Enchanted Christmas

by Craig, Emma

  The lovely old song had always stirred tender sentiments in her breast. Today, when Noah’s deep voice caressed the words and tune, she wanted to cry. Because she didn’t fancy him knowing how moved she was, she bowed her head, stroked her daughter’s silky hair, and hoped her sunbonnet hid the tears in her eyes. His voice seemed to echo over the lake when he finished. Maddie heaved a big sigh.

  “That was real pretty, Mr. Noah.”

  “Thank you, Miss Maddie.”

  Maddie yawned again. “You sing one now, Mommy.”

  “I’m afraid my voice is nowhere near as good as Mr. Partridge’s, Maddie, but I’ll try.”

  Because she didn’t want to spoil the mood Noah’s sad love song had created, Grace chose to sing “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” only she changed Jeanie to Maddie. By the time she’d sung the second verse, Maddie was sound asleep. She finished all the verses she could remember anyway, because she was uneasy about what to say to Noah without the safety net of Maddie’s scrutiny to fall back on.

  There were only so many verses to the song, though, and they didn’t last forever. When she’d sung the last note, she looked up to find Noah watching her. His eyes were half-closed, and he had a crooked smile on his face. He looked handsome and awfully appealing, in his lean, hard-edged way. She wished she hadn’t noticed.

  After several moments of quiet, he said softly, “You have a very pretty voice, Mrs. Richardson.”

  “Thank you.” She laughed nervously. “I used to sing in the church choir back in Chicago. I’ve, ah, seldom heard a man sing so beautifully, Mr. Partridge. Did your father teach you to sing too?”

  She and Frank had met at church when they were children; Grace had considered it an auspicious beginning. Frank’s reedy tenor voice had been nowhere near as beautiful as Noah Partridge’s baritone, but Frank had been a fine man. A wonderful man.

  Noah’s smile broadened fractionally. “No, ma’am. My father was the church’s choir director, but my mother was really the singer in the family. She sang to us kids all the time when we were little.”

  A topic! Grace grabbed it with both hands. “You have siblings?”

  “Had. Yeah. A sister and a brother. She died of typhoid when she was seventeen. My brother died in the war.”

  “How tragic for you and your family.”

  “It was, yes.”

  He glanced away, and Grace saw his lips tighten. Drat it, wasn’t there anything on the face of the earth she could talk about that wouldn’t remind him of some awful incident in his past? Church sounded neutral. She’d try church. She hoped to heaven he wasn’t a Catholic or she’d be at sea.

  “Did, er, you sing in church with your father’s choir?” Why did she feel so nervous all of a sudden? They’d been chatting together all day long. There was no reason for her to have developed a case of the jitters now.

  “Yes, ma’am. Before I became the organist, I sang in the choir. Shoot, I must’ve started when I still sang soprano.” He laughed softly.

  She decided she might as well ask. “What church did your family attend, Mr. Partridge? We were Presbyterians. My family, that is.” Good grief, what was the matter with her?

  He nodded. “We went to the Presbyterian Church too.”

  Common ground! Grace could hardly believe it. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of how to expand on Presbyterianism without sounding like a priggish proselytizer. Music. She’d go back to music; music was good. “I think it’s wonderful that your family gave you such a fine legacy of music, Mr. Partridge.” Considering what had happened to that legacy, Grace wondered if her comment had been less than tactful. Drat! “I mean, if the war hadn’t ruined everything.” Oh, dear. There she went again. Conversing with Noah Partridge was certainly a ticklish business.

  He looked away and his smile faded. “Yeah.”

  She licked her lips, jumpy as one of the frog’s legs she hated to cook. “It’s a shame there aren’t more families out here yet. You might be able to set up a music business again if there were.”

  “I don’t expect I’ll do that again, ma’am.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “You think so?” He smiled again, only this time his smile seemed hard, ironic, and it made Grace’s heart hurt.

