Coming Home for Christmas Read online

He had truly frightened her. Trust me, wife, he thought, even if I lacerate your confidence. “All you need to do is help me once or twice. When they see how much they need me and you, you’ll have friends again.”

  The look she gave him was doubtful and he didn’t press the matter. He wanted more than anything to lie down with her, gather her close and take her fears away. There was one fear he knew he could end now. He went to his battered sea chest and pulled out that last, well-creased letter from his father. He pointed to the passage he had memorized.

  “My brother married my fiancée in 1809,” Thomas said, smiling a little at Laura’s sudden intake of breath, as though she could not imagine such disloyalty. “Listen— ‘Well, son, Cora was four years waiting for you and a woman of twenty-three is ripe and getting stale.’”

  He stopped there, not reading the rest of it: “There will be other lassies.” He felt suddenly too shy to say more.

  No fears, apparently, from his wife. She sat up, taking the letter and looking at English words she could not read. “Twenty-three? Tomás, she is an antique and that was almost three years ago!”

  Her woman’s logic amused him, if that’s what it was. “Aye, lass. An antique. I suppose you will tell me you are a mere twenty!”

  Her eyes were still big, but her voice was proud. “Eighteen, señor, and that is old enough in my country.”

  He thought he would try his luck then. “I am tired, wife. Move over.”

  She could have pointed to his own bed, but she did not. She did as he asked and he lay down next to her. Since his luck was holding, he held out his arm. Laura curled close to him and he knew by that simple gesture how distressed she was. She pillowed her head on his shoulder, as though seeking warmth.

  “You’ll come about again with the people of San Diego,” he murmured, his eyes closing.

  He could feel her shaking her head. “I am certain I will not. They have long memories.”

  “We’ll see, Laura.”

  Chapter Eight

  As November turned into December, Thomas didn’t mention again her helping him in the little village outside the presidio. Laura seemed relieved to work beside him in the ward. After a week, Juan had returned to the barrack, but there were other soldiers needing the surgeon’s help. It was the season of catarrh with coughs and runny noses, which seemed to constitute a major portion of his work on land or sea—so much for the glamour of medicine.

  Thomas had taught her how to care for Ralph Gooding and the carpenter seemed to respond to her tender ministrations. More than once or twice he had observed the two of them engaged in what he knew must be curious conversation. Her English was rudimentary at best, and Ralph’s Spanish was limited. But they seemed to find some common ground and Thomas was content.

  The only ruffling of calm waters came on the night he was called out to a difficult delivery and tried to convince her to come along. She burst into tears and he had no defense against that. “It’s all right, Laura,” he soothed, even as the mayor waited—none too patient, and who could blame him?—for Thomas to hurry to his pregnant wife’s bedside.

  “Don’t make me!” she whispered, clutching his nightshirt.

  “I won’t,” he promised. He touched her forehead with his. “But the moment might come, Laura, when you have to be brave enough to prove your value to everyone here besides just me.”

  He already knew her value and so did his usual customers. She tended his soldiers and fishermen and the Kumeyaay Indians from the mission a few miles away with care equal to his own. Laura Ortiz de Wilkie was a quick study and even brighter than he had thought. “Have a care,” Ralph told him one day. “Maybe I’ll ask her to close my eyes, after I die.”

  The carpenter’s gallows humor would have upset Laura, so Thomas did not translate any of that for her, even though she stood close by, alert, should the carpenter need her. Her loyalty touched him, but her proprietary air—so Spanish—made him chuckle inwardly.

  He was no closer to her bed and Thomas knew better than to press the matter. True to his nature, he analyzed his feelings. Did he just want a female, or did he want this particular female? Did she touch his heart, that seat of more exalted emotions, and not just his baser desires? He could have taken her many times over and she would have had no choice but to submit, but that much cruelty was foreign to him. He could wait; he was good at waiting.

