Coming Home for Christmas

by Carla Kelly

  When he was much younger, he had read Homer and learned of Odysseus’ dreamy days in the clutches of Circe, on her seductive island. With her direct gaze and finely honed sense of superiority, Laura was no Circe—far from it. Still, he knew he would be a liar if he did not admit to himself that San Diego was far more pleasant than life at sea in any ocean. If Laura formed any part of that realization, well, he could repent at sea eventually. That is, provided anyone thought to send a ship for him, once his shipmates found friendly shores up north.

  “‘Why halt ye between two opinions?’”

  Surprised, Thomas looked around, then laughed. “Father, you are quoting the prophet Elijah to me?”

  “Bravo, lad,” the Franciscan priest said. “You know your Old Testament in Spanish, obviously. I am impressed.”

  Thomas bowed. “I am Presbyterian. We know our Old Testament in any language.”

  The Franciscan glanced inside the hovel. “You just appeared indecisive, a quality I seldom observe in you. And there sits Señorita Ortiz. Did she frighten you away?”

  “Far from it,” Thomas replied, willing to be frank with this man who had become something approaching a confidant, now that the Splendid crew was working to refit the Spanish ship below in the harbor. “For a moment, she almost treated me as an equal.”

  Father Hilario laughed and motioned to a bench under a jacaranda tree, next to a woman selling chillies. “First, lad, how are your own patients?”

  “No better today,” he said, always touched by the Franciscan’s concern for the two crew members who were so ill, and who, by rights, Thomas should have hated, because they were part of what tied him to San Diego, when everyone else was preparing to sail north. Or so he had admitted to Father Hilario recently, far from a confessional booth, where his Presbyterian joints would never have knelt anyway. “But it’s not their fault that I am doomed to stay in San Diego, when the crew sails. My lieutenant promised me to your fort’s captain and here I remain.”

  “May I sit with your patients again tonight?” Father Hilario asked.

  “You know you may.” Thomas shrugged. “I doubt the foretopman will know you are there, but Ralph Gooding will probably challenge you to chess.”

  “Perhaps I will defeat him this time,” Father Hilario said with a chuckle.

  “Unlikely. Consumption may be rotting his lungs, but his brain is nimble.”

  They sat in companionable silence. With a frown on her face, and her lips pursed in a way that Thomas had to admit could be distracting to a weak-minded man, Laura left the shack, nodding to the two men as they sat together. Idly, Thomas noticed she had an attractive way of walking that set her skirts swinging.

  Thomas, you’re a dolt, he thought. “Something is distracting her,” he murmured, enjoying the view. Me, too.

  “It’s a touchy thing,” the priest said.

  Thomas waited for the man to continue. He seemed to be weighing a matter of delicacy. “If it’s of the confessional,” Thomas began, “I would never presume…”

  “No, no, that is not it.” The Franciscan sighed. “It will be out soon enough, I fear.”

  Thomas felt an icy hand clutch his heart, which startled him, considering that Laura had never given him any reason to think of her in too friendly a manner. “She is in trouble?”

  Father Hilario shook his head. “It is her father, the accountant.” He shrugged. “Which, I suppose, puts her in trouble.” He turned to look at Thomas and lowered his voice, even though the market square was bustling and noisy. “He has been caught, so to speak, with his hand in the till.” He peered closer. “Do you understand that idiom?”

  Thomas nodded. “It translates well into English, Father.” There are scoundrels everywhere, he thought, feeling suddenly sorry for Laura. “What happened?”

  The priest shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it takes a man of strong character to resist greed.” He gave Thomas a knowing look. “Those of us with no fortune and few prospects are never tempted, are we?” He looked around and leaned closer. “Some say he is a gambler.”

  “Ouch,” Thomas said. “What will happen?”

  “If this is true, Señor Ortiz will be trundled off to Mexico City for trial.”

  “Laura?”

  The priest shrugged again. “She has no family here. I suppose his fate will be hers, as well.”

  Thomas thought about the misfortunes of others as he returned to the garrison. Even though it had been a long time since the crew of the Splendid had been liberated from the fort’s noisome cellar, he had seldom walked past the presidio’s open gate without a feeling of relief. And now the royal accountant was cooling his heels in that miserable hole. Too bad for him.

