The Christmas Brides Read online

She’d taken to life on a remote Montana ranch with amazing acuity for a city girl, and if she’d missed Boston, she’d never once let on. She’d given him Gracie, and they’d been happy.

  Now she rested in the small, sad cemetery beyond the apple orchard, like Josiah, and the fourth Creed brother, Dawson.

  Dawson. Some times it was harder to think about him and the way he’d died, than to recall Beth succumbing to that fever.

  Juliana straightened against Lincoln’s side, yawned. If the darkness hadn’t hidden her face, the brim of her bonnet would have, but he sensed that she was embarrassed by the lapse.

  “We’re almost home,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear.

  She didn’t answer, but sat up a little straighter, wanting to pull away, but confined by his arm and the cloth of his coat.

  When they reached the gate with its overarching sign, Lincoln moved to get down, but the Indian boy, Joseph, was faster. He worked the latch, swung the gate wide, and Lincoln drove the buck board through.

  His father and Tom Dancingstar had cut and planed the timber for that sign, chiseled the letters into it, and then laboriously deepened them with pokers heated in the homemade forge they’d used for horseshoeing.

  Lincoln never saw the words without a feeling of quiet gratification and pride.

  Stillwater Springs Ranch.

  He held the team while the boy shut the gate, then scram bled back into the wagon. The horses were eager to get to the barn, where hay and water and warm stalls awaited them.

  Tom was there to help unhitch the team when Lincoln drove through the wide doorway and under the sturdy barn roof. Part Lakota Sioux, part Cherokee and part devil by his own accounting, Tom had worked on the ranch from the beginning. He’d named himself, claiming no white tongue could manage the handle he’d been given at birth.

  He smiled when he saw Juliana, and she smiled back.

  Clearly, they were acquainted.

  Was he, Lincoln wondered, the only yahoo in the country side who’d never met the teacher from the Indian School?

  “Take the kids inside the house,” Lincoln told Juliana, and it struck him that rather than the strangers they were, they might have been married for years, the two of them, all these children their own. “Tom and I will be in as soon as we’ve finished here.”

  He paused to lift the two smaller children out of the wagon; sleepy-eyed, still wrapped in their blankets, they stumbled a little, befuddled to find them selves in a barn lit by lanterns, surrounded by horses and Jenny Lind, the milk cow.

  “I’ll tend to the horses,” Tom told him. “There’s a kettle of stew warming on the stove, and Gracie’s been watching the road for you since sunset.”

  Thinking of his gold-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Lincoln smiled. Smarter than three judges and as many juries put together, Gracie tended toward fretfulness. Losing her mother when she was only five caused her to worry about him whenever he was out of her sight.

  With a ranch the size of his to run, he was away from the house a lot, accustomed to leaving the child in the care of his now-absent mother, or Rose-of-Sharon Gainer, the cumbersomely pregnant young wife of one of the ranch hands.

  The older boy’s gaze had fastened on Tom.

  “Can I stay here and help?” he asked.

  “May I,” Juliana corrected with a smile. “Yes, Joseph, you may.”

  With that, she leaned down, weary as she was, and lifted the littlest girl into her arms. Lincoln bent to hoist up the smaller boy.

  “This is Daisy,” Juliana told him. “That’s Billy-Moses you’re holding.” The girl who’d spoken of working for her keep at the Diamond Buckle ducked her head shyly, stood a little closer to her teacher. “And this is Theresa,” she finished.

  Leaving Tom and Joseph to put the team up for the night, Lincoln shed his coat at the entrance to the barn, draped it over Juliana’s shoulders. It dragged on the snowy ground, and she smiled wanly at that, hiking the garment up with her free arm, closing it around both herself and Daisy.

  They entered the house by the side door, stepping into the warmth, the aroma of Tom’s venison stew and the light of several lanterns. Gracie, rocking in the chair near the cookstove and pretending she hadn’t been waiting impatiently for Lincoln’s return, went absolutely still when she saw that he wasn’t alone.

  Her corn flower-blue eyes widened, and her mouth made a perfect O.

  Daisy and Billy-Moses stared back at her, probably as amazed as she was.

