A Texas Kind of Christmas

by Jodi Thomas

  Asher glanced her way, but said nothing to suggest he intended to take her to the ball. Her heart sunk a little.

  “As for the dress, my head seamstress, Miss Quigley, may be able to arrange something.” Mrs. Cockrell crossed the room to the drawing room door. “She is our fairy godmother in these sorts of situations. I hope to see you at dinner, Miss Charpentier. Your mother dines at my table, and I will have a place set for you.”

  Asher opened the door for Mrs. Cockrell’s exit, and Eugenie found herself alone with her mother and Asher.

  Her mother had collapsed delicately into a chair, a powder puff of lace and ribbons. Eugenie took the opportunity to study her. On the way in from the carriage, Eugenie had noticed no limp, no slowed pace, no labored breathing. No, on the contrary, Lilly’s color was good, quite good, and her face showed no sign of pain or discomfort. Instead her mother looked pleased, much like a cat who’d stolen a pot of cream.

  “An invalid.” Eugenie said the word. The lie of it filled her mouth like alum. “How could you?” She kept her voice cold and level, but anger flared in the pit of her stomach.

  Lilly shrugged beautifully, as if she had practiced the motion in a mirror. “I never felt at ease in England nor in Italy. But here, no one is higher or lower. I make jam and draw, and from my window, I can gaze on a countryside that stretches out forever. I finally found a land to match my spirit . . . and to awaken yours.”

  “I’ve traveled for the better part of a year because you asked for my help, because you said you finally wanted to come home.” Her anger swelled, fed by the long months of purposeless travel and decades of Lilly’s neglect. But she bit it back.

  “My darling, you must understand.”

  Eugenie shook her head, holding up her palms to stop her mother’s words. “You don’t intend to leave. You never intended to leave. Why did you ask for me to come for you?”

  “How else would I have drawn you here?” Lilly’s voice broke with emotion. “When Judith wrote about Jeremy’s cruelty, I knew I had to act. I couldn’t let you settle for a narrow life in some narrow village, knitting with the other spinsters.”

  Asher stood away from them, watching the floor, his body taut and tense.

  “Haven’t these months of travel made you wish for more?” Lilly extended her arms, but Eugenie backed away. “When you stood at the railing on the ship, didn’t you feel something waiting for you? With each mile of ocean, couldn’t you feel the constraints of being a duke’s ward fall away? When you arrived in Boston, in New Orleans, in Jefferson, and now in Dallas, did you not see a civilization so new and fresh that it makes London for all its appeal look old and stale?”

  “Those are your reactions, Lilly, not mine.” Eugenie felt her mother’s deception twist along the length of her spine.

  “My dear child, you have more spirit in you than you’ve ever allowed yourself. Here you can stretch your limits, see yourself more clearly. Here you can live your own life, not some pale version of Judith’s. She wouldn’t have wanted that for you; she had too much spirit of her own.”

  “Don’t speak of Judith.”

  But Lilly, in the rush of her own words, didn’t seem to hear. “Dallas is only a hint of a city, but Galveston and San Antonio already rival those in the Eastern states. You could make your home in one of those, though I would lament your loss now that we are finally together.”

  “Whatever I choose, whatever I make or don’t make of myself, it will result from something I did, not from something you manipulated.” She would not show Lilly her anger. She would not show Lilly anything of how she felt.

  “You had no right, Lilly,” Asher finally spoke. But Eugenie wanted none of his help. He had betrayed her trust as well.

  “No right.” Her anger prodded by hurt swelled to include him. “You have the gall to speak of no right. What right did you have to keep this from me?” She waved her hand at her mother, still seated in her overstuffed chair. “Two weeks ago I told you I believed she was unable to travel alone.”

  “What right? What right have you to be angry with me? You had traveled halfway around the world to see your mother. It wasn’t my place to stop you only one hundred and seventy miles away.”

  “If you’d told me, I could be halfway back to Boston by now.” She pointed her finger sharply.

  “What right did you have to help her publish my manuscript?” His accusation spilled out, hot and angry.

