Coming Home for Christmas

by Carla Kelly

  “And now, my dear Mrs Nicholls, I would like you to meet someone,” the sultan was saying to her now and gesturing toward a set of beautifully carved doors.

  She gritted her teeth with the impatience of it all, wanting to get over the business of the Christmas tree and what he was probably going to demand from her. Couldn’t the man take no for an answer? Lily smiled as graciously as she could and allowed herself to be led along.

  He showed them into what turned out to be a sumptuous bedchamber. Lily couldn’t help a glance at the major. Good Lord, was the sultan going to seduce her right here, with witnesses? She moved closer to the major, who seemed somehow unconcerned and surprisingly serene. Of course, no one was threatening his virtue, obviously.

  The room was pleasantly warm, the result of several charcoal braziers doing their work. The sultan led the way to a bed. Heaven help me! Lily thought to herself in panic, until she came closer and realized what a simpleton she had been.

  Lying there was a small woman. Lily came closer, almost holding her breath at the frail life in front of her. Without asking permission, she perched herself on the bed and held out her hand, gently touching the woman’s hand, then clasping it carefully in her own. If she had learned one thing in her painful time in the Crimea, it was how to conduct herself at someone’s bedside.

  She glanced at the sultan, curious to know who this woman was, wasted by age and apparent illness, but lovely still. One glance told her and it took her breath away.

  I have been such a fool, she thought. She swallowed her stupid pride and looked at the sultan. “Your Highness, is she one of your wives?” she asked.

  He nodded, kneeling on the floor beside the bed, putting his arm under his wife’s head. “This is Habiba, the wife of my youth, my first wife, the mother of my sons,” he whispered.

  “Habiba,” Trey said. “Lily, that means ‘my dear one,’ in Arabic.”

  She nodded, too touched to speak. Gently, she massaged the woman’s arm. Habiba opened her eyes and Lily almost sighed with the loveliness of her brown, almond-shaped eyes. Forty years ago, maybe fifty even, Habiba must have been a vision out of an Arabian Nights tale.

  The sultan’s wife turned her head to look at her husband and Lily sighed again at the glance they gave one another. If Randolph Nicholls had ever looked at her like that, Lily knew she would still be in deep mourning at his untimely death.

  She glanced at the major, seeking reassurance, and received another shock. He was looking at her in much the same way the sultan was regarding his wife. She blinked and the moment passed. It must have been a trick of the muted light in the room, she decided.

  “I wanted you to meet my dear Habiba, Mrs Nicholls,” the sultan was saying. “I know it will not be long before you leave this Soulali. Will you think of us now and then, when this war is long over?”

  “More than you will know, your Highness,” she whispered. “I have learned so much here.” And most of it today, she added to herself.

  She sat a few more moments, feeling the gentlest pressure on her hand, as Habiba pressed her fingers. Lily held her breath as the sultan’s queen raised her hand.

  “I have told her about your red hair and she wants to see it,” the sultan said.

  Without a word, Lily removed her bonnet, tossing it aside, and tugged at the pins that held her hair in place. She felt Trey’s fingers in her hair, too, pulling at the strands to separate them. He ran his fingers through the tangle until her glorious hair was spread around her shoulders and down her back. She leaned closer then, so Habiba could touch it. The woman smiled and sighed, saying something to her husband. He nodded.

  “She tells you thank you. She has always wanted to see red hair.”

  “I wish I could invite her to Scotland,” Lily said. “She would see how commonplace it is.”

  The sultan laughed and translated her words. Habiba smiled, touched Lily’s hair again and then closed her eyes in sleep, exhausted by so much effort.

  “May your dreams be pleasant,” Lily whispered.

  They stood a moment more in the bedchamber, then the sultan ushered them out. Without a word, Lily reached for the major’s hand and held it. She turned her face into his uniform sleeve until she had control of her emotions, then calmly followed their host.

