A Texas Kind of Christmas

by Jodi Thomas

  A young boy, around nine or ten, ebony-skinned and dressed as a ranch hand, ran out from behind the trees. The boy called out to Asher, “John says my grandfather may be from Africa, but I’m getting almost as good at hiding as any Cherokee.” The boy disappeared back into the shadows.

  In his place, a tall man, dressed almost like the Westerners she’d grown used to seeing in Jefferson, stepped into the light. His turban was decorated with feathers and stickpins. A wide colorful swath of beaded cloth was wound around his midriff. In one hand, he carried a rifle; the other hand was hidden behind his back. He stopped at the edge of the trees, waiting.

  Asher took her hand. He had not yet put back on his gloves, and his flesh against hers felt thrilling, even though she knew it shouldn’t.

  “You’re frightening my passenger, Ware,” Asher called out, and the young boy reemerged from the darkness, grinning.

  The turbaned man handed Ware something, and the boy ran forward, holding the reins for Asher’s team. The horses followed behind obediently.

  John and Ware joined Asher, embracing warmly.

  “Eugenie, meet my eldest brother, John.”

  John bowed from the waist and brushed the back of her hand with his lips. An oddly European action for a man sporting feathers.

  “John?” Eugenie felt confused by the ordinary Englishness of the name. She studied the two men’s faces for a family resemblance.

  “Our father had an odd sense of humor,” Asher said flatly.

  “Our father was originally from Belgium,” John explained. “The name my mother gave me—Yanasa—sounded to him like his native Jan, so . . . John.”

  She studied Asher with renewed interest. “Are you also a Native?”

  “I’m native to Texas—as are all my brothers.”

  “Asher pretends not to understand you,” John intervened. “We are all half brothers. Like Sam Houston, our father lived among the Cherokee people in Tennessee as an adopted son. When Houston became President of the Republic, many Cherokee moved to Texas, our father and his first wife, my mother, among them.”

  “I see,” she said, not seeing very clearly at all.

  “Our father had three wives and a son from each marriage,” Asher broke in.

  John picked up the story. “My mother divorced our father and took me to live with her people outside Dallas. Asher’s mother—a widow from New Orleans—died when he was two. My mother reared us both.”

  “What of your other brother? Is he in Texas as well?”

  John raised his eyebrow at Asher, asking a silent question, and Asher nodded.

  “I’ve spoken of Rafe already; you’ll meet him in Dallas,” Asher explained.

  “The business partner Lilly torments is your brother?”

  “Our father married his third wife while his second was still living. With one family in Dallas and the other in San Antonio, he never intended his sons to meet. But by luck or chance or fate, Rafe, John, and I all served in the same Ranger troop, along with our other business partner, Ware’s father, Ben Payne.”

  “So you are brothers and brothers-at-arms? Does Rafe’s mother know?”

  “Even if she did, Dona Julia is a very devout woman. She would never admit it, and we keep the secret for her sake.”

  “I will not break your trust.” Eugenie was surprised and touched that Asher trusted her. She wanted to ask more questions but couldn’t imagine how to frame them.

  Ware, having tied the horses to the coach, demanded to be noticed.

  “Eugenie, please meet our youngest cattle drover, Ware.”

  “I’m not just a drover; we are all partners,” Ware announced, proudly.

  “Partners?” Eugenie said with only a little surprise.

  “Yep,” Ware said with a smug grin. “Asher, my parents and me, Rafe, and John. When we get near to Dallas, I can show you our place.”

  “Your place? Is that the same as a ranch?” She found the young man delightful, a mix of childhood bravado and seriousness.

  Ware thought before answering, “It’s like a ranch but somewhat bigger.”

  “Like a coyote is bigger than a fox?” Eugenie recognized Asher’s influence already.