  “Your manuscript?” She spoke a second before the realization hit. It made sense: he was Kent. And her anger turned cold and hard. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “I had no obligation to tell you—all that fawning over a book.”

  “Your book.”

  “Not mine—Sadie’s. I wrote it for her, not you, not nobody else, and certainly not for the whole damn island of England. You hadn’t the right, neither of you, to publish it without asking.” He stared hard at Lilly. “What makes you think you can manipulate other people’s lives in that way?”

  “Because she always has,” Eugenie answered.

  He turned on his heel and stormed from the room.

  Lilly looked half penitent and half pleased. “You should follow him.”

  Eugenie didn’t know whether to rail at her mother or follow Asher.

  After a moment, she rushed out after him, but she was too late. The carriage was gone, and he and Rafe were already riding their horses out of town.

  There would be another time. Perhaps at the ball, if he intended still to escort her. But neither of them had revealed their earlier arrangement to Mrs. Cockrell or Lilly. Would he believe she wasn’t interested in going to the ball with him after all?

  She shook her head in frustration.

  It was a fine mess.

  She had no way to contact him, so no way of knowing his plans. If she asked her mother or Mrs. Cockrell or even one of the servants where he lived or how to contact him, she risked raising questions she couldn’t answer. And if somehow she managed to contact him, she risked another public rejection if he wished to have nothing to do with her.

  His horse out of sight, she returned to the hotel lobby.

  She had no option but to wait. Besides, she had much to discuss with Lilly, and knowing her mother, Eugenie would need every minute of that time to be able to leave her mother in Texas without further regrets.

  Chapter 5

  Since her falling-out with Asher, Eugenie had spent days listening—and pining. The women who crowded Mrs. Cockrell’s drawing room could talk of nothing but the upcoming ball. Some had doubted that Sarah Cockrell would finish the hotel after her husband’s murder, but she did, and the ball was her celebration of the accomplishment.

  Some ladies who could not afford to buy a fancy dress had—with surprising ingenuity—salvaged silk from hatboxes or reused the satin, taffeta, and lace from gowns long stored away to make new ones. Others of more means had ordered bolts of material from St. Louis, Boston, or Philadelphia, then waited months for them to arrive by the irregular mail coach or by way of trips—like the one Asher had made—to Jefferson. Still others ordered new dresses from the most fashionable modistes in New Orleans or Houston. For many, their dresses—ordered months in advance—still hadn’t arrived.

  Those with dresses to spare had loaned or sold them to those without. Even Lilly, usually so careful with her clothing, had promised all her spare dresses to women in her drawing classes long before Eugenie arrived.

  Eugenie admired their patience and even, in some odd way, their fatalism. It was a land in which one could make one’s own way, through hard work and ingenuity and luck. So much luck. But it wasn’t a land that promised success. And the settlers embraced that challenge.

  Giving the conversation only half her attention, she considered whether she should attend the ball at all. Asher had made no attempt to contact her since he’d stormed out of the drawing room, and her heart ached to speak to him again. Even so, even in the face of his lack of communication, she still h
oped . . . and longed.

  Perhaps that hope and longing explained why—with less than an hour before the start of the ball—she was standing on a stool in the middle of her mother’s sitting room, having a stranger’s dress fitted to her figure. Miss Quigley had approached another resident of the hotel—a Miss Rutherford—to see if she would allow Eugenie to have one of the half dozen dresses she’d commissioned, but rejected. And Miss Rutherford had agreed. Apparently at the St. Nicholas Ball, most of the women would be wearing someone else’s clothes.

  The room was filled with maids and seamstresses and several of Lilly’s friends. All the women seemed to be talking simultaneously.

  The seamstress, Birdie, was examining the dress’s embroidery. “Ah, this was done in the old country,” she said in her Irish brogue. “I’ve not seen this whipped running stitch used much here—shame that: it’s so elegant.”

