A McKettrick Christmas (7 page)

Brennan rasped out a ragged whisper. “I got to stay alive long enough to see my boy again,” he pleaded. “It’s almost Christmas. I can’t have Tad recalling, all his life, that his pa passed….” The words fell away as another spate of coughing ensued.

Morgan crouched alongside the bench seat, since there were no chairs in the caboose. He was not accustomed to smiling under the best of circumstances, so the gesture came a lot harder that day. Brennan had one foot dangling over an open grave, and unless some angel grabbed him by the coattails and held on tight, he was sure to topple in.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Don’t think about dying, John. Think about
living.
Think about fishing with your son—about better times—” Much to his surprise, Morgan choked up. Had to stop talking and work hard at starting again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost control of his emotions—maybe he never had.
If you’re going to be any damned use at all,
he heard his father say,
you’ve got to keep your head, no matter what’s going on around you.

“My wife,” John said, laboring to utter every word, “makes a fine rum cake, every Christmas—starts it way down in the fall—”

“You suppose she baked one this year?” Morgan asked quietly, when he could speak.

John smiled. Managed a nod. As hard as talking was for him, he seemed comforted by the exchange. Probably he was clutching one end of the conversation for dear life, much as Lizzie had held on to Morgan’s looped belt earlier, when she’d slipped in the snow. “She doubled the receipt,” he ground out. “Just ’cause I was going to be home for Christmas.”

Morgan noted the old-fashioned word
receipt
—his family’s cook, Minerva, had used that term, too, in lieu of the more modern
recipe
—and then registered Brennan’s use of the past tense. “You’ll be there, John,” he said.

Exhausted, John settled back, seemed to relax a little. His gaze drifted, caught on someone, and Morgan realized Lizzie was standing just behind him. She held a mug of steaming ham and bean soup and one of the peddler’s fancy spoons.

Morgan straightened, glanced back at Carson, who seemed to be sleeping now, though fitfully. Sweat beaded the man’s forehead and upper lip, and Morgan knew the pain was biting deep, despite the laudanum.

“I thought Mr. Brennan might require some sustenance,” she said, her eyes big and troubled. She’d paled, and her luscious hair drooped as if it would throw off its pins at any moment and tumble down around her shoulders, falling to her waist.

Morgan nodded, stepped back out of the way.

Lizzie moved past him, her arm brushing his as she went by, and knelt alongside Brennan. “It would be better with onions,” she said gamely, holding a spoonful of the brew to the patient’s lips. “And salt, too.” When he opened his mouth, she fed him.

“Them beans is sure bony,” Brennan said. “I guess they ain’t had time to cook through.”

Lizzie gave a rueful little chuckle of agreement.

And Morgan watched, struck by some stray and nameless emotion.

It was a simple sight, a woman spooning soup into an invalid’s mouth, but it stirred Morgan just the same. He wondered if Lizzie would fall apart when this was all over, or if she’d carry on. He was betting on the latter.

Of course, they’d have to be rescued first, and the worse the weather got, the more unlikely that seemed.

The thin soup soothed Brennan’s cough. He accepted as much as he could and finally sank into a shallow rest.

Creeping shadows of twilight filled the car; another day was ending.

The peddler had engaged the children in a new game of cards. Carson, like Brennan, slept. Mrs. Halifax and the baby lay on the bench seat, bundled in the quilt, the woman staring trancelike into an uncertain future, the infant gnawing on one grubby little fist.

Madonna and Child,
Morgan thought glumly.

He made his way to the far end of the car, sat down on the bench and tipped his head back against the window. Tons of snow pressed cold against it, seeped through flesh and bone to chill his marrow; he might have been sitting in the lap of the mountain itself. He closed his eyes; did not open them when he felt Lizzie take a seat beside him.

“Rest,” he told her. “You must be worn-out.”

“I can’t,” she said. He heard the slightest tremor in her voice. “I thought—I thought they’d be here by now.”

Morgan opened his eyes, met Lizzie’s gaze.

“Do you suppose something’s happened to them? My papa and the others?”

He wanted to comfort her, even though he shared her concern for the delayed rescue party. If they’d set out at all, they probably hadn’t made much progress. He took her hand, squeezed it, at a loss for something to say.

She smiled sadly, staring into some bright distance he couldn’t see. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” she said, very quietly. “My brothers, Gabriel and Doss, always want to sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve, because our grandfather says the animals talk at midnight. Every year they carry blankets out there and make beds in the straw, determined to hear the milk cows and the horses chatting with each other. Every year they fall asleep hours before the clock strikes twelve, and Papa carries them back into the house, one by one, and Lorelei tucks them in. And every year, I think this will be the time they manage to stay awake, the year they stop believing.”

Morgan longed to put an arm around Lizzie’s shoulders and draw her close, but he didn’t. Such gestures were Whitley Carson’s prerogative, not his. “What about you?” he asked. “Did you sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve when you were little? Hoping to hear the animals talk?”

She started slightly, coming out of her reverie, turning to meet his eyes. Shook her head. “I was twelve when I came to live on the Triple M,” she said.

She offered nothing more, and Morgan didn’t pry, even though he wanted to know everything about her, things she didn’t even know about herself.

“You’ve been a help, Lizzie,” he told her. “With John Brennan and with Carson, too.”

“I keep thinking about the conductor and the engineer—their families….”

“Don’t,” Morgan advised.

She studied him. “I heard what you told John Brennan—that he ought to think about fishing with his son, instead of…instead of dying—”

Morgan nodded, realized he was still holding Lizzie’s hand, improper as that was. Drew some satisfaction from the fact that she hadn’t pulled away.

“Do you believe it really makes a difference?” she went on, when she’d gathered her composure. “Thinking about good things, I mean?”

