Coming Home for Christmas

by Carla Kelly

  “You’ve come to save me from report writing.”

  “Not precisely.” She handed him the note. “Should I worry?”

  He read the note and nodded, then read the note again. He blushed predictably. He took his time to speak, obviously weighing his words on some scale of delicate balance. “Mrs Nicholls, I don’t pretend to understand the Oriental mind.” He tapped the note on his wrist, then grinned, his shyness forgotten for a moment. “Or the mind of Excelsior Penrose, who has summoned me this afternoon to a scolding, I fear.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “He’s practically turning purple, just thinking about ‘the flower of European womanhood’—good Lord, he is a proser!—‘subjected to a godless harem.”’

  “We were perfectly safe last night in the harem!” Lily exclaimed.

  “I know.” He looked out the window. “Still, I wish I understood the sultan’s game. Surely he can’t seriously think you’d be willing to become wife number four.” He looked back at the report in front of him, shaking his head.

  And here I am, adding to your worries, Lily thought. She quietly let herself out of his office.

  Lily spent the rest of the day tending to her patients, part of her mind on them, part on her son, so far away from her…and another part on Major Wharton, who was going to get a dressing down for nothing. She directed the able-bodied patients to help the more feeble soldiers into the many-windowed, enclosed pavilion that she had renamed a solarium. When everyone was seated, she told them about the hopeful Christmas tree and was rewarded with a smattering of applause.

  She set them to making paper chains and looked about for tin snips. “Any shape you want,” she assured the men who were flattening tin cans. She supervised the work. One rogue of a soldier tried to pass off a tin phallus as a candlestick, but his fellow patients threw their pillows at him. The maneuver was successful, particularly the pillow in which someone had stuffed a thick book. His roar of outrage turned into a whimper of pain, which Lily wisely ignored.

  As the afternoon passed, she glanced out of one of the windows to see Major Wharton walking on the lawn with Captain Excelsior Penrose. Their body language said everything. She felt her face grow hot as she watched the major’s steady stride, hands behind his back, and Penrose’s irate gesticulations. She couldn’t help a sigh. Probably nothing Major Wharton could explain would ever head off a vitriolic letter destined for the British High Command, complaining about the American sending sheltered ladies to a harem.

  As if any of them were sheltered now, not after a year and a half of washing filthy bodies, superintending basic needs or listening to soldiers and their longings for England and families. When all was quiet in the solarium, Lily sat on a window ledge in the hall, thinking of her own sacrifice and that of her young son. And there was the major walking beside the captain, who seemed to have a mountain of complaints to unload on a conscientious, caring man. It seemed unfair.

  But maybe she was wrong. As she watched, just out of their view, something changed. The major was talking now, leaning toward the British surgeon, intent. She stared as Penrose reared back at some comment from the major and stalked into the hospital. She swore she heard the door slam, two floors below.

  “My goodness, Major, what did you tell him?” she asked her own reflection in the window.

  She didn’t want to embarrass Major Wharton, but she had not overcome her curiosity as they met that evening in the small diet kitchen, piled high now with bowls and pans from the ruined kitchen. The nuns had returned to the seraglio, assuming she would arrive later.

  Major Wharton joined her at the sink, drying the pans she handed him. She stopped, a sponge in her hand, which made him pause.

  “I couldn’t help noticing what you were attempting on the front lawn this afternoon,” she said, dabbing at a bowl and not quite looking at him. “You were brave to try to explain the situation, but I fear Captain Pompous is even now writing a nasty note to the high command in Sebastopol.”

  The major gave her a winning smile, one without any shyness in it this time. “Then you would be dead wrong, Mrs Nicholls. True, I explained why I felt it best for you and the sisters to stay in the seraglio for another night. And as you can imagine, he reacted precisely as you must have seen, full of outrage, manly affront and Christian indignation.”

  “Yes! But won’t you…aren’t you…?”