  Lilly’s maid couldn’t stop talking about Mrs. Cockrell’s scheme for lighting the affair. “The small chandeliers in the dining room and the large one in the main entry came all the way from New Orleans. They take kerosene for fuel, which is, you know, much safer than candles. And Mrs. Cockrell has hired her own fireman to light, watch over, and put out the flames.”

  While the seamstress brought in the dress’s waist, Lilly attempted to settle a cluster of greenhouse flowers on Eugenie’s head.

  “Ouch,” Eugenie said, putting her hand to her forehead.

  “Stop fidgeting, Eugenie.” Lilly batted away Eugenie’s hand.

  “Stop stabbing me with pins. I have no need of hothouse flowers in my hair.”

  “But with them you will be the belle of the ball.”

  “I’m too old to be the belle. Besides, I’d prefer not to bleed on another woman’s dress.”

  “It’s a red dress—bleed all you want.” Lilly was not to be dissuaded from the flowers.

  In the days since her argument with Asher, Eugenie had made a curious peace with her mother. She had never known her mother, not as an adult at least. So, she had set aside a child’s hurt at feeling abandoned to ask why Lilly had left her with Judith. Lilly’s answer had surprised and troubled her.

  Lilly had pulled a locket on a chain from under her blouse and held it open. On one side was a miniature of a man Eugenie recognized as her father; on the other were three dark curls of hair, each tied with a silk string.

  “I was so young when I married your father, and so in love, and then he was gone. But I had you, my precious girl, just two, with those ringlets of dark hair around your face, and I had your brother.” Lilly pointed at the curls of hair, one for each of her children and one for their father.

  Though Eugenie had often seen her mother wearing the locket, she had never known what was inside. She’d never imagined it might be a remembrance of her.

  “On your father’s death, you and your brother became the new count’s ward. I had no legal right to my children; no mother does. He sent your brother to school, but he allowed me to keep you. Then he changed his mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he did. It is the way of such men. They decide. You comply. The count never expected me to refuse. But I’d already met my dear Charles, and he agreed to help me take you to my own guardians in England. His only requirement was that we marry. So, we spirited you away.”

  “To my grandparents and to Judith.” Eugenie kept the conversation going.

  Lilly nodded. “Your uncle was a petty count of an insignificant territory. Your grandfather was a duke of the English realm. You were safe with him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What child understands such power?” Lilly closed the locket and slipped it back under her blouse. “Besides, from the beginning, you and Lady Judith shared a bond. Everyone could see it.”

  The hints of tears formed in the corners of Lilly’s eyes. “I was a willful, flighty girl, a butterfly, in love with the idea of love as much as with the men I married. You were your father’s daughter, all serious and thoughtful, so I left you in the care of someone who could nurture those qualities, not destroy them.”

  “You wouldn’t have destroyed . . .”

  Lilly held up her hand, stopping Eugenie’s words. “If I know anything, I know myself. And if you are honest with yourself, you know I was right.”

  Eugenie, though she found her mother’s reasoning odd, had to admit its truth. “Why did you always leave without telling me?”

  “Because I never knew myself. Whenever I woke up crying at the thought of leaving you again, I packed my bags. I told myself it was for the best. I never wanted you to remember me crying.”

  Eugenie had almost objected, but she let it go. In some way, Lilly’s odd incomplete explanations had been enough.

  “Ouch.” Eugenie came out of her reverie with a start. “Now you’ve stuck a pin in my ear.”

  “Don’t worry—it’s just a tiny bit of blood. Next to this red rose, no one will see it. There. All done.”

  “Ah, look! The guests have begun to arrive! Look at that carriage: all decked with ribbons.” The maid pointed at the street.

  Lilly and Eugenie joined the maid to watch the guests arrive. It was shortly before dusk, and the streets were suffused with a golden glow. Guests arrived both on foot and in carriages. The women wore their finest jewelry, rivaling that worn at the best Brahmin party in Boston. The men in their gleaming white shirts and black suits sported jeweled studs and cuff links. All of them—men and women both—wore white gloves, the women’s extending all the way to their elbows.