  “Never thought of it that way, but I suppose so.” Ware tilted his head in concentration. “The dog that lives behind the farrier’s shed growled at me so much, I was sure she was a coyote. But she was simply protecting her pups. Asher’s promised me a black pup when we return to Dallas. Perhaps he’ll get you one too.”

  As Eugenie talked with Ware about his anticipated pet, Asher and John stepped to the side of the wagon. She could hear their voices pitched low, but not their words. A few moments later they rejoined her and Ware.

  “Fallen trees block this road two miles down. John says we can move the trees enough to pass by, but we’ll lose time and tire the horses. Or we can take a second route he’s scouted: the rain passed it by, so the roads are dry. But it will require us to sleep on the trail.”

  “You are the guide. How could I have an opinion as to which road to take?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, giving one of the half grins that flipped her stomach, but she forced herself to ignore it. “You are a formidable woman, and I thought it would be best to ask your preference.”

  * * *

  Within minutes, Asher, John, and Ware had hitched the horses, who seemed happy to be back in their traces. While the men strapped Eugenie’s luggage back to the carriage, Eugenie spoke to each of the horses, especially Trudy, scratching the horse’s neck until she found that spot where Trudy’s lip drooped in pleasure.

  Within minutes, they were back on the road. Asher and John shared the driving, while Ware sat like a prince on the luggage on top of the coach.

  Eugenie traveled in the coach alone, left to her own thoughts. She relived each moment of her trip with Asher, from their first meeting to the tornado to their kisses. Before her lips had found his, she’d never believed that two souls could touch.

  But whatever attraction she felt for him, she couldn’t trust it. Asher had admitted she was older than he’d expected. To him, it likely was a turn of phrase, or even an observation about how Lilly manipulated words as well as people. But for Eugenie it was a necessary reminder of Jeremy’s cold assessment of her shortcomings: “I can describe my fiancée in six words, boys: plain, bookish, dull, opinionated, old, and . . . rich, boys, rich as Croesus.” She’d misjudged Jeremy—or rather she’d judged him on the face he’d chosen to show her—and she would not make that mistake again. She would be suspicious, where before she’d been trusting.

  Asher Graham might be handsome and clever, but he was still rough and tumble, with ways more suited to life on the frontier than the drawing room. She would reserve her affections for someone like Garrand Kent, a man who could navigate both the land and the niceties of social interaction and whose writings showed to be wise, witty, and kind.

  A tap at the window interrupted her reverie.

  Startled, she jumped to see Ware, hanging down from the top of the coach, pressing his face to the cold glass. A wide smile spread across his face; clearly, half the fun was shocking her.

  Her sad thoughts interrupted, she picked up Kent’s Texas, intending to read. Yet somehow every page reminded her of Asher. She set the book aside, but the scenery through the window had lost its appeal.

  Remembering the box of books for the circulating library, she pulled it out. When in London, she’d spent her happiest childhood hours at a bookstore called the African’s Daughter. The owner, Constance Equiano, had been her grandmother Sophia’s dear friend and Eugenie’s favorite tutor. The daughter of bestselling author and former slave Olaudah Equiano, Constance had taken her father’s abolitionist legacy seriously. Her shop had for almost forty years been a center for radical liberal thought, most recently encouraging women to begin the fight for suffrage. Eugenie had learned to think broadly under Constance’s tutelage, and she hoped that the books Asher had collected would give her a glimpse
into his mind.

  Sadly, the contents of the box were a hodgepodge, telling her nothing at all of Asher’s interests.

  On top were a pile of magazines, and she amused herself by imagining who would read each one. Godey’s Lady’s Book would be for the young miss about to enter her first season—did Dallas have such a thing? Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for the new resident wishing to remain connected to the world outside Texas. The Atlantic Monthly for the elderly lawyer, lonely for intelligent conversation. The suffragette magazine the Lily for a middle-aged widow no longer concerned with public opinion, Scientific American for the local school headmaster—Dallas was big enough for a school, wasn’t it?

  But her interest in the game quickly faded, and she set the magazines aside to see what else might be in the box.