  He decided not to worry overmuch about Laura; she must have friends in San Diego to look out for her. At least she wasn’t thousands of miles away from people who spoke her language or practiced her religion. As his own father had told him on occasion, a little humility never did a body any harm.

  He mentioned the matter to Ralph Gooding, the carpenter who lay in bed with fever-bright red spots in his cheeks, as classic a presentation of consumption as Thomas had ever seen. Poor man. Gooding had come to Thomas’s attention several years ago when the Splendid had rounded Cape Horn in a monstrous storm and entered the Pacific.

  Thomas had finessed Gooding through good moments and bad, but the disease was finally taking its inevitable course, no matter how balmy the air in San Diego, or how plentiful the seafood and other choice victuals, now that they were no longer imprisoned.

  Ralph had been cajoling Thomas to take ship with the coastal lug when it was finished. “Davey there and I are finished, sir, and you know it,” had been Gooding’s most recent argument. There was no denying Thomas was tempted. Davey Ewing, the foretopman, traveled in and out of consciousness and the carpenter was right about his own prognosis.

  “You know I cannot leave you,” Thomas had said, hoping his resolution sounded firm and reassuring.

  Bless him, Gooding tried again, this fourth day of November, as the purple hues of late afternoon began to spread across his coverlet. “Davey Ewing is a no-hoper and Father Hilario can close my eyes as well as you can, Surgeon,” was Gooding’s latest attempt. “Why should you remain?”

  Thomas propped his stockinged feet on the carpenter’s bed. “Ralph, you’re a trial and a blasphemer, but the answer is still no!”

  Gooding smiled and Thomas knew he understood. “Did some learned professor feed you a cock-and-bull story while you were in medical school?”

  “Indeed he did! Happens I believed it and still do,” Thomas concluded gently. He ran his hand down the carpenter’s skinny arm. “And there is this—in order to get a ship and permission to leave, Mr. Ludlow promised the fort’s captain that I would remain here to treat his own sick.” Thomas smiled. “See there, Ralph—it isn’t just about you!”

  Gooding laughed appreciatively, as Thomas had hoped he would, but the laugh turned into a racking cough that ended with a handkerchief to his lips.

  Thomas calmly wiped away the blood. “I know my duty,” he said simply.

  Gooding nodded. When he spoke, it was just a whisper. “Then you’ll hear no more about it from me.” His good humor had not deserted him, though. “I suspect you prefer the fleshpots of San Diego to any of his Majesty’s frigates.”

  “You’ve found me out,” Thomas teased back, slapping his forehead dramatically. “Seriously, it is San Diego’s beaches I would miss.”

  Now that was a lie. Thomas sat with his patient until the man drifted to sleep, trying to think of the last time he had visited the harbor for any purpose other than to wish himself aboard the coastal vessel the Splendid crew was reinforcing for the trip north. Finally, it had become too painful, so now he stayed away.

  When Gooding slept, Thomas strolled outside the fort’s adobe walls to admire Alta California’s bewitching twilight. He would have enjoyed it more if Laura Ortiz hadn’t stumbled into him as she came into the presidio, her l
impid eyes too full of tears to see him.

  He had tried to sidestep her, but ended up grasping her shoulders to keep her from running right into him. When she looked up, he couldn’t help sucking in his breath at all the misery in her eyes; it easily had his own misery trumped in spades. He was a man of some experience—life in the Royal Navy made that imperative—but he was not prepared for such raw sorrow.

  So much so that he lightened his grip, but did not release her, blurting out, “Señorita Ortiz, is there something I can do for you?”

  Him? Him? A former prisoner, a Protestant, a man who soiled his hands with actual work? If she had hauled herself back and slapped him, Thomas would not have been surprised.

  She did seem to rear back in disbelief at his impertinent invasion of her privacy. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it into a firm line. Resigned, he waited for the cutting reply he fully expected, but it never came. Instead, she shook her head slowly and passed him.