  “Gracie,” Lincoln said unnecessarily. “We have company.”

  Gracie had recovered by then; she fairly leaped out of the rocking chair. Looking up at Juliana, she asked, “Did you answer one of my papa’s advertisements? Are you going to be a governess, a house keeper or a wife?” Lincoln winced.

  Understandably, Juliana seemed taken aback. Like Gracie, though, she turned out to be pretty resilient. The only sign that the child’s question had caught her off guard was the faint tinge of pink beneath her cheekbones, and that might have been from the cold.

  “I’m Miss Mitchell,” she said kindly. “These are my pupils—Daisy, Billy-Moses and Theresa. There’s Joseph, as well—he’s out in the barn helping Mr. Dancingstar look after the horses.”

  “Then you’re a governess!” Gracie cried jubilantly. Young as she was, she could already read, and because Lincoln wouldn’t allow her to travel back and forth to school in Stillwater Springs, she was convinced that lifelong ignorance would be her lot.

  “Gracie,” Lincoln said, setting Billy-Moses on his feet. “Miss Mitchell is a guest. She didn’t answer any advertisements.”

  Gracie looked profoundly disappointed, but only for a moment. Like most Creeds, when she set her mind on something, she did not give up easily.

  For the next little while, they were all busy with supper.

  Tom and Joseph came in from the barn, pumped water at the sink to wash up and joined them at the table, while Gracie, who had already eaten, rushed about fetching bread and butter and ladling milk from the big covered crock stored on the back step.

  His daughter wanted to make Miss Mitchell feel welcome, Lincoln thought with a smile, so she’d stay and teach her all she wanted to know—and that was considerable. She hadn’t asked for a doll for Christmas, or a spinning top, like a lot of little girls would have done.

  Oh, no. Gracie wanted a dictionary.

  Wes often joked that by the time his niece was old enough to make the trip to town on her own, she’d be half again too smart for school and ready to take over the Courier so he could spend the rest of his life smoking cigars and playing poker.

  As far as Lincoln could tell, his brother did little else but smoke cigars and play poker—not counting, of course, the whiskey-swilling and his long-standing and wholly scandalous love affair with Kate Winthrop, who happened to own the Diamond Buckle.

  Gracie adored her uncle Weston—and Kate.

  Casting a surreptitious glance in Juliana’s direction whenever he could during supper, Lincoln saw that she could barely keep her eyes open. As soon as the meal was over, he showed her to his mother’s spacious room. She and Daisy and Billy-Moses could share the big feather bed.

  Joseph bunked in with Tom, who slept in a small chamber behind the kitchen stove, having given up his cabin out by the bunk house to Ben Gainer and his wife. Theresa was to sleep with Gracie.

  Lincoln’s young daughter, however, was not in bed. Wide-awake, she sat at the table with Lincoln, watching as he drank lukewarm coffee, left over from earlier in the day.

  “Go to bed, Gracie,” he told her.

  Tom lingered by the stove, also drinking coffee. He smiled when Gracie didn’t move.

  “I couldn’t possibly sleep,” she said seriously. “I am entirely too excited.”

  Lincoln sighed. She was knee-high to a fence post, but some times she talked like someone her grandmother’s age. “It’s still five days until Christmas,” he reminded her. “Too soon to be all het up over presents and such.�
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  “I’m not excited about Christmas,” Gracie said, with the exaggerated patience she might have shown the village idiot. Stillwater Springs boasted its share of those. “You’re going to marry Miss Mitchell, and I’ll have Billy-Moses and Daisy to play with—”

  Tom chuckled into his coffee cup.

  Lincoln sighed again and settled back in his chair. Although he’d thought about hitching up with the school teacher, he’d probably been hasty. “Gracie, Miss Mitchell isn’t here to marry me. She was stranded in town because the Indian School closed down, so I brought her and the kids home—”

  “Will I still have to call her ‘Miss Mitchell’ after you get married to her? She’d be ‘Mrs. Creed’ then, wouldn’t she? It would be really silly for me to go around saying ‘Mrs. Creed’ all the time—”

  “Gracie.”

  “What?”