  Underneath the magazines were a collection of books for young children. She studied each book carefully, trying to imagine how the local schoolmaster or mistress would use it to teach. The fattest of the books, Jacob Abbott’s Rollo Learning to Read, surprisingly wasn’t about learning to read at all. Instead the book offered a series of stories on a variety of topics intended to encourage practice in reading. She read one or two but found the pictures more interesting than the text. She was about to close the book when she noticed the opening lines to the story of ‘Contrary Charles’:

  “Do you know what a contrary boy is? He is one who is never satisfied with what he has, but always wants something different.”

  Before Jeremy, she would have thought that an accurate description of Lilly. But after, she’d wondered if she were the contrary one.

  She leaned her head back against the carriage wall and shut her eyes.

  She hadn’t loved Jeremy, not in any way that mattered. But as a woman longing for a family of her own and with few prospects who weren’t fortune-hunters, Eugenie had thought they would suit. He’d appeared to be steady and responsible, if a bit tedious and proud. And Judith—ever-perceptive Judith—had liked him. Eugenie needed no other recommendation.

  Only Lilly had seen through him. She’d disliked Jeremy immediately, and he her. As Eugenie’s courtship progressed, Lilly’s interactions with Jeremy increasingly bordered on the uncivil. Jeremy had explained away the problem in flattering terms: Lilly needed to be admired, and he admired only Eugenie. For once shy Eugenie found herself the center of a handsome man’s attention, while her vibrant mother sat in the shadows.

  Lilly’s note on leaving for Texas had ruined it all. Had Lilly enumerated all of Jeremy’s faults, Eugenie would have shaken her head over the list and ignored it. Instead Lilly said only, “He will bring you grief.” No explanations, no justifications. The sentence slipped into Eugenie’s heart like the slender blade of a penknife.

  Her uncles had already investigated Jeremy, so Eugenie made her own inquiries. Using the resources available to a woman—the testimony of maids, servants, and shopkeepers—she discovered everything she didn’t want to know. After that, it was easy to make him want to break their engagement, though she hadn’t expected him to choose the season’s best-attended ball for his announcement.

  No, she hadn’t loved him, and except for the public nature of the scandal, she had barely missed him. But he’d cost her Judith.

  Judith, more her mother than Lilly ever was.

  She should have seen the signs: the hesitant look, the forgotten reticule, the repeated question. But for more than a year, she had been too caught up in Jeremy’s attentions. Not until Judith, confused, started calling her Lilly, did Eugenie realize how much she’d already lost. And then Judith was gone.

  After Jeremy’s deception and Judith’s loss, all Eugenie’s expectations of what her life would be like disappeared. She was left with only a bone-deep sadness. She’d learned to live with the sorrow, never confronting it directly, fearing that if she did—if she let herself feel it, even for a moment—she might never find her way out of the darkness again. But in the quiet safety of the carriage, she let herself touch the edge of that pain, and five thousand miles from home, she finally let herself cry.

  A long time later, when she brushed away her tears, she considered the question from a different angle: if she couldn’t be satisfied in England, could she expect to feel any differently in Texas?

  She closed Rollo’s book, wondering if Asher had brought the book for Ware, and if the young boy knew how to read well enough to enjoy it.

  Under the children’s books, she found the sorts of books she’d expected for a lending library—recent British novels by the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope alongside American works by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child. A thin volume of Lydia Sigourney’s pious, devotional poems fit her expectations of a Western town’s taste. But who in Dallas wanted to read Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century? If the books were those Asher had chosen himself, he had a wide, eclectic, and even odd taste. No, Mrs. Cockrell and the other subscribers must have given him a list.

  Once the box became merely a collection of books rather than an insight into Asher’s mind, she lost interest. She was about to choose a book to read, when, underneath all the other books, she found a package wrapped in brown paper and tied separately with twine. She ran her finger along the package’s edge. More books. But why separate them from the others?