  He led them into the entrance hall again and there was the Christmas tree. It was scarcely a noble pine, but this was wartime, and all of the Ottoman Empire had suffered.

  “I wish it were a larger tree, Mrs Nicholls,” the sultan apologized. “Wagons are either still full of the wounded, or refugees, or supplies and food, moving here and there.”

  “I understand, your Highness,” she said. “It will mean so much—so much!—to the men who are homesick for England.” She took a deep breath. “You said the cost would be high for me.”

  “I did.” The sultan seemed less confident then. “Perhaps I ask too much of a lady.”

  She knew then what he wanted, probably what he had wanted months ago, when she had foolishly thought he was asking her to be his fourth wife. She hadn’t understood, but now she did.

  “It’s not too much, your Highness, considering your great kindnesses to us at the barracks hospital. And for the tree, of course.” She fingered her loose hair. “You’d like to have a wig made from my hair for Habiba, wouldn’t you? Certainly, you may.”

  Chapter Seven

  “I like it, Lily, and I’m not just saying that.”

  Worried, Lily searched his face for the lie, but it wasn’t there. There was nothing in Major Wharton’s face but appreciation: no sympathy, no pity, nothing but the kind of delight she remembered from her son Will’s face, when he saw something he enjoyed.

  She held out her hand for the mirror, gritting her teeth. She had been brave enough through the process and Trey had sat right beside her through the whole ordeal. It was easy enough to pantomime that she wanted Habiba’s chief servant to take everything. Her hair was curly and she knew it would look good enough, tight around her face. Still, she had felt a pang as she ran her hand down the whole lovely length of her red hair. Oh, well. She wore it under a matron’s cap, so what difference could it possibly make?

  Trey put the mirror in her hand. She raised it slowly to her face, horrified at first to see someone with big brown eyes—goodness, but they looked twice as large, without a wealth of hair to balance them—and let her breath out slowly. Tears welled; that was all. She turned her head to the side, reacquainting herself with her ears that had always been covered by her hair and cap. At least they were small ears, like Mama’s. She sighed and looked at the major.

  He hesitated a moment, then he touched her tight curls. His face turned beet red, but he didn’t take away his hand, twining the stubby strands around his finger. “Fun, too,” he told her. He peered closer at her face. “Not going to cry, are you?”

  She shook her head as the tears fell. Without a word, he gathered her close and kissed the top of her head. “You did a brave and a good thing, Lily,” he said and then released her, after dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief held at the ready.

  She wouldn’t have minded if he had held her longer. He made no move to distance himself, so she had to be content with that. He turned to watch two palace servants carry the sultan’s promised Christmas tree into the foyer. They had bound the limbs with twine to keep the tree from bouncing about over the deep ruts between the palace and the hospital.

  “We’ll set it in the main hall,” she told him as they jounced over terrible roads, the tree held between them. “That way, the men from Units Two and Three—those who don’t walk well—can see it from their beds.”

  He nodded. “I’ll clip the twine, and set it in a bucket of sugar water outside the kitchen door. Our housekeeper used to do that.” He scratched his head. “Not sure why. She claimed the cold air helped the tree hang on to its needles. No one ever argued with her.”

  Lily had done as he said, fluffing out the branches as he clipped the twine. He looked u
p at her and she tried not to shiver in the winter air, missing the extra warmth of her hair.

  Trey grinned at her and opened the door to the kitchen. “Get inside! You can’t imagine how I would dread composing a report to Miss Nightingale, describing your final hours deep in the grip of la grippe, because short hair had rendered you vulnerable.”

  She did as he said, warming herself in front of the oven. She wished he would stay in the kitchen, but after a nod in her direction, he returned to the hospital, muttering something about “that blasted report.”

  She waited a few minutes, thinking of the times he had left, only to return because he had something further to tell her, be it joke or serious business. Because he did not return, she decided to be philosophical, reminding herself that when the hospital finally closed, she would never see him again. There was no way their paths would ever cross again. She would never run into him in London, or glimpse him during a visit to the Lake Country. Fishing would never bring him to Scotland. He would be an ocean away, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to change it.