  “In a world of hurt, as we say in America?” he asked, taking the bowl from her. “Here’s what you couldn’t have heard from the window.” He smiled at her, glee just barely jostling aside shyness this time. “I reminded him I was well aware of his continued dalliance with one Maeve O’Grady. You probably thought she was a respectable widow and a laundress, eh?”

  Lily nodded, her eyes wide. “Isn’t she? She’s been so kind as to launder some of my…” It was her turn to blush this time. “Well, some of my dainties.”

  The major dried the bowl with a flourish. “I assured Excelsior that if he said one word about a perfectly reasonable solution to a difficult situation for you and the nuns, everyone in Sebastopol would know about Mrs O’Grady, who—ahem—also rejoices in the name of Stephen O’Grady. Such a scandal that would be.”

  Lily stared at him, her mouth open. “How did…how did…?”

  Humor triumphed over circumspection this time. “Close your mouth, Mrs Nicholls! I doubt the flies in the Crimea are healthy to ingest, especially after that long siege of Sebastopol.”

  “Stephen O’Grady? Heavens! Who…?”

  “Told me?” He laughed then, and spread his dishcloth across a chair back. “Mrs Nicholls, I have told you this before: I am one of five members of the U.S. Army who has a paper stating he is an observer. It’s signed by the president of the United States. I observe; it’s official. I am a certified observer. Sometimes it’s even useful. Imagine the scandal, should I reveal that little stinker. And so I told Excelsior Penrose.”

  There was no way Lily could stifle the mirth inside her, so she didn’t even try. She sat down at the table, rested her head in her hands and laughed until she ached. The major calmly finished the dishes as her laughter eventually wound down into an occasional undignified snort, and then she dabbed at her eyes.

  “I haven’t laughed like that in years,” Lily said, when she could finally speak.

  “Does the body good,” the major said. He took out his timepiece and observed it for a moment. “Mrs Nicholls, it is—”

  “Major Wharton, my first name is Lillian, but I prefer Lily,” she said.

  He blushed predictably. “I do, too, Lily,” he said. “You’re right, of course. After all that candor, I suppose we should be on a first-name basis. Call me Trey. Silly name, but my parents were hoping that, after two sons, I’d be a girl and had nothing better to offer!”

  When they had both finished laughing, he pocketed his watch. “Let me arrange for a dog cart to take you to the palace, before it gets any later.” He laughed. “Unless you’d rather have Mrs O’Grady keep you company here for the night.”

  She shuddered in mock horror and was taking off her apron when she heard someone running. Lily glanced at the major. “I hope nothing else is on fire.”

  The major opened the door as the night orderly practically threw himself into the room. He gasped a few seconds until he could speak, and he looked directly at her. “Mum, the hemorrhage in Unit Four…?. ’E’s spouting again!”

  “Then you’d best run for Captain Penrose,” she said, retying her apron and starting for the door, every nerve alert.

  The orderly shook his head. “I did, mum, but he’s drunker than a lord. And Surgeon Guilford took the steamer to Yalta just this morning!” He grasped her arm, all propriety thrust aside. “Mrs Nicholls, can you help? Please say you can!”

  She could and she did, running after the orderly to Unit Four, where the sergeant in question stared at his spouting stump in horror and his comrades looked on helplessly. She sat beside him, elevating his ruined arm and
staunching the flow with pressure and styptic, all the while speaking calmly and telling the man that these things always looked worse than they were. She hoped it was true; she knew it was something her own father would tell a terrified patient.

  With the orderly holding the lamp high and Trey assisting her, Lily threw in a half-dozen more sutures. She had never done such a thing before, and admitted it in a low voice to the major when the job was done, and the invalid’s eyes had closed in weariness and relief.

  “I did the best I could,” she murmured, looking at her bloody hands, which shook slightly now the emergency was past.

  To her surprise, Trey knelt beside her as she still sat on the sleeping sergeant’s cot. He covered her shaking hands with his own and just held them, until she felt the heart return to her body and her hands were still.

  “You’re an observer, too, watching Captain Penrose at work,” he whispered.

  “I suppose I am,” she whispered back.