  Curious, she carefully unwrapped the books. She knew them all from Constance’s bookshop, and she greeted each one as an old friend. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by Douglass himself, published over a decade before to great acclaim both in the US and abroad; William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, a novel imagining the tragic lives of Thomas Jefferson’s fictional slave daughters; and a book of poetry by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

  Eugenie touched the spine of each book reverently. She knew that relations between the races were tense in the States. She knew that many thought that a war was coming, one that would pit the Southern states against the Northern. But somehow the sequestering of books by African-Americans into their own packet disturbed her. Had Asher done it? And why?

  Carefully she wrapped the books back up and returned them to the bottom of the box.

  Picking up Margaret Fuller’s radical call for equality, she began to read.

  * * *

  The new road led them through land less populated, and John stayed with them, offering another set of eyes and hands. On the new road, the travelers quickly fell into a routine. Each day they would rise to hard bread and tack, then start their travels, riding two or three hours, followed by an hour to water, feed, and rest the team. In the middle of the day, they would rest for several hours—Asher called it their siesta—then return to the road, traveling another two or three, before stopping again.

  They would travel this way from dawn until dusk, able to cover in ten hours around fifteen to twenty miles a day. With each stop, Ware and John prepared food over the fire, and Asher saved the coals for the foot warmers in the carriage. At night, she would sleep in the carriage, curled under heavy blankets, with Ware—her self-appointed protector—stretched out in the gutter between the seats. Asher and John remained outside near the fire, alternating between sleep and keeping watch.

  On the third day, she surprised the men by asking if she could ride sometimes on the driver’s seat, and they began to take turns. Sometimes she and Asher would ride together, other times she and John. Ware almost always rode on the roof behind them, adding his own quaint commentary to their conversation. When after several more days Eugenie asked if she could drive the carriage, the men devoted themselves to teaching her how to read the road and the horses on it. It wasn’t exactly like driving her uncle’s curricle, but she quickly adapted to the new challenge.

  She soon discovered that John was a natural storyteller. He entertained her for hours with stories of training as a lawyer and a diplomat under the charismatic Sam Houston. He alternated his stories of strange Dallas court cases with
fantastic tales of Texas Kent’s book hadn’t included. The headless horseman of the mustangs, believed to be the restless ghost of a murdered cattle rustler; the wild woman of Navidad who could slip in and out of houses, stealing food and supplies, without the families or their dogs ever waking; and the secret gold of the Guadalupe Mountains. John made her laugh as often as he made her cry.

  Asher filled in her education with more useful knowledge, telling her about the distinct geographical regions of Texas: the steamy swamps and timber forests in the east; the sand hills and dunes of the southern coast; the tall grass plains of the north; the arid deserts of the far west; and the majestic mountain region of the southwest. His stories were more humble than John’s, focused on the land and the people and animals in it. But somehow his quiet stories and his rich sonorous voice kept her riveted.

  Every time they rode together, he made her feel like the world contained only the two of them. And yet, at the same time, he was never inattentive to his team or his surroundings. He was a rare man, kind, interesting, gentle, and passionate, and she looked forward to sitting beside him as she had looked forward to little else for years.

  But when they asked her to reciprocate with stories of England, she chose carefully. To hide her wealth, she told stories of living with her widowed uncle as his housekeeper or of helping the ladies of the Muses’ Salon—her grandmother’s club—with their various schemes and projects.

  All her stories were true, but what they suggested of her circumstances was utterly a lie. She was no poor relation, but an heiress with money and land of her own. She regretted her deception, but justified it, by reminding herself that soon she would return to England and never see him again. The thought hurt her heart and her conscience more than she cared to admit.

  Though she warmed under each man’s tutelage, she felt Asher’s praise and attention most deeply. Each night at the fireside, when he brought her a dish of whatever he and John had cooked and his hand brushed hers, she wished that the trip could last more than just a fortnight.