  “Go to bed.”

  “I told you, I’m too excited.”

  “And I told you to go to bed.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gracie pro tested, disgruntled.

  But she got out of her chair at the table, said good-night to Tom and stood on tiptoe to kiss Lincoln on the cheek.

  His heart melted like a honey comb under a hot sun when she did that. Her blue eyes, so like Beth’s, sparkled as she looked up at him, then turned solemn.

  “Be nice to Miss Mitchell, Papa,” she instructed solemnly. “Stand up when she comes into a room, and pull her chair back for her. We want her to like it here and stay.”

  Lincoln’s throat constricted, and his eyes burned. He couldn’t have answered to save his hide from a hot brand.

  “You’ll come and hear my prayers?” Gracie asked, the way she did every night.

  The prayers varied slightly, but certain parts were always the same.

  Please keep my papa safe, and Tom, too. I’d like a dog of my very own, one that will fetch, and I want to go to school, so I don’t grow up to be stupid….

  Lincoln nodded his assent. Though it was a request he never refused, Gracie always asked.

  Once she left the room, Tom set his cup in the sink, folded his arms. “According to young Joseph,” he said, “he and his sister have folks in North Dakota—an aunt and a grandfather. Soon as he can save enough money, he means to head for home and take Theresa with him.”

  Lincoln felt a lot older than his thirty-five years as he raised himself from his chair, began turning down lamp wicks, one by one. Tom, in the meantime, banked the fire in the cook stove.

  They were usual, these long gaps in their conversations. Right or wrong, Lincoln had always been closer to Tom than to his own father—Josiah Creed had been a hard man in many ways. Neither Lincoln nor Wes had mourned him overmuch—they left that to Micah, the eldest, and their mother.

  “Did the boy happen to say how he and the girl wound up in a school outside of Stillwater Springs, Montana?”

  Tom straightened, his profile grim in the last of the lantern light. “The government decided he and his sister would be better off if they learned white ways,” he said. “Took them off the reservation in North Dakota a couple of years ago, and they were in several different ‘institutions’ before their luck changed. They haven’t seen their people since the day they left Dakota, though Juliana helped him write a letter to them six months back, and they got an answer.” Tom paused, swallowed visibly. His voice sounded hoarse. “The folks at home want them back, Lincoln.”

  Lincoln stood in the relative darkness for a few moments, reflecting. “I’ll send them, then,” he said after a long time. “Put them on the train when it comes through next week.”

  Tom didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, the whole Trail of Tears echoed in his voice. “They’re just kids. They oughtn’t to make a trip like that alone.”

  Another lengthy silence rested com fort ably between the two men. Then Lincoln said, “You want to go with them.”

  “Somebody ought to,” Tom replied. “Make sure they get there all right. Might be that things have changed since that letter came.”

  Lincoln absorbed that, finally nodded. “What about the little ones?” he asked without looking at his friend. “Daisy and Billy-Moses?”

  “They’re orphans,” Tom said, and sadness settled over the darkened room like a weight. “Reckon Miss Mitchell planned on keeping them until she could find them a home.”

  Lincoln sighed inwardly. Until she could find them a home. As if those near-babies were stray puppies or kittens.

  With another nod, this one sorrowful, he turned away.

  It was time to turn in; morning would come early.

  But damned if he’d sleep a wink between the plight of four innocent children and the knowledge that Juliana Mitchell was lying on the other side of the wall.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MATTRESS FELT LIKE A CLOUD, tufted and stuffed with feathers from angels’ wings, beneath Juliana’s weary frame, but sleep eluded her. Daisy slumbered innocently at her right side, sucking one tiny thumb, while Billy-Moses snuggled close on the left, clinging to her flannel night gown—the cloth was still chilled from being rolled up in her satchel, out in the weather most of the day.

  Juliana listened as the sturdy house settled around her, her body still stiff with tension, that being its long established habit, heard a plank creaking here, a roof timber there. She caught the sound of a door opening and closing just down the corridor, pictured Lincoln Creed passing into his room, or bending over little Gracie’s bed to tuck her in and bid her good-night. Would he spare a kind word for Theresa, who was sharing Gracie’s room, and so hungry for affection, or reserve all his attention for his little daughter?

