Coming Home for Christmas (16 page)

W
ill handed his government travel documents to a highly dubious conductor. The man frowned at Nora Powell, who was making herself small against the window. Frannie sat next to her, a frown on her own face as she glared back at the conductor.

“She's not an exhibit in a zoo,” Frannie whispered to Will as the conductor moved on.

Will seated himself across from the women. Without a word, he removed his glove from Nora's bound hands, then gently rubbed her cold hands with his warmer ones. He remembered when his mother used to put hot potatoes in his pockets and wished he could do something similar for this poor woman.

She started when he touched her, her eyes opening wide and then narrowing into slits.
She's going to bite me,
Will thought, but he kept rubbing her hands. “I'm not here to hurt you, Nora,” he told her. “This nice lady is Mary Frances Coughlin, but we call her Frannie.”

Frannie nudged her shoulder. “May we call you Nora?” she asked.

Nora nodded and relaxed noticeably, which meant Will could relax, too, and not fear for his fingers. When her hands were warmer, he sat back.

“Nora, I'm a surgeon. I'm on my way home to Philadelphia to get married. Frannie's going to New York. We're…we're going to take you home first.”

He watched Nora's eyes as they filled with tears that spilled on to her cheeks. With her bound hands, she grabbed for him. “I want to go home now!” she said.

“That's what we're doing,” Will repeated, relieved that she understood.

She had hold of his hand with both of hers. She shook her head. “Home!” she said again, louder. “Home! Not Iowa!”

Will felt the breath go out of him as he understood what she was trying to tell him. “Nora, I have my orders,” he said, and it sounded lame and stupid to him. “You're to be returned to your Iowa relatives.” He almost added,
It's the best thing,
but another look at her ravaged face told him the folly of that.

As the train left the depot, Nora Powell's soft weeping was drowned out by the hiss of the engine gathering steam and the clatter of the rails. Tears running down her face, she stared out of the window at the snow, the rabbit brush and sage scoured by the wind and the tracks that were taking her farther and farther from the family left behind at the Spotted Tail Agency.

Will was a competent surgeon, well trained and scientific in the best way he knew. As he listened to Nora's tears and watched the concern in Frannie Coughlin's eyes, he knew he was being measured and found
woefully scant by some cosmic tribunal that he hoped wasn't the mind of God.

I have worries of my own,
he told himself, thinking about Maddy and her boring letters, each more shallow than the last, as she went over every tiny detail of their upcoming nuptials. Did she honestly think he was interested in how many rosettes there would be on each bridesmaid's bodice? It was easy enough to read her silly letters and laugh them off, as he remembered her lovely face and breathy way of talking. Sitting across from real pain, he wondered at his own shallow character.

“I wish it were different,” he murmured to Frannie.

“So do I,” she whispered back.

He stared at Nora's bound hands, knowing what his mother would do, she who had worked for years to smooth the way for immigrants and the poor. She often spoke to him about her work, but he knew this had never involved Indians, and most assuredly not Indian captives who wanted to stay with their half-Indian children. He still knew what she would do.

“Nora, look at me,” he said, in what he called his surgeon's voice, the one he relied on to get attention when he needed it.

She raised her eyes to his and he steeled himself against so much pain on one face. “Nora, I want to cut the bonds on your hands, but you have to promise me you won't try to escape.”

She just stared at him, her face as impassive now as though she truly were Sioux.

“I mean it, Nora. If I cut the bonds and you escape, you won't get far.”

A stubborn light came into her eyes, one he had seen
before, mostly on the face of mothers, who surely were the most tenacious creatures on earth. He swallowed, remembering a mother who had leaped through fire to snatch her child from a burning wagon when the regiment was set upon by Apaches in Arizona Territory. Neither had survived, but Will had never thought survival was on her mind when she plunged into the flames.

Maybe he could do better this time. “You might escape me, but look out of the window. It's snowing again and it's cold and you won't make it alive to Spotted Tail Agency. You're too far away.”

He let her digest that fact, gazing out of the window, too, as dusk settled in. “Promise me, Nora,” he said, a few minutes later. “I don't want to leave you bound because you're not a criminal. You're a mother who wants to go home. Let's find a better way.”

Why he said that, he had no idea. “Maybe your relatives can help,” he suggested, wishing it didn't sound so feeble. He continued his idiocy. “There are lawyers in Nebraska and Iowa.”

Heavens! You're an imbecile, to talk about lawyers!
he thought, disgusted with himself. He stopped, remembering other cases he had heard, where captive women had been returned to their families. He had heard tales and none of them had happy endings. And here he was, babbling about lawyers. He didn't even know if Nora Powell's relatives would show up to reclaim a tainted woman, much less advance one penny toward reclaiming her children.

“Or maybe they won't help you,” he heard himself saying next. “I won't lie to you, Nora.”