“Regardless of how things turn out,” he replied, “thinking about good things feels better than worrying, wouldn’t you say? So in that respect, yes, I’d say it makes a difference.”

She pondered that, then looked so directly, and so deeply, into his eyes that he felt as though she’d found a peephole into the wall he’d constructed around his truest self. “What are
you
thinking about, then?” she wanted to know. “You must be worried, like all the rest of us.”

He couldn’t tell Lizzie the truth—that despite his best efforts, every few minutes he imagined how it would be, treating patients in Indian Rock, with her at his side. “I can’t afford to worry,” he said. “It isn’t productive.”

She wasn’t going to let him off the hook; he could see that. Her blue eyes darkened with determination. “What was Christmas like for you, when you were a boy?”

Morgan found the question strangely unsettling. His father had been a doctor, his mother an heiress and a force of nature, especially socially. During the holiday season, they’d gone to, or given, parties every night. “Minerva—she was our cook—always roasted a hen.”

Lizzie blinked. Waited. And finally, when certain that nothing more was forthcoming, prodded, “That’s all? Your cook roasted a chicken? No tree? No presents? No carols?”

“My mother wouldn’t have considered dragging an evergreen into the house,” Morgan admitted. “In her opinion, the practice was crass and vulgar—and besides, she didn’t want pitch and birds’ nests all over the rugs. Every Christmas morning, when I came to the breakfast table, I found a gift waiting on the seat of my chair. It was always a book, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As for carols—there was a church at the end of our street, and sometimes I opened a window so I could hear the singing.”

“That sounds lonely,” Lizzie observed.

His childhood Christmases had indeed been lonely, Morgan reflected. Which made December 25 just like the other 364 days of the year. For a moment he was a boy again, he and Minerva feasting solemnly in the kitchen of the mansion, just the two of them. His dedicated father was out making a house call, his mother sleeping off the effects of a merry evening passed among the strangers she preferred to him.

“If you hadn’t mentioned a cook,” Lizzie went on, when he didn’t speak, “I would have thought you’d grown up in a hovel.”

He smiled at that. His mother had regarded him as an inconvenience, albeit an easily overlooked one. She’d often rued the day she’d married a poor country doctor instead of a financier, like her late and sainted sire, and made no secret of her regret. Morgan’s father had endured by staying away from home as much as possible, often taking his young son along on his rounds when he, Morgan, wasn’t locked away in the third-floor nursery with some tutor. Those excursions had been happy ones for Morgan, and he’d seen enough suffering, visiting Elias Shane’s patients, most of them in tenements and charity hospitals, to know there were worse fates than growing up with a spoiled, disinterested and very wealthy mother.

He’d had his father, to an extent.

He’d had Minerva. She’d been born a slave, Minerva had. To her, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was as sacred as Scripture. She’d actually met the man she’d called “Father Abraham,” after the fall of Richmond. She’d clutched at the sleeve of his coat, and he’d smiled at her.
Such sorrow in them gray, gray eyes,
she’d told Morgan, who never tired of the much-told tale.
Such sadness as you’d never credit one man could hold.

Morgan withdrew from the memory. He’d have given a lot to hear that story just one more time.

Lizzie bit her lip. Took fresh notice of his threadbare clothes, then caught herself and flushed a fetching pink. “You’re
not
poor,” she concluded, then colored up even more.

He laughed, and damn, it felt good. “Oh, but I am, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Poor as a church mouse. Mother didn’t mind so much when I went to Germany to study. She figured it would pass, and I’d come to my senses. When I came home and took up medicine in earnest, she disinherited me.”

Lizzie’s marvelous eyes widened again. “She did? But surely your father—”

“She showed him the door, too. She was furious with him for encouraging me to become a doctor instead of overseeing the family fortune. Minerva opened a boarding house, and Dad and I moved in as her first tenants. We found a storefront, hung out a shingle and practiced together until Dad died of a heart attack.”

Sorrow moved in Lizzie’s face at the mention of his father’s death. She swallowed. “What became of your mother?” she asked, sounding meek now, in the face of such drama.

“She sold the mansion and moved to Europe, to escape the shame.”

“What shame?”

God bless her, Morgan thought, she was actually confused. “In Mother’s circles,” he said, “the practice of medicine—especially when most of the patients can’t pay—is not a noble pursuit. She could have forgiven herself for marrying a doctor—youthful passions, lapses of judgment, all that—but when I decided to become a physician instead of taking over my grandfather’s several banks, it was too much for her to bear.”

“I’m sorry, Morgan,” Lizzie said.

“It isn’t as if we were close,” Morgan said, touched by the sadness in Lizzie McKettrick’s eyes as he had never been by Eliza Stanton Shane’s indifference. “Mother and I, I mean.”

“But, still—”

“I had my father. And Minerva.”

Lizzie nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “My mother died when I was young. And even though I’m close to Lorelei—that’s my stepmother—I still miss her a lot.”

He couldn’t help asking the question. It was out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Is money important to you, Lizzie?” He’d told her he was poor, and suddenly he needed to know if that mattered.

She glanced in Carson’s direction, then looked straight into Morgan’s eyes. “No,” she said, with such alacrity that he believed her instantly. There was no guile in Lizzie McKettrick—only courage and sweetness, intelligence and, unless he missed his guess, a fiery temper.

He wanted to ask if Whitley Carson would be able to support her in the manner to which she was clearly accustomed, considering the fineness of her clothes and her recently acquired education, but he’d recovered his manners by then.

“Miss McKettrick?”

Both Lizzie and Morgan turned to see Ellen standing nearby, looking shy.

“Yes, Ellen?” Lizzie responded, smiling.

“I can’t find a spittoon,” Ellen said.

Lizzie chuckled at that. “We’ll go outside,” she replied.