  The weight of her melancholy seemed to settle on her shoulders like mortar. She sobbed out loud as she changed from her one dress into the old nightshirt he had given her, because she had nothing else. She decided she would wear the garment until it turned to rags and disintegrated. With tears on her cheeks, Lily ordered herself to be calm and think about the pleasure of seeing Will again soon, and her parents. She had no idea what she would do with herself, once she left the Ottoman Empire, no idea at all.

  Lily was sitting in bed thinking, her chin on her drawn-up knees, when Trey Wharton knocked on her door. She knew his knock.

  “Y-yes?” she asked, wanting to get up and pull him into bed with her. Her face was hot with the mere idea.

  He opened the door, but just stood in the doorway. He held a ribbon-tied document in his hand and her heart sank. He set it down on the small table by the door.

  “It was on my desk. Looks like your marching orders, Lily. You’ve been given leave to steam from Constantinople right after Christmas, destination France and then England.” He stood there a second, hesitating, then closed the door quietly. “G’night now.”

  She didn’t hear his footsteps and her heart ached to think he was standing on the other side of the door, just waiting there for what, she wasn’t sure. Every fiber in her body wanted her to leap out of bed and open the door, but something else—call it character, call it virtue, call it cowardice—prevented her. After a long moment, she heard slow, receding footsteps.

  It wasn’t the worst night of her life; that was probably the night after Balaclava, when every wounded man in the history of the world had seemed to pile up in the woefully unprepared barracks hospital in Scutari. It wasn’t even the night her late husband Randolph had taken his last shallow breath and died. She had only felt relief that consumption no longer held him hostage in pain and suffering.

  For hours she lay there, wishing to hear Trey Wharton’s measured footsteps again. She had grown accustomed to his steps. For a year they had both ward walked, despite him not being a doctor. It hadn’t mattered. Even though he was an American, and as he had so colorfully expressed to her, had no dog in the fight, he cared about the French and British soldiers in his hospital, the one Miss Nightingale had, in her wisdom, given to him.

  He had walked even when she was too tired to walk, but had sat, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, on a bench in the main hall, too worn out to make it to her own bed off the kitchen. She lay in bed now, knowing she would miss his firm tread, and wondering if he would ever walk up and down with a child of his own, soothing away a nightmare, or teething woes. “I trust you won’t be shy forever, Major Wharton,” she had murmured late in the night. “Surely some day there will be a lady brave enough to chase you until you catch her.”

  At least she had two new dresses, one green, one blue and both silk, courtesy of the sultan. Lily washed and dressed in the morning, thinking about the Christmas tree she had bought with her hair: anything not to think about her departure papers on the table—she couldn’t bring herself to touch them—or the fact that, in a few days, she would say goodbye forever to Major Trey Wharton, her American observer.

  At least her hair was easy to tend. She smiled into her scrap of mirror, teasing the curls here and there, then covering it all with her matron’s cap. Mama would mourn her lovely hair, but Papa would find it amusing. Ever practical, Will would probably hug her and remind her that it would grow. Now it was time to retrieve the tree and start decorating.

  Lily opened the kitchen door and gasped. The tree was gone! She put her hand to her mouth and sagged against the doorframe, her knees weak. When she could stand upright again, she looked around, her breath coming in little gasps until she felt light-headed. Nothing. She ran into the hospital. Maybe Major Wharton had risen earlier and set it in the main hall. That would be a kindness typical of him.

  Nothing. Forcing herself to walk slowly—the men were still sleeping—she went into each ward, looking around. She went outside once more, not bothering with a shawl against the bitter cold. Still no tree. She pressed her lips tightly together to keep from sobbing. She took a deep breath, then another. She sniffed again. Pine.