  He was almost too embarrassed to look at her, except he did. For one tiny moment, she looked like a woman who desperately needed a friend. The moment was as ephemeral as the smoke starting to rise from little shacks outside the fort on the way to the pueblo.

  Thomas Wilkie stored it up for the moment. He knew he had a good instinct for other people’s troubles. That was another lesson he seemed to have learned in medical school.

  Chapter Three

  Less than a week later, three incidents happened in cruel succession: the Almost Splendid—as the crew had christened her—sailed with the tide for Fort Astoria in Oregon country; Davey Ewing died, nearly at the moment the Almost Splendid disappeared over the horizon; Laura Ortiz was turned out of her house, a victim of her father’s circumstances. Thomas was hard put to think which incident bothered him more, particularly since he was deep in a pool of self-pity that rendered him less than useful.

  Against his inclination, he had gone to the harbor for the ship’s embarkation. It was a typically misty morning in San Diego, with fog here and there, but destined to burn off by four bells or so in the forenoon watch. He had two express purposes in attending the coasting vessel’s send-off. The first was to give his pharmacist’s mate all the useful advice he could think of. True to his nature, the mate paid attention for a few minutes, then his focus began to wander. God protect the men of the Almost Splendid, for I know I cannot once they sail, Thomas thought.

  The second matter of business involved getting Lieutenant Ludlow, captain of the vessel now, to put his signature to a document attesting to Surgeon Thomas E. Wilkie’s reasons for remaining in San Diego—to tend to crew members too sick to embark on the Almost Splendid and as a bargaining chip in return for the Spaniards’ help in outfitting the vessel.

  Father Hilario had suggested such a document over supper the night before, after the soup and before the fish and tortillas. “Tomás, suppose an English vessel should appear in our harbor, and wonder why you are here, instead of aboard a ship? Could this get you into trouble?”

  “Ay de mi,” Thomas had said, startled at the possible implications and startled that he had thought automatically in Spanish. “I could end up swinging from a yard-arm, if a British captain thinks I held back because I was a cowardly malingerer.”

  Thomas had drawn up a document to cover himself, in the event an English ship actually did arrive. Father Hilario had taken it to the presidio’s captain, who added his additional reasons. The capitan’s secretary was far more skilled than the overworked purser on the Almost Splendid. With baroque swirls and furbelows, he had written in Spanish that Tomás Wilkie, surgeon, Royal Navy, had been expressly required to remain behind to provide medical care to England’s illustrious allies, the Spanish, who were without a physician of their own. The captain’s seal was far more impressive than Lieutenant Ludlow’s mere signature.

  Lieutenant Ludlow and his now-former surgeon had shaken hands on that matter as the crew unfurled the sails. “The Americans at Fort Astoria will help us. Between the two of us nations, we’ll get you home, Thomas,” Ludlow had said, with one eye on the sails. “And now, I have work to do.”

  “That’s all I ask, sir,” Thomas said to the captain’s back. With a sigh, and one last look around, Thomas left the small lugger. He stood on the dock, hands in his pockets, head down, as the ship tacked out of the harbor.

  Now he felt well and truly alone, discounting his helpless patients in the presidio’s hospital. As he climbed back to San Diego, he turned a few times to look down at the harbor again. “I am so far from home, Father,” he murmured. “I do not know if I will ever see another Christmas with you and Mum.”

  He swallowed a few times, declared himself too old to cry, but let the tears fall anyway.

  The second incident happened immediately upon his return to the presidio. At some point between Thomas’s morning ward-walk and his entry through the presidio’s always-open gates, the foretopman had died.

  Well, damn me, Thomas thought, as he closed Davey Ewing’s eyes. He glanced at the carpenter, who was observing him thoughtfully.

  “I hope you don’t hate me, Thomas,” the man said.

  “For being alive?” he asked. “You’re troubling the wrong man about that. I’m your surgeon. I’d like to keep you on this side of the soil.”

  It was true; he meant it. He also felt himself succumbing to the worst case of self-pity he had ever indulged in. But for you, and the Spanish captain, I would be sailing north, he couldn’t help thinking, even though he knew it must be a sin to feel that way.