  On those occasional nights when no one needed his medical skills, Thomas fell into a pleasant bedtime routine with his new wife. He had always enjoyed reading in bed and he continued the practice, retiring to his bed with a good book and a sturdy candle. He kept the door to their shared chamber open. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Laura kneel at her prie-dieu and begin that comforting click of her rosary beads. He even fancied that she prayed for him, but never had the nerve to ask.

  When she finished, she invariably went into the ward for a last look around, even though he knew everyone in there was buttoned up for the night. She might spend a few minutes with Ralph Gooding. Once in a while Thomas heard them laugh, and he had to wonder what mutual language they could possibly communicate in. As December replaced November he even heard them humming a time or two. The tune was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  The sibilant splash of water in the washbasin signaled her ablutions next. There was no room for her clothes press in their bedchamber, not with the extra bed, so he listened then for the rustle of her clothing as she disrobed, put on her nightgown and draped an all-encompassing shawl around herself. The shawl stayed around her until she was safely in her own bed, then she draped it across the end of her bed and generally sat up, cross-legged, to brush her hair.

  Once he almost got out of bed and took the brush from her, to handle that office himself. Her hair was such a beautiful deep black and snapped and crackled as she brushed it. Her expression was often dreamy then, as though the homely exercise soothed her. It soothed him, too, when it wasn’t exciting him. The fun began when he blew out his candle and the room was dark.

  Then, and only then, did Laura Maria Ortiz de Wilkie seem to feel confident enough to talk to him about her childhood in Spain, their removal to the viceroy’s court in Mexico City, and her mother and baby brother, both of them long dead in a cholera epidemic.

  “Could you have saved them?” she had asked one night.

  He thought it over and had to tell her that he probably could not. By the light of the moon shining through the eucalyptus leaves outside their window, he saw her raise up on her elbow to give him that intense stare of hers.

  “But you would have tried everything, would you not?” she asked.

  “You know I would.”

  “Even if it meant you came down with cholera?”

  “Even then.”

  Silence. And then, “Do you ever wish you could save everyone?”

  No one had ever asked him that before. He had to try not to show his emotions when he replied, “All the time.”

  He must not have been convincing, because the next thing he heard was her covers pulled back and her bare feet on the floor. She did nothing more than pull his covers higher over his chest and then kiss his forehead before returning to her own bed, but it was enough to melt his heart entirely.

  In his turn Thomas told her about Dumfries, where it rained all the time and the wind blew, and his parents’ house—stone and substantial—was never warm enough. One night he probably woke up Ralph with his laughter, when Laura looked at him and mused in all innocence, “Only an idiot would yearn for a place like that.”

  “It’s home,” he had replied, when he stopped laughing.

  He could tell she was not convinced. She was even less impressed with Christmas celebrations in Scotland, which amounted to very little.

  “The cook will fix a slightly better-than-usual dinner and we will go to church.”

  “You can’t be serious,” she had said, in her now-familiar voice, the tone reserved for the truly misbegotten.

  “I never
lie, Laura,” he lied. “What do you do here that is better?”

  “Most nearly everything,” she said succinctly, which made him smile in the dark. “We have special food, singing and dancing.” He could hear her sitting up in her bed. “We have fun.”

  “Fun is against the law in Scotland,” he told her and was rewarded, to his amusement, with a huge snort of disgust from the other bed. “No. Seriously. England outlawed fun.”

  “Then I cannot comment on such stupidity,” she said, pulling her dignity about her like a shawl, which never failed to make him smile. “We have a posada and that is the best of all.”

  Thomas listened appreciatively as Laura told him of the nine nights of processions of the Holy Family from door to door, seeking in song a place to spend the night. With growing enthusiasm she described their tender plea for succor, and the innkeepers’ disdain, also sung. “And on the last night, the eve of Christmas, Maria and José go to the final house and the innkeepers let them in,” she concluded in triumph, obviously aware that her Christmas far trumped his. “We pray and we eat.” She laughed softly. “A lot of both.”

