Enchanted Christmas

by Craig, Emma

  “You do?” Grace kissed her head. Maddie was such a joy to her. Even though she wished every day that Frank could be here to see her, Grace would never regret having given birth to Maddie.

  “Yes. It’s going to be a Christmas present!”

  Grace looked down into Maddie’s upturned face. The little girl was beaming from ear to ear, and her freckled cheeks were as pink as summer roses. “What’s going to be a Christmas present, Maddie?”

  “The reed organ!”

  Oh, dear. Grace rolled the garland into a coil, laid it on the table, picked Maddie up, and settled her on her lap. Then carefully, trying very hard not to bruise her tender spirits, she told her that a dream was a dream—and reality wasn’t.

  She got the feeling Maddie was only humoring her when she nodded.

  Chapter Four

  “We’ll just visit for a few minutes, lad. Can’t pass by a neighbor without saying howdy. Not out here, ye can’t, when neighbors are so few and far between.”

  Noah’s nerves writhed under skin that felt too tight to hold them. He was strung as taut as a fiddle string, and it was all he could do to keep from bellowing at Alexander McMurdo to quit playing games with him and show him some land for he could either buy or homestead.

  Mac glanced at him and those damned eyebrows of his arched again. Noah was sure the old man could read his thoughts—this time they were transparent. Ever since the war, Noah’s emotional reserves weren’t strong enough to hide his nervous disorder. Of course, before the war, he hadn’t had a nervous disorder. He knew Mac could see that his lips were pulled tight against his teeth, that the muscles in his jaw were working convulsively, and that the tendons in his throat bulged with barely suppressed anxiety.

  The old fellow’s face went as tender as that of a woman looking upon her own newborn babe. He pulled his sway-backed gray alongside Fargo, who nodded amiably to the other horse.

  Then he laid a hand on Noah’s clenched fist. It was all but strangling his saddle horn. “Ah, laddie, take a care for yourself. There’s naught to be worried about here. This here territory’s a new place, a land of promise and opportunity, where a man—any man—can start over again without his old life gettin’ in the way.”

  In spite of his very best efforts, Noah knew he was going to explode. He hated it when his nerves bested him and he erupted into the chaotic fury that had been driving him these past several years. Yet he was powerless to control his condition. It was as if a demon had been set loose inside of him. Most of the time, if he stayed away from people, the demon slept.

  Sometimes—now, for instance—the demon got free and, like Mr. Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre, it created blazing havoc. Noah was going to lose control now and yell at this kind old man who was only a little frustrating, really, and then Noah’d be humiliated and embarrassed—and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop himself. He opened his mouth . . .

  And saw the air around him bloom with sparkles. His rage vanished, taking his demon with it. Suddenly it was as if the very word anger didn’t exist in Noah’s world.

  He blinked at the sparkles. They were transparent at first, like infinitesimally tiny diamond chips. Then, as if the diamonds had become bored with only their own kind for company, ruby sparkles glinted. Soon sapphire and emerald and topaz-colored dots joined the others and flickered in the air. He rubbed his eyes and blinked some more.

  He looked down at Mac’s hand resting on his own, which had gone slack. The sparkles seemed to be emanating from where their hands touched. How strange. A sensation of peace invaded him. This was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him in a life that lately had been filled with weird things.

  “Ah, lad, ye’ll be all right. Ye don’t know it yet, and ye’ve had a harder life than most, but ye’ll heal. Ye will. And this here’s the place to do it.”

  Too fuddled to think, Noah turned to stare at Mac, his mind blank. Even his demon wasn’t there anymore. It had gone away. Vanished. Exorcised by this strange old man’s touch.

  Nonsense. He tested the word. “Nonsense.” It came out in a croak, like a frog trying to whisper.

  Mac grinned. “Aye. The whole thing’s nonsense, laddie. And here we are at the Hugh Blackworth spread. Old Hugh’s out ridin’ his range and tryin’ to get himself richer. His wife, Susan, is inside, and she’s a regular tartar of a female. She’s worth knowin’, is Susan, and she’ll be pleased to meet ye, although she won’t show it.”

