, their talking in the semidarkness, now that the lamp had been extinguished, the way her papa and Lorelei so often did, late at night, when they were alone in the kitchen, with the stove-fire banked low and the savory smell of supper still lingering in the air.

“Because it wouldn’t be right,” Lizzie said. “For Whitley or for me. He’s a good man, Morgan. He really is. He deserves a wife who loves him.”

Morgan didn’t answer. Not right away, at least. “These are trying circumstances, Lizzie—for all of us. Don’t make any hasty decisions. You’ll have a long time to regret it if you make the wrong ones.”

Again, Lizzie glanced in Whitley’s direction, then down at her hands, knotted atop the fabric of her ruined skirts. “Maybe I’m not cut out to be married anyhow,” she ventured. “Some people aren’t, you know.”

She felt his smile, rather than saw it. “It would be a waste, Lizzie, if you didn’t marry. But I agree that you’re better off single than tied to the wrong man.”

“My pupils,” Lizzie mused. “They’ll be my children.” Even as she said the words, a soft sorrow tugged at her heart. She so wanted babies of her own, sons and daughters, bringing the kind of rowdy, chaotic joy swelling the walls of the houses on the Triple M.

“Will they be enough, Lizzie?” Morgan asked, after a lengthy silence. “Your pupils, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” she answered sadly.

Morgan squeezed her hand again. “You have time, Lizzie. You’re a beautiful woman. If you and Whitley can’t come to terms, you’ll surely meet someone else.”

Lizzie feared she’d already met that “someone else,” and he was Morgan. Normally a confident person, she suddenly felt out of her depth. The McKettricks were certainly prominent, and they were wealthy, but they lived in ranch houses, not mansions. Nobody dressed for dinner, or employed servants, or rode in fancy carriages, as Morgan’s people surely had. She’d attended Miss Ridgley’s, where she’d learned which fork to use with which course of a meal, how to embroider and entertain, and after that she’d gone to San Francisco Normal School. Morgan had studied medicine abroad. Estranged from his mother or not, he would be at home in high society, while Lizzie would be considered a frontier bumpkin at worst, one of the nouveaux riches at best.

“Lizzie?” Morgan prompted, when she didn’t reply to his comment.

“I was just wondering why you’d want to live and work in a place like Indian Rock, instead of Chicago or New York or Philadelphia or Boston,” she said. “Don’t you miss…well…all the things there are to
do
in places like that?”

“Such as?”

“Concerts. Art museums. Stores so big you have to climb stairs to see everything they sell.”

Morgan chuckled. “Do
you
miss concerts and museums and shopping, Lizzie?”

“No,” she said. “San Francisco is beautiful—I really enjoyed being there. I made a lot of friends at school. But there were times when I was so homesick, I wasn’t sure I could stand it.”

Morgan caressed her cheek with the backs of his knuckles, his touch so gentle that a hot shiver went through her. “I guess I’m homesick, too,” he said, “but in a different way. The home I want is the one I never had—the one I’m hoping to find in Indian Rock.”

Lizzie’s throat thickened. It was only too easy to picture Morgan as a small child, having Christmas dinner in the kitchen of some yawning mausoleum of a house, with only the family cook for company. On the other hand, things would be different in Indian Rock—once word got around town that the new doctor didn’t have a wife, the scheming and flirtations would begin. Meals would be cooked and brought to his door in baskets. He’d be invited to Sunday suppers, and unmarried women for miles around would suddenly develop delicate ailments requiring the immediate attention of the attractive new physician.

Thinking of it made Lizzie give a very unladylike snort.

In the moonlight, she saw Morgan’s right eyebrow rise slightly, and a smile played at one corner of his mouth. “Now, what accounts for
that
reaction, Lizzie McKettrick?” he asked.

She loved it when he called her by her full name, though she could not have said why. But she was mightily embarrassed that she’d snorted in front of him, like an old horse nickering for oats. “You won’t be single long,” she said. “Once you get to Indian Rock, I mean.”

She regretted the statement instantly; it revealed too much. Like a contentious colt, it had bolted from the place she contained such things and kicked up a fuss inside Lizzie.

Again, that crooked little smile from Morgan. “I think I’d like to be married,” he mused, surprising her yet again; she’d
thought
she was getting used to his blunt way of speaking. “A lovely wife. A passel of children. It all sounds very good to me right now, but maybe I’m just being sentimental.”