  He knew what she spoke of, thinking of his years in San Diego and discounting the one year where the English and Spanish had still been officially at war and which he had spent mainly in prison. Even when the English and Spanish were friends, no one from the pueblo or presidio had included them in the festivities. “I remember the singing and the music,” he told her, his hands behind his head, as he lay there in the dark. “Can we have Maria and José visit us here in the infirmary?”

  She was silent a long time and he thought she had drifted to sleep. When she spoke, he heard the tears in her voice. “No one will have me, señor,” she said. “Just as there are innkeepers who would not have the Christ Child.”

  “Damn them all, then,” he said softly in English.

  Thomas didn’t hesitate. It was his turn to throw back the bedclothes, cross the room to her bed, tug up her blanket and plant a gentle kiss on her forehead. Before he returned to his own bed, she took his hand and kissed it, which made him swallow, then kept him awake much of the night as he contemplated the depths of her shame at her father’s scandal, and his own emotions.

  I wish you would trust me enough to understand that if we help your people with medical attention, you’d be astounded how many friends you will have, he thought. He wanted to tell her that, but her even breathing told him that she slept.

  “Call me cynical, but it is true,” he whispered in Spanish, before his eyes closed. “Something needs to happen, because I cannot bear to see you so sad.”

  From his lips to God’s ears. Thomas wasn’t sure what woke him so early on that morning of December 8th. He lay there listening; Laura was breathing gently on the other side of the little room. When he had got up around midnight to check on Ralph and the other patients, as he always did, he had left the door between the ward and their sitting room ajar. Now he listened, frowning. Nothing. Ralph’s breathing was labored, but that was to be expected, with advanced consumption.

  He listened harder and then it came to him that the animals taken into the courtyard were stirring restlessly, the cattle lowing and the horses whinnying, as though a wolf were among them. He got out of bed quietly and went to the door in the sitting room that opened onto the courtyard. He opened it a crack and watched the animals moving about; he could see no predators to disturb them.

  Thomas had just crawled back into bed and stretched out with a sigh, when the ground began to shake. The whole room seemed to sway. It was only seconds, but enough to nauseate him.

  He leaped from bed, his legs far apart as though he stood on the quarterdeck, because the movement continued. He heard tiles falling from the roof and glasses breaking in the next room. He knew he should rush to the ward, but that wasn’t his first instinct now. In a few seconds, he had scooped Laura from her warm bed to the floor, lying on top of her on the heaving tiles, cradling her head in his hands. He slid them both under her bed. She was suddenly wide awake and as terrified as he was, clinging to him, wrapping her legs around his body in a strange caricature of lovemaking and fear at the same time. He pulled her close.

  The room continued to move; the heavy bed even started to shift, so he moved them farther under it. Laura groaned when her cupboard with all its dishes crashed to the floor in the other room. “It’s all right,” he murmured, kissing her somewhere in the vicinity of her ear. “It’s just dishes.”

  She didn’t say anything, but tried to burrow as close to him as she could, her breath coming in little gasps. He put his cheek next to hers—she was so soft—and said in a commanding voice, one usually reserved for the orlop deck, when patients were piling up at the foot of the gangway during battle, “Breathe slowly. In and out. Do it.”

  She did. In a moment, he felt her heart slow down, beating more in rhythm with his now. He could feel her body relax under his, even though her legs were still firmly anchored over his back. This was not the time to do what he wanted to do, but Thomas Wilkie, practical surgeon and Scot in the Royal Navy, had to admit he was beguiled by the idea.

  “Can you breathe?” he asked, his voice more normal now.

  Laura nodded, but clung tighter when he tried to move off her.

  “Honey, I have to go in the other room.” It was the first endearment he had attempted. She made no objection. After more precious seconds, while the earth still trembled, she released her hold on him just enough for him to slide out from under her bed, and tug her after him.

  He wasn’t sure he had ever seen another human being’s eyes as wide open as his wife’s were just then.