  Noah glanced to the right and to the left and even up into the sky above his head. The sparkles had gone away. He looked at Mac again and realized the old fellow’d been talking to him. “Um, I beg your pardon?”

  Laughing, Mac withdrew his hand from Noah’s, turned his horse through the gate to the Blackworth spread, and proceeded to guide Noah down the beaten path leading up to a big white house.

  Noah watched Mac’s back for a minute, and then decided meeting Susan Blackworth wouldn’t be as bad as all that. He nudged Fargo into following Mac’s horse. Fargo, who’d evidently become bored watching the hind end of Mac’s old Samuel heading away from him, seemed pleased to obey.

  # # #

  “When will they be back, Mommy?”

  It was, by Grace’s count, the thirty-fifth time Maddie had asked the same question this morning. She glanced up from where she was rolling out a piecrust and sighed.

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart. They may be away for several more days, you know, because Mac was going to show Mr. Partridge some parcels of land.”

  “How come?”

  “I believe Mr. Partridge wants to establish a cattle ranch out here, Maddie.”

  The little girl took one last peek out of the window and wandered back to her mother’s side. When Grace had the pies in the oven, she was going to roll out the remaining scraps and let Maddie help her sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on them, cut them into strips, twist them into curlicues, and bake the strips. Cinnamon sticks were, for Maddie, the epitome of the culinary art. Grace wished everything in life could be so simple.

  “Why can’t he live where daddy wanted to live? Out by the ribber, where you said?”

  When Grace glanced down at her daughter, it seemed to her that all she saw were eyes—big, blue eyes that were so innocent it hardly seemed possible that Grace herself might once have had eyes like that. “That land belongs to us, Maddie. Your daddy got it for us. Mr. Partridge wants some land of his own.”

  “But we live here with Mac.”

  “We’ll live by the river someday, sweetheart.” At least Grace hoped they would.

  The big blue eyes narrowed in thought. “But why can’t we share? You said sharing is p’lite.”

  A grin caught Grace by surprise. “Yes, dear, sharing is very polite. But people don’t usually share land and their homes. They share things like—oh, chores or food. Things like that.”

  “How come?”

  Home come? Oh, dear. Grace knew she was supposed to know the answers to these things, but children asked the most awkward questions. “Um, you see, dear, people get their own land. It’s just the way we do things. That way everyone can have his own little piece of the world to live on.” She gave Maddie a tiny piece of raw dough, hoping to distract her.

  It didn’t work long. “Indians don’t,” Maddie said after she’d swallowed her treat.

  “Indians don’t what, Maddie?”

  “They don’t live on their own little piece of the world. Mac says they don’t think of the world like we do. They think that it belongs to everybody to share.”

  “The last time I looked in the mirror, we weren’t Indians, sweetie.” Feeling a little exasperated, Grace added, “You want to go look and see if you’ve turned into an Indian overnight?”

  Perceiving a new game, Maddie nodded and skipped into the other room. Grace imagined her climbing on the little footstool Frank had made for her and squinting into the mirror. She smiled as she pressed the first crust into a pie plate she’d brought with her from Chicago.


  She heard Maddie tripping lightly back into the kitchen and looked up, still smiling. “Well?”

  “I’m not an Indian,” her daughter announced.

  “Well, then, I guess you’ll just have to be content in thinking like a little white girl instead of like a little Indian girl.”

  “I guess.”

  Grace could tell she wasn’t altogether happy about it.

  As for Grace, she imagined she would be happier about things if she could stop her mind from dwelling on Mr. Noah Partridge. She was, however, as powerless to stop her mind from that idle pursuit as she was powerless to solve her own problems. With a sigh, she decided to pay attention to her daughter. She was all that Maddie had, after all, and she owed her.

  # # #

  The first thing Noah saw when he stepped into the Blackworth’s front parlor was the old lady, sitting ramrod straight in a wing chair. Clad all in black and propping her hands on a cane, she glinted at him out of eyes that looked, in the poor indoor light, to be as black as onyx, as cold as winter, and as glittery as those damned sparkles that had just knocked the demon out of him outside.