For some reason she could not define, Lizzie wanted to cry. And it wasn’t because she was far from home on Christmas Eve, or because she knew she would have to turn down Whitley’s proposal and he would be hurt and disappointed, or even because all their lives were in danger.

Not trusting herself to speak, or govern what she said if she made the attempt, Lizzie remained silent.

Morgan brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “Get some sleep,” he counseled. “Tomorrow’s Christmas.”

Tomorrow’s Christmas.
Lizzie found that hard to credit, even with the little tree and the presents so carefully arranged beneath it. She nodded, and she was about to get to her feet when, with no warning at all, Morgan suddenly caught her face between his hands and placed the lightest, sweetest kiss imaginable on her mouth.

A jolt shot through Lizzie; she might have captured liquid lightning in a metal cup, like fresh spring rain, and swigged it down. She knew Morgan felt her trembling before he lowered his hands from her face to take hers and help her to her feet.

“Good night, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said gruffly. “And a happy Christmas.”

She found a place to lie down on one of the long bench seats, never dreaming that she’d sleep. Her heart leaped and frolicked like a circus performer on a trampoline, and she could still feel Morgan’s brief, innocent kiss tingling on her lips.

To distract herself from all the contradictory feelings Morgan had aroused in her, she imagined herself at home on the Triple M. She stood for a few moments in the familiar kitchen, lamp-lit and warm from the stove, and saw her papa and Lorelei sitting in their usual places at the table, though they did not seem to see her.

Mentally, she climbed the back stairway, made her way first to the room John Henry, Gabriel and Doss shared. They were all sound asleep in their beds, fair hair tousled on the pillows and flecked with hay from the customary Christmas Eve visit to the barn, and each one had hung a stocking from a hook on the wall, in anticipation of St. Nicholas’s arrival. The stockings were still limp and empty—Lorelei would fill them later, when she was sure they wouldn’t awaken. Rock candy. Toy whistles. Perhaps small wooden animals, hand carved by Papa, out in the wood shop.

The scene was achingly real to Lizzie—it made her eyes sting and her throat ache so fiercely that she put a hand to it. As she stared down at her brothers, drinking in the sight of them, John Henry opened his eyes, looked directly at her.

“Where are you?” he asked, using his hands to sign the words he couldn’t speak.

Lizzie signed back. “I’ll be home soon.”

John Henry’s small hands flew. “Promise?”

“Promise,” Lizzie confirmed.

And then the vision faded, leaving Lizzie longing to find it again.

As she settled her nerves, she was aware of Morgan moving about the caboose, probably checking his various patients: Mrs. Halifax with her injured arm, Whitley with his broken leg, the peddler, Mr. Christian, who’d nearly gotten himself frozen to death, and last of all poor John Brennan, struggling with pneumonia.

And over them all loomed the mountain, ominously silent.

Finally Lizzie slept.

Christmas.

It had never meant so much to Morgan as it did that night. He wanted to give Lizzie everything—trinkets, the finest silks and laces, and beyond those things…his heart. For a brief fraction of a moment, he actually wished he’d granted his mother’s wishes and become a banker, instead of a doctor.

Annoyed with himself, he shoved both hands through his hair, as he always did when he was frustrated—and that was often.

He concentrated on what he knew, taking care of the sick and injured, knowing full well that sleep would elude him.

John Brennan seemed marginally better.

Mrs. Halifax would be fine, once she’d gotten some real rest.

Mr. Thaddings was resting quietly, the bluish color gone from his lips.

Even Christian, the peddler, who had come dangerously close to dying, appeared to be rallying somewhat. He might lose a few toes, but otherwise, he’d probably be his old self soon.

Whitley Carson’s leg would mend; he was young, healthy and strong. Unless he was the biggest fool who ever lived, he’d pursue Lizzie until she accepted his proposal, married him and bore his children. Maybe he was smart enough to know that a woman like Lizzie McKettrick came along about as often as the proverbial blue moon, and maybe he wasn’t.

Morgan hoped devoutly for the latter.

If they got out of this situation alive, Morgan decided, and if Lizzie
didn’t
change her mind about marrying Whitley, by some miracle, he would court her himself.

Did he love her?

He didn’t know. He certainly admired her, respected her and, God knew,
wanted
her, and not just physically. She’d opened some whole new region in his soul, an actual landscape, golden with light. Should Lizzie refuse his suit, as she well might, he’d have that magical place to retreat into, for the rest of his life, and he’d find some sad solace there.