  Startled, she looked toward the stables, where the native coachmen generally gathered by their charcoal fire. All she saw this time was smoke. Her hands bunched into tight fists, she started to run, thinking of all the terrible things she would say.

  The coachmen looked at her in surprise, as she stopped by their circle, suddenly uncertain. Her tears flowed when she saw the remains of her tree, smoldering and billowing smoke everywhere. The tree had been too green to burn for warmth, but they had tried. As she looked at the cold men—nobody dressed warmly because war had reduced them all to paupers—she remembered Trey’s irritation only yesterday that the charcoal deliveries had been disrupted. He had made some comment about things going to pieces when wars were ending. These coachmen had never failed her in their delivery of the wounded.

  They were cold and had tried to warm themselves with her Christmas tree, her foolish tree that probably meant more to her than to her patients, because she had been trying to hang on to some semblance of her normal family life, especially her son, in this time of abnormality. That was all the tree truly was, a graceful reminder of happier Christmases. She had tried to recapture better days with a silly tree and she had failed.

  Lily turned away, shivering. She had given her hair for this futile gesture. She walked slowly back to the kitchen, her heart barely lifting when she noticed the major standing in the doorway, his face serious. She shook her head and tried to walk past him into the kitchen, but he gently took her by the shoulders and held her close when she began to weep.

  She wasn’t sure why she cried. Maybe it was for Randolph; maybe for Will, whom she missed with every fiber in her body; maybe because she knew in her heart she would never be as lucky in love as her own parents; maybe she cried for war and death and women in England and France who had lost their lovers; maybe she was just tired to the marrow of her bones. Whatever the reason, Major Wharton wrapped his arms around her and let her sob.

  She wanted him never to let her go, but there was breakfast to prepare in the newly refurbished kitchen. The doctors would be coming soon for a cup of tea before they began morning rounds. The Sisters of Mercy were probably already through with morning prayers. The clock was ticking and many depended on her.

  Lily pulled away finally, looking at the major, wishing one last time that he would say something that would stop her from leaving. She sniffed back unshed tears. Maybe the biggest reason for her sorrow was that the observer, for all his skill and experience, couldn’t seem to see her love for him.

  Chapter Eight

  As foolish as she had felt over the Christmas tree, Lily knew herself well enough to understand that her training would take over, especially when so many people needed her. She had wanted to believe the major, when he looked her in the
eye, his hands still gentle on her arms, and assured her there would be a tree.

  She had nodded and smiled, because she knew he wanted to see that. It was pointless to mention that tomorrow was Christmas Eve. He could read a calendar as well as she could. After the noon meal, Trey had told her there would soon be a transport of the walking wounded by steamer for Constantinople. He had completed the paperwork for her to accompany them. She could leave on Christmas morning, or sooner, if the steamer was ready.

  “At least it won’t take me long to pack,” she had joked, hoping to dissipate some of the bleakness she felt and could have sworn she’d seen reflected in his eyes also. Say something to me, she said to herself, wishing he could understand her heart. That’s how it is supposed to be done, you know, no matter that you are American and bound by your own orders. Do you think I find London irresistible? Think again.

  But Trey Wharton was not susceptible to thought waves and everyone seemed to need her. Her duties occupied her solidly from the noon meal to mid-afternoon, but she found a hundred ways to avoid the main hall, where the ambulatory men had collected all the ornaments they had prepared for the tree the coachmen had burned, the tree for which she had sacrificed her hair.

  As the afternoon waned, one of the nuns delivered a note to her on the familiar, heavily embossed paper that came from Sultan Abdul Ahmed Wasiri. She managed her only genuine smile so far that day, pleased to see an invitation for her to visit that afternoon. There was a pony cart waiting for her.

  She scribbled a note for Captain Penrose and left the barracks hospital.

  As charming as ever, the sultan took her to the seraglio, where a weaver sat cross-legged on a straw mat, attaching her shorn red hair to a mohair cap.