  Gracie was a charming child, as lovely as a doll come to life, with those thickly lashed eyes, golden ringlets brushing her shoulders and the pink-tinged porcelain perfection of her skin. Privileged by comparison to most children, not to mention the four in Juliana’s own charge, Gracie was precocious, but if she was spoiled, there had been no sign of it yet. She’d greeted the new arrivals at Stillwater Springs Ranch with frank curiosity, yes, but then she’d ladled milk into mugs for them, even served it at the table.

  Juliana’s heart pinched. Gracie had a strong, loving father, a home, robust good health. But behind those more obvious blessings lurked a certain lonely resignation uncommon in one so young. Gracie had lost her mother at a very early age, and no one under stood the sorrows of that more than Juliana herself—she’d been six years old when her own had succumbed to consumption. Juliana’s father, outraged by grief, torn asunder by it, had dumped both his off spring on their maternal grandmother’s doorstep barely two weeks after his wife’s funeral and, over the next few years, delivered himself up to dissolution and debauchery.

  Clay, nine at the time of their mother’s passing, had changed from a light hearted, mischievous boy to a solemn-faced man, seemingly over night. In a very real way, Juliana had lost him, in addition to both her parents.

  Victoria Marston, their grand mother, already a widow when her only daughter had died, dressed in mourning until her own death a decade later, but she had loved Juliana and Clay tirelessly nonetheless. Grand mama had given them every advantage—tutors, music lessons, finishing school for Juliana, who had immediately changed the course of her study to train as a school teacher upon the discovery that “finishing” involved learning to make small talk with men, the proper way to pour tea and a lot of walking about with a book balanced on top of her head. There had been college in San Francisco for Clay, even a Grand Tour.

  Juliana had stayed behind in Denver, living at home with Grand mama, attending classes every day and letting her doting grand mother believe she was being thoroughly “finished,” impatiently waiting for her life to begin.

  For all the things she would have changed, she appreciated her blessings, too; she’d been well-cared-for, beautifully clothed and educated beyond the level most young women attained. Yet, there was still a child like yearning inside Juliana, a longing for her
beautiful, laughing mama. The singular and often poignant ache was mostly manageable—except when she was discouraged, and that had been often, of late.

  After graduating from Normal School—her grandmother had died of a heart condition only weeks before Juliana accepted her certificate—she’d begun her career with high hopes, pushed up her sleeves and flung herself into the fray, un daunted at first by her brother’s cold disapproval. He’d wanted her to marry his business partner, John Holden, and because he con trolled their grandmother’s large estate, Clay had had the power to disinherit her. On the day she’d given back John’s engagement ring and accepted her first teaching assignment at a school for Indian boys in a small Colorado town a day’s train ride from Denver, he’d done that, for all practical intents and purposes.

  Juliana had been left with nothing but the few modest clothes and personal belongings she’d packed for the journey. Clay had gone so far as to ban her from the family home, saying she could return when she “came to her senses.”

  To Clay, “coming to her senses” meant consigning herself to a loveless marriage to a widower more than twenty years her senior, a man with two daughters close to Juliana’s own age.

  Mean daughters, who went out of their way to be snide, and saw their future step mother as an interloper bent on claiming their late mother’s jewelry, as well as her home and husband.

  Remembering, Juliana bit down on her lower lip, and her eyes smarted a little. She might have been content with John, if not happy, had it not been for Eleanor and Eugenie. He was gentle, well-read, and she’d felt safe with him.

  In a flash of insight and dismay, Juliana had realized she was looking for a father, not a husband. She’d explained to John, and though he’d been disappointed, he’d under stood. He’d even been gracious enough to wish her well.

  Clay, by contrast, had been furious; his otherwise handsome features had turned to stone the day she’d told him about the broken engagement.

  In the six years since, he’d softened a little—probably because his wife, Nora, had lobbied steadily on Juliana’s behalf—writing regularly, even inviting Juliana home for visits and offering to ship the clothing and books she’d left behind, but when it came to her inheritance, he’d never relented.