  “I’m proud of you, Lily Nicholls,” he said. He stood up and pulled her up, too. “It’s too late for you to go to the sultan’s palace. I don’t trust anyone afoot at this hour. You’re taking my bed tonight.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he put his finger against her lips.

  “No argument, Lily. I’ll see that you’re comfortable, then come back here for an hour or so. If things look calm, I’ll put the orderly in charge and stretch out on the sofa in my office. No argument,” he said again.

  Lily nodded, quite unable to feel shy about the matter, because she suddenly knew this man’s heart. She had known for more than a year how decisive and organized he was; now she knew how kind.

  After a few words with the orderly, the major escorted her to his quarters next to his office and left her there. Before he returned to Unit Four, Trey knocked on the door. When she opened it, he held out a nightshirt. “Granted, it is worlds too large for you, Lily, but I suspect you’re not choosy right now, considering that your entire wardrobe is singed beyond resuscitation.”

  She took it gratefully. “Perhaps I should have taken my chances in the seraglio. Didn’t Sultan Wasiri promise me a new dress or two?”

  Trey nodded. He looked around to make sure no one was listening, then leaned closer, like a conspirator. “Tell you what—when he sobers up, I can ask Captain Penrose if Stephen O’Grady could spare a frock.”

  She heard his laughter down the hall, and was still smiling when she closed her eyes.

  Chapter Six

  With all the soldiers that could be spared, and a sprinkling of servants from the sultan’s palace, the kitchen and quarters were repaired within two days, to Lily’s relief.

  And her disappointment, too, she had to admit. Trey Wharton had proved to be an excellent man to share quarters with. Captain Penrose, still in no fit condition to see to his responsibilities, kept to his quarters. Major Wharton had written his own note to Miss Nightingale about the matter. “I’m telling her right here that you are staying in the hospital because the surgeon is incapacitated,” he had said, showing her the letter. “I think there won’t be any argument.”

  Before he had gone ward walking the next night, he had given her his voluminous report on hospital administration in the Crimea. “A little light reading, in case you are an insomniac,” he’d said, as he took up his slatted lamp and closed the door.

  Full of comments and questions, Lily had still been awake when he returned an hour later. Almost before either of them seemed to realize it, they were in the office next to the sitting room—Lily wearing Trey’s nightshirt and wrapped in his overcoat—and the major taking notes as she made suggestions to strengthen the document.

  All joking aside, Major Wharton was an astute observer. “I don’t know if you are aware of it—I barely am, anymore—but I used to have a childhood stammer.”

  Lily shook her head.

  “The upshot was that I spent a lot of time watching people and how they did things. It was always easier to watch than to talk. I recorded my observations.” He shrugged, a hint of red to his complexion, but not much. He seemed to be finding her easier to talk to. “I watched Miss Nightingale in Scutari Hospital. I did more than that—I studied her. Lily, she is a bona fide genius. She gave me a wealth of good ideas on how to manage people, wounds, time and money in fraught circumstances. You were in Scutari?”

  “Yes.” She put her hand to her mouth, unable to say anything for a moment, which earned her Trey’s warm hand on her neck. “When…when she saw that I was sensible and not inclined to faint, Miss Nightingale sent me here, after that emergency had passed.”

  “Wise of her.” He indicated the report, with her notations. “I intend to resign my commission when I return to the States. Let us see if this report leads to a hospital-administrator position for me in Philadelphia.”

  “And not with a bank?”

  He shook his head. “Not interested. And I’m not interested in being a gentleman of leisure, either. What a boring life.” He dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Lily, I am thirty-five years old and know my own mind.” He put down the pen and looked at her, which made him blush predictably. “That wasn’t nice of me, to make fun of gentlemen of leisure.”

  “Which my late husband was,” she said and grew bold enough to touch his hand, now that he had removed it from her neck. “Don’t task yourself over that. It is boring to be a lady of leisure. I don’t want to return to that life, but what alternative have I?”