More silence.

“I just don't want you to run away, because you won't get where you want to be,” he said simply. “That's what it comes down to. I don't want you to freeze to death. I'm trained to help people, but I can't if you escape.”

After a long moment, Nora edged closer to the front of the seat and held out her bound wrists. “I won't escape,” she said. “At least not now.”

A glance at her face told him that was the best promise he was going to get today. “Very well.” He took out his pocketknife and cut the cords.

Before he drew another breath, Nora had yanked the pocketknife from his hand. He watched, mouth open, as she looked at the knife, at him, then folded the knife and handed it back. “You should be more careful,” she said simply. She sat back, leaned against the window and closed her eyes.

Will stared at her and then at Frannie, whose eyes were wide. Without a word, she moved away from Nora and sat next to him. Equally silent, Will put his arm around her, drawing her close for no discernible reason that filtered through his brain, except that he suddenly felt cold and she looked warm.

“I'm a fool,” he said finally. “She could have killed me.”

Frannie moved a little in his embrace and he let go of her, his face red. In another moment, Frannie had resumed her seat next to Nora. “You're no fool, Captain Wharton,” she said, her voice quiet. “I think she trusts you to help her.”

How am I going to do that?
he thought, more miserable than before. “Frannie, all I'm trying to do is get home for Christmas and get married.” Disgusted with himself again, he wondered if he had ever uttered a
more imbecilic sentence in his life. He shook his head. “What a whiner I am,” he admitted.

Frannie merely smiled. “Your secret is safe with me. Hopefully, your fiancée will marry you anyway.”

A
s the car grew darker, Will thought about Frannie's words, meant in jest, he was certain, but striking closer to the bone than Paddy Coughlin's daughter knew. He closed his eyes, thinking, not for the first time, that he was having trouble remembering what Madeline Radnor looked like.
I'm a beast,
he thought, but he knew he wasn't. True, he had a bad habit of leaving his dirty laundry on convenient doorknobs and apple cores here and there, but he never got so drunk that he couldn't remember where he was, or who was president of the United States.

He opened his eyes and looked at Frannie Coughlin, who was watching Nora Powell. He observed her carefully, seeing the concern in those lovely green eyes. He observed her reaching into her large and shabby carpetbag and pulling out a lap blanket. She draped it over Nora's slight frame. When the woman started, Frannie touched her shoulder and soothed her back to sleep.

Will asked himself if this scene would be different if Maddy were on the train and was suddenly pitchforked into caring for an Indian captive with two half-Indian children left behind somewhere on a reservation. He might wish his future wife would show compassion for a poor soul so decidedly beneath her, but he couldn't help doubting that Maddy Wharton would be any different from Maddy Radnor, Main Line debutante.

He probably wasn't being fair to his fiancée, considering that he hadn't seen her in two years, and there was every possibility that she had matured into someone who would embrace his decidedly unaristocratic life in the U.S. Army. In reality, though, her recent letters had more than hinted how nice it would be if he would resign his commission and set up a practice in a better part of Philadelphia, or in one of the affluent towns along the Main Line.

She wants me to specialize in diseases of the rich,
Will had even written to his father in the last letter. Maybe he and Papa would have a moment to talk about the matter before the wedding and laugh it off as the stuff of cold feet.

He was already dreading his future wife's first look at his army quarters. As a post surgeon, he had more room than most officers his own age—four rooms, in fact—but he knew the size of the Radnor manor, situated across the street from his own Philadelphia home. Their future bedchamber at Fort Laramie was half the size of his parents' linen closet.

And there was the matter of servants. Before he had left Fort Laramie, he had cajoled a corporal's wife into promising to give his quarters a cleaning every week or so. Maddy had said she was bringing along a cook
and her personal maid. He hadn't the heart to tell her that even if they were more than usually homely looking, the two would probably be married in a month or less, sergeants and corporals being what they are in a female-starved society.

“Captain?”

Startled, he looked up at Frannie, who was giving him the same compassionate appraisal she had lavished on Nora Powell.

“Yes, Frannie?” he asked, hoping he hadn't been looking like a total no-hoper, rather than the capable, unflappable, maybe even charming officer and gentleman he tried to be.

“You just looked a little dismal,” she said.

“I feel dismal.”

Frannie sighed and glanced at Nora. “She's in a tough situation.”

Will blushed, grateful for the gathering dusk and hoping that Frannie Coughlin would never know that he had been thinking of himself and not the Indian captive. “And I had to go and promise her lawyers,” he whispered.

He was saved by the bell, the three-toned tinkle that announced dinner was soon to be served in the dining car. “When I get dismal, I eat,” he announced to Frannie and Nora, who had opened her eyes at the sound of the bells. “Let's go.”