  “Yes, I do think so. I think it was awful of your fellow citizens to burn your family’s business, Mr. Partridge. After enduring the horrors of battle, at least you should have been able to expect peace when the war was over.”

  He didn’t speak for a minute. “Actually, I didn’t see too many battle horrors, ma’am.”

  Her hand stilled on Maddie’s head, and she stared at him, surprised. “You didn’t?” Why was he in such terrible shape, then? She’d assumed he’d been in the thick of the fighting; had been wounded, perhaps. “Oh.”

  “No. I was shot and captured during my second fight, in ‘61, and sent off to prison camp.”

  Shot and captured? Prison camp? Good heavens, from what Grace had read, some of the prison camps were even worse than the battlefields. No wonder he looked as if he’d been half-starved and hadn’t recovered yet. “My goodness. I’m sorry, Mr. Partridge. Which prison camp were you held in?” Should she have asked that? Well, it was too late now.

  Again, he was silent for several seconds. Grace wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  Then he turned again, looked her in the eye, and said distinctly, “I spent the first two years in Virginia. The last year was at Andersonville.”

  Andersonville? Grace’s mouth dropped open. She whispered, “Andersonville!” endowing the word with every ounce of the revulsion it deserved. “My God.”

  She’d read an account of what they’d found at Andersonville after the war ended. Horrors heaped on horrors. Acres of graves. Pits, really, into which bodies had been dumped, unnamed. No one knew who’d died there, whose bodies remained there, whose families would never know where their loved ones lay buried. They only knew there had been hundreds of men who hadn’t made it out alive. Starvation, illness, cold, heat. Perhaps her sister Eleanor’s husband’s bones were there. They’d never know, unless Miss Clara Barton’s humanitarian organization had better luck in the future than they’d had so far.

  She’d cried through the entire article about the vile place, but she’d made herself finish it, sensing that it was somehow her duty. This was what her fellow countrymen had done to each other, and she needed to know, to understand, how they could have done it.

  It hadn’t helped. She didn’t understand to this day. In fact, she suspected that if she’d read that account a thousand times and a dozen more like it, she still wouldn’t understand. Perhaps she was a better person because her mind couldn’t comprehend how people could perpetrate such grotesque, regrettable things upon one another; she didn’t know, although she doubted it.

  All she knew for sure is that she no longer wondered that Noah Partridge was such a strange, unhappy man.

  She had to swallow before she could get her voice to work. “And you say you were wounded when they took you there?”

  He nodded.

  “How—how awful.”

  “It was pretty bad.”

  “Did, um, they tend to your wound?”

  There went that caustic smile again. “Sort of.”

  Sort of. What did that mean? She couldn’t make herself ask.

  He chuffed out a short breath and gave her a half-answer to her unasked question. “It healed eventually.”

  Well, she was glad of that. She swallowed. He absently rubbed his thigh as though he were remembering. A leg wound. It must have been a leg wound. “How, um, how long were you in prison?”

  “A little over three years The last year was the worst.”

  A little over three years? Good grief! Small wonder he looked like an ambulatory skeleton. “I’m, ah, surprised you survived for so long.”

  He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah. I was kind of surprised myself.” H
e sucked in a deep breath. “I had to bury a lot of men who didn’t, and I wasn’t in very good shape when they took me out.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He was leaning back on an elbow, his posture relaxed, casual. His eyes belied his pose. They were as bleak as winter, and they frightened Grace. He might have realized it, because he shifted his gaze to the lake as if seeking answers there. Grace suspected there were no answers, anywhere.

  “I was in the hospital for eight months afterwards, in Washington. I couldn’t walk—too weak from starvation and malaria. There was no food at all towards the end. We ate acorns, peanuts, slop, anything we could find. There weren’t even any rats left alive there by that time. We were better than cats at getting rid of vermin.”

  She shuddered and didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “It was—pretty bad.”

  She had to wipe tears from her cheeks and cursed herself for her wretched emotions. What a weakling she was. This poor man had lived it, and she couldn’t even bear to hear about it. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Partridge.”

  “Thanks.”