  She had to give Major Wharton the credit due him. Something about his candid nature had encouraged her to voice a thought she had never been brave enough to say before. At least she had been circumspect enough not to say the next thing that wanted to come out of her mouth: Could you find me employment in your Philadelphia hospital?

  During the afternoon, Lily thought so long about their comments that she almost—but not quite—wished for the hectic days of only last autumn, when they had all been too busy to think of anything except the wounded and the diseased. What do I do now? she asked herself, as she emptied bedpans and washed bodies. Since the lifting of the siege of Sebastopol, her father-in-law had written her several letters, urging her return to the family fold in London, tempting her with a modiste eager to make new frocks, boarding school—horrors!—for Will, and leisure—oh, that word—to make calls about town.

  As Lily scrubbed the main hall, her eyes still on a prime spot for the non-existent Christmas tree, she was free to let her mind rove. Nobody ever says anything about remarriage, she thought, remembering the times her mother-in-law had let drop her own thoughts on one love and no other, and how sad Lily’s husband was dead so young. A person could die of boredom, Lily told herself and vigorously tackled the cold stones with the brush. It won’t be me.

  In mid-afternoon, the fruit basket from the sultan that she had come to dread arrived. She opened the note, and her heart leaped. I have found you a tree. Do come and see it, Mrs Nicholls, the note read. And there it was: We have some business to discuss. Wasiri.

  She knew she would find the major in the warehouse next to the kitchen, where he had said he would be supervising an inventory. If she hadn’t been so worried, she would have been more flattered to see the way his eyes lit up when she came into the room.

  “Oh, my stars, tell me I shouldn’t worry,” she said as she handed him the little note.

  He set down his clipboard and read it, smiling a little and shaking his head. “A persistent man, our sultan,” he commented, tucking the note in his uniform pocket. “Would you like me to accompany you to his palace?”

  She could have kissed him in her relief. He must have known, because he startled her—and maybe himself—by giving her a quick hug. “It’s nice not to face this alone,” she told him.

  Trey didn’t say anything as he released her; maybe it wasn’t necessary.

  As Lily sat beside him in the pony trap for the trip to the palace, she discovered that the short drive was long enough for a remarkable epiphany. She had done p
recisely what her mama’s postscript to an earlier letter had mentioned: she had found love during wartime. She glanced at the major—a handsome man even in fraught circumstances, but more importantly, someone who never panicked, as far as she could tell, and who had a genuinely kind heart. She knew how many rules he had broken to get General Pasquier’s dying son transferred to France, all in the hopes of allowing father and son to have even a few minutes together. And he hadn’t done it for a dusty bottle of champagne. She was in the presence of a genuinely kind man, an intelligent man, a capable man, who also happened to be shyer than forest violets.

  For all she knew, he had a sweetheart back in Philadelphia. If he didn’t, there must be any number of female candidates vying for his heart in his Main Line society. It sounded depressingly similar to her own privileged life of emotions cushioned in cotton wadding, buttressed by the tomfoolery that a woman could only love once and that her chance had come and gone. It was idiocy, but not something a lady talked about.

  But there were bigger fish to fry right now, she reminded herself, as they walked into the palace to be greeted by Sultan Abdul Ahmed’s chief secretary. After a graceful salaam, he led them to the seraglio. Lily felt her heart sink into her sturdy boots. She hung back, not able to help herself.

  “I have got myself into a mess over a dratted tree,” she whispered to Trey. “Why was I so foolish?”

  “When we—” and he emphasized we “—get ourselves out of this mess, you’ll have to tell me why the tree is really so important.”

  She nodded, not even sure herself. But it was too late to worry over the matter, because there was the sultan, looking more benign than usual, perhaps because he was in his own harem, secure in the comfort of his ladies. I doubt anyone asks the sultan if he only loves once, she thought sourly.

  The sultan and the major exchanged their usual lengthy pleasantries, which seemed to be part of doing business in the Ottoman world. She couldn’t help but be impressed with how adroitly the major had come to an understanding of how to do business with Muslims. Maybe he should find his place in the crass world of commerce.