  The second thing he saw, shoved into a corner of the Blackworth’s parlor, was the reed organ. The sight of that organ sent Noah’s demon rampaging back into his insides as if it had only gone away to recruit its friends and now had an army at its back. He sucked in a sharp breath and let it out only when Mac laid a hand on his shoulder. The demons vanished at once.

  Damn, Noah wished he knew how the old man did that.

  “This here’s Mr. Noah Partridge, Susan. Mr. Partridge comes to us from the grand old state of Virginia.” Mac’s voice reminded Noah of a master of ceremonies, introducing an attendee at a ball.

  “Is that so?”

  Mrs. Blackworth’s voice sounded like a rusty hinge. At first Noah thought she might be crippled or something because she didn’t move, but only watched him like a hawk. He sensed a fierce intelligence behind those black eyes. Then she rose in a rustle of crisp bombazine, and marched at him as if she were a general and he a private who’d just spilled the general’s tea. He shuffled uncomfortably when she stopped dead in front of him. She was damned near as tall as he was, and he stood a shade over six feet.

  “Noah Partridge, are you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Pleased to meet you.” He wondered where that lie had sprung from. It was a remnant of his lost youth that he hadn’t uttered in a decade or more.

  “From Virginia?”

  Maybe she was deaf. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be related the Partridges of Partridge’s Pianos and Organ Works, would you?”

  Noah opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

  “In Falls Church?”

  He still couldn’t get his tongue and teeth and lungs coordinated. Astonishment held him speechless.

  “Well, speak up, young man. You either are or you aren’t. It’s not as if I asked you to parse a sentence.”

  “Yes,” popped out of Noah’s mouth. He licked his lips, decided he’d didn’t relish being considered a fool, and tried to redeem himself. “Yes, ma’am. My grandfather started the business back in the twenties, and my father took it over. I—ah . . .” His voice trailed out. He couldn’t bear to think about it, much less say it.

  “I expect you lost it during the war,” said Susan Blackworth, obviously not one to get mealy-mouthed over so trivial a thing as a war and the loss of a family business.

  “Yes,” said Noah, and shut his teeth with a clink.

  She nodded once sharply. “Tragic, that. Tragic. I lived in the nation’s capital, you see. Hugh and I were married there.”

  She swept an arm out, and Noah understood that the gesture was meant to indicate the reed organ.

  “My father bought me that organ at Partridge’s when I was just a girl. We brought it out here on a wagon, believe it or not. I didn’t care about anything else, but I wouldn’t leave my organ behind, or my piano, either.”

  Noah hadn’t even noticed the piano. He scanned the parlor. Oh, yes, there it was. It looked about as unhappy as the organ. The organ intrigued him, and he glanced back at it.

  She chuckled dryly. “Of course, my rheumatism is so bad now, I can’t play very often, but I’m not sorry I made Hugh haul it out here. He deserved the trouble.”

  Somewhere in the back of Noah’s brain, the strangeness of her declaration registered. He didn’t take time to think about it. At the moment he had eyes only for that old organ sitting like an orphaned child in the corner of Mrs. Blackworth’s parlor.

  It looked like it was a good forty years old. Or a bad forty, depending. His hands itched and his fingers curled, and he realized they wanted to be investigating the organ. They wanted to be running over the elaborately carved cherry-wood box. They wanted to dust it off and polish it up so that the wood gleamed again.

  They wanted to run themselves over the keys. They wanted to open the box up and investigate the organ’s guts, to see how the reeds were holding up out here in the perishing dryness of the desert. They wanted to oil everything, to test the stops and tune it, to clean it up and repair it.

  Noah could see from where he stood that the poor thing was in dire straits. Hell, that organ looked like its insides might be almost as withered as his own. He forced himself to glance away from the organ and back to Susan Blackworth, and suppressed an impulse to lecture her on the proper care of reed organs and to scold her for neglecting this one. It could be a beauty if it were only cared for properly.

  She grinned at him with almost as much irony as he’d seen Mac do, but with much less compassion. “Go ahead, Mr. Partridge. Feel free to investigate the instrument. You can let me know if you think it can be repaired.”

