Creeping shadows of twilight filled the car; another day was ending.
The peddler had engaged the children in a new game of cards. Carson, like Brennan, slept. Mrs. Halifax and the baby lay on the bench seat, bundled in the quilt, the woman staring trancelike into an uncertain future, the infant gnawing on one grubby little fist.
Madonna and Child, Morgan thought glumly.
He made his way to the far end of the car, sat down on the bench and tipped his head back against the window. Tons of snow pressed cold against it, seeped through flesh and bone to chill his marrow; he might have been sitting in the lap of the mountain itself. He closed his eyes; did not open them when he felt Lizzie take a seat beside him.
“Rest,” he told her. “You must be worn-out.”
“I can’t,” she said. He heard the slightest tremor in her voice. “I thought—I thought they’d be here by now.”
Morgan opened his eyes, met Lizzie’s gaze.
“Do you suppose something’s happened to them? My papa and the others?”
He wanted to comfort her, even though he shared her concern for the delayed rescue party. If they’d set out at all, they probably hadn’t made much progress. He took her hand, squeezed it, at a loss for something to say.
She smiled sadly, staring into some bright distance he couldn’t see. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” she said, very quietly. “My brothers, Gabriel and Doss, always want to sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve, because our grandfather says the animals talk at midnight. Every year they carry blankets out there and make beds in the straw, determined to hear the milk cows and the horses chatting with each other. Every year they fall asleep hours before the clock strikes twelve, and Papa carries them back into the house, one by one, and Lorelei tucks them in. And every year, I think this will be the time they manage to stay awake, the year they stop believing.”
Morgan longed to put an arm around Lizzie’s shoulders and draw her close, but he didn’t. Such gestures were Whitley Carson’s prerogative, not his. “What about you?” he asked. “Did you sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve when you were little? Hoping to hear the animals talk?”
She started slightly, coming out of her reverie, turning to meet his eyes. Shook her head. “I was twelve when I came to live on the Triple M,” she said.
She offered nothing more, and Morgan didn’t pry, even though he wanted to know everything about her, things she didn’t even know about herself.
“You’ve been a help, Lizzie,” he told her. “With John Brennan and with Carson, too.”
“I keep thinking about the conductor and the engineer—their families….”
“Don’t,” Morgan advised.
She studied him. “I heard what you told John Brennan—that he ought to think about fishing with his son, instead of…instead of dying—”
Morgan nodded, realized he was still holding Lizzie’s hand, improper as that was. Drew some satisfaction from the fact that she hadn’t pulled away.
“Do you believe it really makes a difference?” she went on, when she’d gathered her composure. “Thinking about good things, I mean?”
“Regardless of how things turn out,” he replied, “thinking about good things feels better than worrying, wouldn’t you say? So in that respect, yes, I’d say it makes a difference.”
She pondered that, then looked so directly, and so deeply, into his eyes that he felt as though she’d found a peephole into the wall he’d constructed around his truest self. “What are you thinking about, then?” she wanted to know. “You must be worried, like all the rest of us.”
He couldn’t tell Lizzie the truth—that despite his best efforts, every few minutes he imagined how it would be, treating patients in Indian Rock, with her at his side. “I can’t afford to worry,” he said. “It isn’t productive.”
She wasn’t going to let him off the hook; he could see that. Her blue eyes darkened with determination. “What was Christmas like for you, when you were a boy?”
Morgan found the question strangely unsettling. His father had been a doctor, his mother an heiress and a force of nature, especially socially. During the holiday season, they’d gone to, or given, parties every night. “Minerva—she was our cook—always roasted a hen.”
Lizzie blinked. Waited. And finally, when certain that nothing more was forthcoming, prodded, “That’s all? Your cook roasted a chicken? No tree? No presents? No carols?”
“My mother wouldn’t have considered dragging an evergreen into the house,” Morgan admitted. “In her opinion, the practice was crass and vulgar—and besides, she didn’t want pitch and birds’ nests all over the rugs. Every Christmas morning, when I came to the breakfast table, I found a gift waiting on the seat of my chair. It was always a book, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As for carols—there was a church at the end of our street, and sometimes I opened a window so I could hear the singing.”
“That sounds lonely,” Lizzie observed.
His childhood Christmases had indeed been lonely, Morgan reflected. Which made December 25 just like the other 364 days of the year. For a moment he was a boy again, he and Minerva feasting solemnly in the kitchen of the mansion, just the two of them. His dedicated father was out making a house call, his mother sleeping off the effects of a merry evening passed among the strangers she preferred to him.
“If you hadn’t mentioned a cook,” Lizzie went on, when he didn’t speak, “I would have thought you’d grown up in a hovel.”
He smiled at that. His mother had regarded him as an inconvenience, albeit an easily overlooked one. She’d often rued the day she’d married a poor country doctor instead of a financier, like her late and sainted sire, and made no secret of her regret. Morgan’s father had endured by staying away from home as much as possible, often taking his young son along on his rounds when he, Morgan, wasn’t locked away in the third-floor nursery with some tutor. Those excursions had been happy ones for Morgan, and he’d seen enough suffering, visiting Elias Shane’s patients, most of them in tenements and charity hospitals, to know there were worse fates than growing up with a spoiled, disinterested and very wealthy mother.
He’d had his father, to an extent.
He’d had Minerva. She’d been born a slave, Minerva had. To her, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was as sacred as Scripture. She’d actually met the man she’d called “Father Abraham,” after the fall of Richmond. She’d clutched at the sleeve of his coat, and he’d smiled at her. Such sorrow in them gray, gray eyes, she’d told Morgan, who never tired of the much-told tale. Such sadness as you’d never credit one man could hold.
Morgan withdrew from the memory. He’d have given a lot to hear that story just one more time.
Lizzie bit her lip. Took fresh notice of his threadbare clothes, then caught herself and flushed a fetching pink. “You’re not poor,” she concluded, then colored up even more.
He laughed, and damn, it felt good. “Oh, but I am, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Poor as a church mouse. Mother didn’t mind so much when I went to Germany to study. She figured it would pass, and I’d come to my senses. When I came home and took up medicine in earnest, she disinherited me.”
Lizzie’s marvelous eyes widened again. “She did? But surely your father—”
“She showed him the door, too. She was furious with him for encouraging me to become a doctor instead of overseeing the family fortune. Minerva opened a boarding house, and Dad and I moved in as her first tenants. We found a storefront, hung out a shingle and practiced together until Dad died of a heart attack.”
Sorrow moved in Lizzie’s face at the mention of his father’s death. She swallowed. “What became of your