  She sensed he meant it, although she knew her being sorry was pitifully inadequate compensation for what he’d endured.

  Maddie made a little mew in her sleep and turned over, rolling from Grace’s lap. She was sorry to lose the security of her daughter’s weight, but decided her time could better be used in cleaning up the dishes and repacking their picnic trappings. With a sigh, she rose to her feet.

  “Let me help you, Mrs. Richardson.”

  Noah got up too. It was the first time Grace noticed he favored his left leg the slightest bit. All at once the idiocy of men infuriated her. She turned on him abruptly and could tell she’d startled him.

  “You know, Mr. Partridge, if Frank and I had ever had a son, I think I’d leave the country before I’d let him fight in a war. Wars are stupid. They’re uncivilized. They’re horrid! They don’t solve anything, and only make people hate each other.”

  Tears had built in her eyes again, and she dashed them away, embarrassed. But what she’d said was the truth, and she wouldn’t retract it. His grin caught her off guard.

  “Don’t reckon I’d try to stop you, ma’am. Not today, I wouldn’t. When I was a young buck and my mama told me pretty much the same thing, I had arguments enough.”

  She blinked at him, trying to hold back her tears. “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head. Grace read bitter irony in his expression. She got the feeling he was mocking the boy he’d once been. All at once she thought she understood what his motivation might have been. “You were idealistic, weren’t you, Mr. Partridge? You really believed that fighting for the Union’s cause would bring about changes for the better in the world, didn’t you?”

  He picked up and stacked the three tin dishes they’d used for their lunch. “Yeah, reckon I had my head stuffed all full of chivalrous nonsense back then. I was a damned fool.” Glancing up, he murmured, “Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t mean to swear.”

  Grace tossed off his apology. She didn’t blame him for swearing. Feeling indignant and furious on behalf of all the young men—she didn’t consider them young fools—who’d fought and died—and worse—in the conflict that had torn the country apart, she stooped and gathered the fish pan and spatula. She wished she could conk the leaders of this country over their heads with the cast-iron skillet. Maybe it would knock some sense into them.

  “It’s not your fault you believed what people told you, Mr. Partridge. If I were a man, I’d probably have done the same thing. They make you believe you’re fighting for a good cause, don’t they? They pretend your life matters to them.” She wanted to shriek her rage to the skies, for whatever good that would do.

  “I expect so, ma’am.”

  “But they don’t really care about anything but their own pocketbooks, do they?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not qualified to answer that one, I’m afraid.”

  She sniffed angrily. “If women had the running of things, you wouldn’t see any more wars, I’ll warrant. Women aren’t so eager to send their men off to die.” Her mood was black. She wanted to punish someone for Noah Partridge’s sake, and for the sake of all the women who’d lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers in the wars of men.

  He chuckled, and she didn’t appreciate it. “Maybe you’re right, ma’am.”

  “Yet men won’t give women the vote. I wonder if it’s because the old fogies who run the country are afraid that if they did, the young men might live long enough to take their places. I guess war eliminates a lot of the competition.”

  Grace couldn’t recall ever before saying anything so clearly hateful, and the words embarrassed her once they were out in the open. She glanced at Noah, wondering if she’d shocked him. He merely smiled, his face looking much softer than it usually did. She got the feeling he might actually agree with her.

  Frank and she had never talked about serious issues. They hadn’t needed to, really, because they were so attuned to each other. In a way, she appreciated this opportunity to stretch her reasoning; to flex her mental muscles.

  At least Mr. Partridge didn’t laugh at her. Every time she’d mentioned anything the least outré to Frank, he’d chuckled and told her ladies didn’t need to worry their heads about those things. She’d never resented his saying so, and she’d never have dreamed of arguing with him. Right now, though, she wondered if Frank might have been wrong. Women had every bit as much business thinking as men did. More, if men’s thoughts led them to war, she decided defiantly.