  “I can never get accustomed to these,” she said as she trembled.

  He kept his arms around her a few more moments, then duty called; in fact, it clamored from the ward where Ralph was coughing. He released her and hurried into the other room, after lighting his lantern.

  The ward was filled with plaster dust. His own eyes wide, Ralph coughed, his hand to the tubercular lesion on his throat, which began to ooze.

  “We have to get him out of here,” Thomas muttered to Laura, who had thrown her shawl around her nightgown. He grabbed a stretcher and Laura helped him move the carpenter onto it. Ralph was light enough now—too light—and she had no trouble taking one end of the stretcher and helping him move his patient into the courtyard. Ralph stopped coughing and Thomas stood over him a moment before following Laura back into the ward. Together they helped out a broken leg and a bad cold.

  When his patients were comfortable enough, now that the frightened livestock had been herded outside the presidio’s courtyard, he motioned to Laura. “We’d better get dressed,” he told her.

  They hurried inside. Laura wasted not a moment on propriety and threw off her nightgown, standing naked before reaching for her chemise and then her dress. For several weeks now it had been his duty to button her up the back. He couldn’t help it that his fingers shook. Whether it was the shock of the earthquake or the sight of his wife’s substantial and beautiful breasts, he had to remind himself to breathe.

  Oddly he felt shy about disrobing in front of her, as she looked about for her apron and shoes at the same time. When in Rome, he thought, stripping. He found his trousers before his smallclothes, which was a timesaver. A shirt and his surgeon’s bibbed apron completed his haute couture, plus sandals. His medical bag was always in the same place. He slung it around his shoulder and reached for the cloth bag full of bandages.

  “You’re my pharmacist’s mate,” he told his wife, handing the bag to her. “Just follow me. We’ll check the garrison first.”

  She nodded, clutching for his arm when the floor started to sway again with an aftershock. “Dios mio,” she muttered, holding tight to his arm. “Why do people live in San Diego?”

  “Must be the beaches,” he said, trying to make a joke, as the floor heaved and then stopped. “This never happens in Dumfries.”

  It pleased him that Laura could still tease in
turn. “From what you have told me, nothing else ever happens there, either, including Christmas,” she whispered in his ear. “We may have to do something drastic about Dumfries.”

  Chapter Nine

  Impulsively Thomas kissed her cheek, then started for the small barrack on the opposite side of the courtyard. Few soldiers lived there permanently. The captain had explained to them several years back that soldados in Spanish forts generally lived outside the walls with their families, or even in bachelor houses.

  He held out his hand for Laura and she took it, hanging back for a small moment. He turned around and noticed the tears in her eyes.

  “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

  “I am, too,” he told her honestly, “but I know what to do, and you know far more than you think you do.”

  She must have believed him because she nodded and squeezed his hand. His reassurance grew when she corrected his Spanish.

  They found the captain nursing nothing worse than a bump on his head, caused when the bookcase with government regulations had collapsed against his desk, spilling out more than a century of parchment documents bound with red ties. While Thomas felt his forehead the captain remained serene, contemplating the piles of regulations. “I doubt any of us paid much attention to them anyway,” was his philosophical comment. “Spain is so far away.”

  Their visit to the mess hall took longer. The cook and his minions still crouched under tables, one Kumeyaay boy clutching his foot, cut when he’d run across broken china to slide to safety with the others. After Thomas coaxed them out, Laura bound the lad’s foot and gave him a handful of sweets from a box that had burst open. The cook glared at her for wasting delicacies on a mission Indian, but Laura just glared back, winning that staring contest handily. Thomas could have told the man to save his glares; his wife never suffered fools gladly and was not inclined to start now.

  They finished up quickly in the presidio, hurried along by soldiers from outside the walls, begging for help with their families. Laura hung back for only a moment, looking to Thomas for reassurance. She had not left the comparative safety of the fort since her father had been led in chains from the presidio.