  He cleared his throat. “You want to repair it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. Of course, I only have sons, and they’re all about as musical as their father.”

  Noah got the impression that neither Mr. Blackworth nor his sons were musical, and that Mrs. Blackworth wasn’t fond of any of them. “I’d, um, like to look at it, ma’am.” He wanted to lift the lid and read the label.

  That instrument looked like one of his grandfather’s first efforts. Grandpa Partridge had begun the business with pianos, and moved on to organs in the late twenties. Noah’s father had been partial to the piano side of the business. Noah himself had never been able to resist a reed organ. Until the war. He could resist pretty much anything these days.

  Except Susan Blackworth’s organ . . .

  “Well, Mr. Partridge? Do you plan to stand there observing it for the rest of your life, or do you want to see it?”

  Mac touched Noah’s elbow. It was a gentle touch, but it propelled Noah forward as if Mac had shoved him.

  Lord, it was a beautiful instrument. Noah’s hand hovered over it for several seconds. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to bring back all those old memories—they were older even than the ones that haunted him—but at last he lowered his hand, which settled on the warm wood like a dove nesting.

  In the space of seconds, his heart filled with music. It began softly, a lilting waltz that grew louder and louder until it thundered through him like a pipe organ in a church, and then grew louder still, and sharper, until his brain reverberated with the noise of cannon fire and Gatling guns. He drew in a loud, rasping breath and covered his ears.

  Mac’s hand brought him back to Mrs. Blackworth’s parlor again. It was gentle, barely perceptible, on his shoulder. Noah wasn’t sure if he groaned aloud or not, but his breath sounded like fingernails on a slate.

  “Here, lad, it’s a fine old instrument, isn’t it?”

  Noah opened his eyes and stared at Mac. The old man smiled as if Noah hadn’t just made a thundering ass of himself. In fact, Mac’s expression was benevolent, almost good-humored. He remembered his grandfather looking at him like that when he’d fallen and scraped his knees and was trying not to cry because he was a boy, and boys didn’t cry. Like hell they didn’t.


  “Yes, it is a fine instrument.” Susan Blackworth’s tone rang with satisfaction, as if she thought a fine instrument was only what she deserved.

  “It’s—” Noah had to stop and clear his throat again. “It’s one of my grandfather’s first reed organs.” His hand lightly caressed the keys. When he looked at his fingers, they were dusty. “You should keep the protector down, ma’am.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Noah heard the rustle of Mrs. Blackworth’s skirts as she walked over to stand beside him.

  “Of course, it needs work. It’s sadly in need of oil and repair. And it’s probably out of tune. There isn’t a piano tuner within two hundred miles of Rio Hondo.”

  Noah wondered if she was as resentful as she sounded.

  “There is now.”

  Mrs. Blackworth and Noah both turned to look at Mac, who beamed at them like a cherub.

  “There is what?” Mrs. Blackworth’s voice was as crisp as her bombazine skirt.

  “Why, a piano tuner, of course.” With his black briar pipe, Mac gestured at Noah. “This lad here can tune a piano to beat the band, and he can build a reed organ from the ground up. I expect he can fix this one.”

  “Can he now?”

  Mrs. Blackworth eyed Noah keenly. He twitched his shoulders and felt uncomfortable. “I, uh, haven’t done that kind of work for several years.”

  “What exactly happened to your grandfather’s business?” Mrs. Blackworth asked curtly.

  He turned away from the scrutiny of the two old people. He wasn’t sure his voice would work. It had taken to drying up on him years before when he tried to talk to people—and he hadn’t had to say anything this painful for ages. He decided to keep it short. “It burned down.”

  After a moment of silence, Mrs. Blackworth said, “What a pity.”

  “Yeah.” A pity. That was one way of putting it.

  “So many people lost so much in the war.”

  Noah eyed her and decided she didn’t mean it to sound sarcastic. He didn’t give her another yeah, but couldn’t manage anything else. Nor did he elaborate. The truth of Noah’s life seemed worse to him somehow than what she obviously thought had happened. It’s one thing when an invading enemy burns you out. It’s quite another when your own townsfolk do it because they hate you.