  She didn’t like to think of Frank as being anything but the most perfect man in the world, so she didn’t linger over her doubts. Rather, she got her scrub brush and a bar of lye soap out of her pack and walked to the edge of the lake. Noah walked with her. There she knelt and began scrubbing the utensils, using the heavy-bristled brush on them then way she’d like to use it on a couple of politicians. She’d like to scrape their precious skin raw for a while and see how they liked it!

  Noah rinsed and wiped, as quietly as he did everything. Today, now, his silence didn’t seem sullen to her, but merely natural. After enduring what he’d endured, what was there to say? Grace expected she’d be silent too. Idle chatter must seem ridiculous after Andersonville.

  When she was through, she stood, stretched out her back, and smiled at him. “Thank you. That didn’t take long at all with both of us doing it.”

  “Yes’m. My mama used to make my brother and me wash dishes at home. Said there was no such things as men’s work and women’s work, but only work that needed doing.”

  She laughed. “Your mother sounds like a woman after my own heart, Mr. Partridge.”

  “Yes’m. I think the two of you would have liked each other.”

  Grace looked up into his eyes, and seemed to get caught there for a moment. He was such an intense man. Frank hadn’t been nearly as intense as Noah Partridge. Frank had been rather happy-go-lucky, actually. He hadn’t been hard and lean and ragged like this. On edge, as if he might break apart any second.

  Noah Partridge frightened her. He made her nervous. She felt funny inside, as if she’d stood up too fast and her head was swimming. His powerful gaze made her remember how it had felt to have Frank’s arms around her. She’d felt treasured, protected, loved. Mr. Partridge’s gaze made her long to feel those things again.

  Good heavens, what was the matter with her? With an effort, Grace broke eye contact and turned away. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms where gooseflesh had sprung up. She felt foolish.

  “I won’t hurt you, ma’am.”

  Noah’s soft assurance startled her. She whirled around. A response danced on her tongue. She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t thought he’d hurt her, but the declaration died before she could speak it because she got trapped by his eyes again. His intense, brooding, beautiful green eyes.

  As if of its own accord, her hand reached out to him. He caught it in his and d
rew her to him.

  When he kissed her, Grace felt as if a firecracker had been shot off in her veins.

  Chapter Twelve

  So long. It had been so long since Noah had lost himself in the arms of a woman. He’d been a boy, an innocent, no more than a child, the last time.

  Grace Richardson yielded to the soft pressure of his lips as if she and he had been made for each other at the beginning of time, separated by accident, and had only just found each other again. She was perfect. She fit exactly. She filled his senses and his arms, and he knew he could lose himself in her and forget all the bad things in his life with her, if she’d only let him.

  His tongue met hers in a slow, delicate dance of pure pleasure. She clung to him, her fingers digging into his shoulders as if she, too, felt the rightness of their kiss. He felt her woman’s body under his hands, limber, sweet, and he knew that if he allowed her to, she could help cure him. Already he felt her sweetness penetrating his dark places and shining healing light on them, illuminating his dank caverns, bringing soothing rays of sunshine into his blighted life.

  She felt like his sanctuary, his refuge, his deliverance. He knew a moment of hope for a life which, until now, he’d believed was irredeemable. The most he’d hoped for in years was perhaps, one day, to salvage a tiny space for himself in the world where he could hide away and protect his raw wounds from further damage. He’d never dared hope that he might find real peace. But he felt peaceful now, with Grace in his arms.

  Grace. Was she his grace? His salvation? She felt like it. Carnal desire blossomed like a spring bud in her sunshine alongside a blessed peace of mind he’d never hoped to experience again. By God, he felt like a man. For the first time in years, he felt like a man.

  “Mommy? Mommy, why are you kissing Mr. Noah?”

  Noah’s brain felt muzzy, and he uttered a soft cry of distress when Grace wrenched herself away from him, turned, and pressed her hands to her burning cheeks. It took him a moment to orient himself; his head was addled, full of Grace and passion and hunger. He stared at her, blinking, wondering why she wasn’t in his arms any longer. He needed her there.