  Eugenie studied the crowd, looking for the tall, lean Ranger who had somehow in just two weeks captured her heart. She hadn’t realized that she loved him when they’d parted, but since then, she’d felt as if a portion of her soul had been torn away.

  If he didn’t come to the ball, she would know there was nothing between them. She would proceed with her plan to travel back to New Orleans and from there to Boston and home. She didn’t want to be Eve in the New World, without Asher as her Adam.

  Lilly whispered, “He’ll come, my darling girl; Asher’s no fool. He’ll come.”

  To avoid Lilly seeing her cry, Eugenie squeezed her mother’s hand and slipped from the room.

  * * *

  In the main ballroom, converted from the dining hall, kerosene lamps flickered from sconces on the walls between each window. Each table was lit by its own oil lamp, though the wicks were kept low to create the appearance of a mellow glow throughout the room. The ballroom walls were hung with fine tapestries, many borrowed from Dallas’s leading citizens, and around each window hung garlands of cedar and other evergreens. From the half-circle balustrade before the balcony, flags of Texas and the United States hung down. There the honored guests sat with an unparalleled view of the proceedings.

  The preliminary music was unexpectedly fine, with the local music teacher Mrs. Reinhardt directing her students on the piano and guitar. Then, the orchestra master played several melodies solo on the violin. Once he was done, a bugle signaled the grand march.

  Eugenie found herself in a space against the wall. From there, she watched the couples enter the ballroom in a long, elegant line.

  Near her, a woman in blue velvet stood half-hidden both by the drapes and a giant bear of a man in a respectable but worn black suit. Eugenie couldn’t hear their whispered conversation, but both were clearly at ease with the other. Eugenie had begun to spin a story about them, when the man left to join a garish woman dressed in red. Eugenie felt disappointed that the romance she’d imagined just starting had ended so quickly. Like hers.

  The ball began with a waltz. As the couples moved so gracefully across the floor, Eugenie imagined herself twirling around the room in Asher’s arms. But the memory hurt more than soothed her. How had she imagined she was storing up memories for the future? Every one made her heart break.

  The waltz transitioned to a minuet, then the minuet to a polka, followed by dance after dance she didn’t know. A helpf
ul young servant told her the names: schottische, mazurka, lancers, Virginia reel, and a dozen others.

  She waited. Still Asher did not come.

  Around nine, she noticed a group of rough men with badges had arrived. She assumed they had been hired to ensure that none of the ladies or gentlemen lost their jewels. But they circled the dance floor, staring at all the women and the men, like animals in search of prey. One, crossing in front of her, stopped to give her a hard look.

  She drew herself up tall. “What are you looking at, my good sir?”

  The man grinned, revealing broken-out teeth. Probably from a brawl, she thought.

  “I’m looking for a missing heiress. Her daddy thinks she’s kidnapped, as if any man would want a girl as homely as she is.”

  She thought of the woman in blue velvet hiding behind the curtains and the man talking to her. Perhaps their whispers had been a plan to escape. Had it been Asher asking, she would have offered the information gladly, but she wouldn’t tell this half-drunken bully anything.

  The man’s eyes ranked over her body. “Pink dress, she’s wearing, with ribbons.”

  “I’m not wearing pink,” she said flatly, letting her voice carry all the steel she’d learned from years of avoiding rakes and other predators.

  “No, ma’am. You’re not.” He leered at her, his breath stinking of liquor. “But that red is mighty fine. Let’s take a twirl around the dance floor.”

  He reached for her hand, but she pulled it back decisively.

  “I could never enjoy a dance knowing a young girl is in danger.” Inwardly rolling her eyes, she played to the drunk lawman’s sense of importance. “You must go . . . and find her.”

  “Of course, Miss . . . ?” He waited for her to fill in her name.

  She didn’t.

  “Well, I better go. That girl’s pappy won’t be able to sleep until he knows she’s safe. But if you need anything, you just holler for Chase. Chase Johnson.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She watched Chase saunter away, happy she’d been able to get rid of him so easily. But men like him were like bad pennies, and it was inevitable he would show back up before the evening was done.