Frannie shook her head. “I usually just wait until the candy butcher walks through the car, so I can inspect his sandwiches. I'm on a bit of a budget and I have to get all the way to Brooklyn.”

He appreciated her honesty and reminded himself
that the teachers of soldiers' children probably weren't in the top salary rung at any army post.

“I never eat alone, ladies,” Will announced. “Let this be my treat.”

“That's a lot of money, Captain,” Frannie said, doubt high in her voice.

How to explain to this frugal miss, daughter of a hospital steward, that he was thrifty by choice, despite being buttressed by the Wharton fortune? For a fleeting moment, he wondered how his stepfather had ever explained the same thing to his mother, before they were married in 1856. It always struck him as ironic that his stepfather's branch of the Whartons was stuffed to the gullet with banking money, but they never talked about it.

“Frannie, I have enough. You know there is nothing to spend money on at Fort Laramie,” he told her. “We're going to eat right on this train.”

He knew he didn't have a stern face. He knew he could fake one when he had to. He gave Frannie The Glance. She saw right through him, but agreed to accompany him to the dining car. “We'll spend his money, won't we, Nora?” she said to the other woman and took her hand, so that she had no choice.

 

Dinner was mostly an unalloyed pleasure. Will watched Frannie studying the menu, a frown on her face, as she looked for the least expensive items. He watched her trying to gather her courage to tell him it was all too dear.

“Miss Coughlin,” he began, which made her laugh, considering he hadn't called her that in an entire year. “Miss Coughlin, I'd be honored if you and Miss
Powell—” to his delight, he even coaxed a twitch of the lip from Nora “—will let me order for you. I'm a real connoisseur of Union Pacific grub.”

It was “grub” that did it. Frannie laughed out loud, let go of the menu and said, “I surrender, Captain!”

She folded her hands in her lap. Will grinned at her with real affection, thinking of all the times she had helped him in the hospital simply by being there to read to his patients. He had never been able to show her any true gratitude before now.

He picked up the menu and caught the waiter's eye “We'll start with the purée of chicken soup, and follow it with rib ends of beef and browned potatoes.” He looked over the elaborate menu to the two women seated across from him. “Unless either of you is partial to mutton and then I would give you my sympathies. No?”

He felt only relief when Nora smiled. “Well, then, no sheep for us. We can chase the rib ends down with lamb pie,
à la anglaise,
then clear our palates with olives and celery, before we charge ahead.”

Both of the women were smiling now. Satisfied, he cleared his throat elaborately and returned to the menu. “Aha!” He stabbed the paper. “Here I see squash, green corn—heavens—green peas or beets. No beets, ladies—I forbid it. People who eat beets would probably drink their own bathwater.”

Frannie laughed, which pleased him to no end. She had a hearty belly laugh, the kind that would send Maddy fleeing to another room. Nora laughed, too, then looked around, as if she wondered who had done that.

Will grinned at them both. “Green peas? Wise choice. Now let's take this dinner home with pumpkin
pie and ice cream. Tea or coffee?” They agreed on tea and Will handed back the menu with a flourish that even made the waiter smile.

 

The Union Pacific did its usual best with the dinner he had chosen, but Will could have been eating ash cakes, for all he tasted it. His pleasure lay in watching Nora Powell work her way through every course with a single-minded intensity that told him worlds about her usual bill of fare. The ice cream on the pie made her eyes widen. “It's been years,” she whispered. She savored a tiny bite, then a larger one, before she set down her spoon. “I wish I could share this with my children,” she said, looking at the bounty in front of her, her face suddenly serious.

Please, don't let her cry,
Will thought. Without hesitation, he launched into a vivid description of his first Christmas in Philadelphia after they had moved from Scotland, with strange food and customs, and his own fears of newly found cousins laughing at his thick Scottish brogue. “My stepfather swore he could only understand one word in ten,” he told his little audience, then launched into his best Dumfries dialect.

To his relief, Nora smiled at his antics; so did the children at the table across the aisle. He glanced at Frannie, who watched him with an expression he could not interpret, and held his breath until Nora picked up her spoon again.

The waiter brought the bill when they had finished. “Captain, is she the Indian captive?” the waiter whispered as Will paid the bill.

“How did you know?”

“Not many secrets on a train, sir,” was all the waiter
would say. He watched Nora leave the car with Frannie, then shook his head. “I'd rightly hate to be in her shoes.”

“You're right,” Will told him. “I'd hate to be in her shoes, too.”

He let the women go ahead, standing a long moment in the space between the two cars, balancing easily as the train clacked its steady course across Nebraska. Hands in his pockets, he watched through the glass as Frannie settled Nora down again and put her arm around the woman, who seemed to be crying. Frannie drew her close, both arms around her then.

“Frannie, you're a woman in a million,” he said out loud, and watched them until the cold penetrated his uniform and he was forced to enter the warm carriage.