  He could tell Ralph Gooding didn’t believe his bonhomie; he scarcely believed it himself. He made himself look Gooding in the eye, except the carpenter had already sighed and turned his face to the wall.

  Thomas assuaged his guilt by taking extra care over the body of Davey Ewing, dead so far from home. His innate curiosity made him want to perform an autopsy, but he resisted. He doubted anyone in the presidio would think kindly of him after such a procedure and he did have to get along with the Spanish.

  Still, he couldn’t help but be touched by the way Father Hilario gently helped him with a soft cloth and stood silently by the dead man, his hands clasped together. When he had finished praying, he put a crucifix between the profane and adulterous foretopman’s tight grip.

  “He wasn’t a very good man, Father,” Thomas said.

  “Who among us is?”

  The words were softly spoken, but Thomas felt the rebuke settle around him like mortar. “Forgive me, Father,” he whispered, and left the room.

  Perhaps if his father had been a cruel man, and his mother an indifferent woman, Thomas would not have yearned for home with quite the longing that attacked him now. If he were honest, he could recall many a moment in the far northern latitudes when he would have gladly committed all seven deadly sins for the privilege of rotting in so blissful a prison as San Diego. In fact, he knew there would be many a San Diegan who, suddenly transported to Dumfries, would have been shocked at being exiled to such a spartan environment.

  But home was home and he was far from his; the matter was as simple as that. Thomas knew himself well enough to know that he would probably mope about for a few days and then resign himself to the current affair. Still, it was hard, and he knew he had to tough it out on his own.

  The third cruel incident was not specifically his problem, but made him feel considerably less sorry for himself. After a night of tossing and turning in his tidy quarters off the ward, Thomas had wakened to a disgustingly lovely morning. Even though it was November, the shutters were open and the fragrance of various tropical flowers wafted inwards, daring him to think ill of Alta California. Sourly, he could and did, until he glanced out of the window off the surgery to see the royal accountant being led toward the inner courtyard in chains.

  “Good Heavens!” he exclaimed, setting down the bowl of warm water he had poured with which to wash Ralph Gooding. The water sloshed onto the bedside table and Ralph looked at him with amused eyes.


  “Is it Napoleon?” the carpenter joked.

  “Not quite. It looks as though Father Hilario was right. Laura’s father is being led away in chains. I guess the Spaniards suffer fools no more gladly than the Navy Board would.”

  The carpenter frowned. “Is he the man accused of pilfering money from the presidio treasury?”

  “The very one. Father Hilario has kept me abreast of the audits and investigating committees,” Thomas replied. “I swear the Spanish are even more diligent bean counters than our own fiscales.” He stopped and smiled at his use of Spanish where English was expected. “Accountants, I mean.”

  “What happens now?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I have no idea, but it can’t be pleasant.”

  It wasn’t. Father Hilario gave him a full report that afternoon while Ralph dozed. According to the Franciscan, all of the Ortizes’ possessions were to be auctioned off that very evening. “Yes, there were gambling debts. Not only did he siphon off money from the presidio’s coffers, but he also cheated a number of local residents.” He shook his head. “He cried and carried on and vowed to pay it all back, but there was no sympathy in that room! Talk is that he will be on the king’s highway in chains tomorrow, heading for a trial in Mexico City.”

  “So soon?”

  The priest shrugged. “If he stays one moment longer, I fear the San Diegans will garrote him.” He made a twisting gesture with his hands and Thomas winced.

  The priest bustled off; mid-afternoon prayers were approaching. Thomas assumed his favorite position in the broad window. It was a good time to resume the pity he had been showering on himself since the Almost Splendid had sailed, except that he had a more nagging thought: What would happen to her High and Mighty Doña Laura Maria Ortiz de la Garza?

  He knew it wasn’t his business. Either she would go with her father to Mexico City or perhaps stay with friends in San Diego.

  His mind on Laura, Thomas sat with Ralph Gooding while his patient ate his gruel and soft-boiled eggs a few hours later. Apparently the carpenter had similar thoughts, because he folded his arms across his stomach and looked the surgeon in the eye.