Chapter Text
Christy
When I was a girl in Asheville, I remember Christmas Eve was the social event of the winter season.
Green wreaths and red ribbons were affixed to every door; evergreen garlands and holly berries were twisted up every iron lamp post. At Biltmore House, they hung glass ornaments and lit their grand banquet tree with electric lights.
My mother and father always went out, unless they hosted the night’s festivities. And on those occasions, my brother and I would sneak out of our beds and watch the adults mingle below, velvet skirts and lace collars for the women, top hats and tailcoats for the men.
It was always a swanky affair, heavy on the champagne and chatter. My father would often retire to his study before the end of it, with a tumbler of brandy and a newspaper or one of his law books tucked under his arm. Mother would scowl at his absence, but honestly, she was lucky that he stayed as long as he did.
A few years later, I’d join them down there, as Mother wanted to present me to a number of eligible bachelors who might make an appropriate match for her only daughter. They bowed and smiled at me, with vain eyes and gloved hands.
“Miss Huddleston, you look ravishing. All grown up and ready to mingle with us reprobates.” I remember a Mr. Seward telling me this at one of those Christmas Eve parties, with the words falling from his lips before he even had a chance to properly look at my face.
Of course, what did it matter what I looked like? Or what I said or did or thought? That wasn’t why Mr. Seward, or any of those other young men, were seeking out the daughter of William and Julia Huddleston.
I thanked him for the compliment, but only after my mother pinched my side discreetly, through French silk and whale bone, reminding me that the young man’s gilded praise required a reply. I added a modest smile in afterthought, but it hardly stuck, as I’m afraid I just didn’t believe Mr. Seward would do for me at all.
He wouldn’t. He didn’t. Neither did any of his friends. I left for Cutter Gap that spring.
Those days of corsets and champagne parties were far behind me now. Miles and years away. It felt like they’d happened to a different person, not me. If I met my eighteen-year-old self, I’m not sure I’d even recognize her anymore.
And I know she wouldn’t recognize me. Not here, on Christmas Eve, pacing from one end of our mountain cabin to the other, wearing a trail in the pine floors with my tense footsteps.
My path went from the crackling fireplace to the front door and back again, past windows covered in white frost and night shadows. My gaze wandered the familiar sights of the front room—a plaid shirt thrown over the rocking chair, my icepick shoes discarded by a wicker basket in the corner (so rarely used, I forgot they were still there), Fairlight’s quilt and that woven blue-and-green tartan, both thrown over the cedar trunk, tintypes on the mantel, fishing gear hung up for the season, awaiting the spring.
And Neil’s pipe, stone-cold and awaiting his return.
I was singing softly while I paced, as Catherine was in my arms, fussing.
“Shady grove, my little love,” I sang to her softly, just above her head, my voice not much louder than a whisper. “Shady grove, my darling…”
She preferred Neil’s voice to mine with the old songs. But then, so did I.
The winter winds outside were howling like a banshee, blizzard-like and freezing. The cabin was snug and warm, but the sound of those winds whistled at the cracks of log walls and wailed at the window panes, keeping both of us awake long into the night. Of course, I wouldn’t have slept anyway, with or without the storm. I tossed and turned but couldn’t fall asleep, no matter how hard I tried. Neil’s side of the bed was cold and my mind wouldn’t let me forget that fact. Not even for a little while.
Neil wasn’t home yet. He’d gone to Raven Gap early that morning and he had yet to come back.
“It’s okay,” I cooed at Cathy. Her little hand gripped the sleeve of my nightgown tightly, but her fussing quieted under my soothing. The storm didn’t worry her near so much as my anxiousness, so I said it again, “It’s all right, I promise.”
The words sounded pitifully hollow to my ears. But they were convincing enough for an eleven-month old. She seemed primed to lay her little head against my shoulder, all those messy red curls that she’d inherited from her father going every which way. Reaching down with my free hand, I smoothed a couple of those strands out of her face and resumed the song, “Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall…”
God, why isn’t he home?
I couldn’t help myself from thinking the most dire thoughts, imagining the worst, even if I knew better. This wasn’t the first time he’d been late coming back from a call. It wouldn’t be the last. I’d been warned enough that this was how things would go, by Miss Alice, Fairlight and Margaret’s ghost.
Neil was the Cove’s only physician. And the mountain people lived dangerous, hard lives, too often in need of his services. Oh, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I said my vows to that bull-headed, broad-chested, and stubbornly-reckless man.
But there was no way around it. Not for me. Falling in love doesn’t allow for rational thought or the prudent choice, whatever my mother’s insistence on the matter.
And I’d fallen so deeply in love with Dr. Neil MacNeill that I’m afraid it might just last our respective lifetimes. And then some.
I don’t know why it took me so long to know my own feelings. I was so young when I first came here but that wasn’t all of it. I’d been foolish about everything with David. So very foolish. I was flattered by his attention, I think, and pleased about the way I could turn his head with so little effort. There was power in that which I’d never felt before. It was thrilling and frightening all at the same time.
And anyway, there was a symmetry to the idea that seemed irrefutable at first—two idealistic dreamers from other places, two outsiders looking to make a difference, separately and perhaps, together. We were alike, in many ways—our faith, our goals, our upbringings—but I took that compatibility and friendship for more than it was.
When I let David steal kisses from me on the church steps under that silver moonlight, a thought crept into my head unbidden, one that I buried quickly, worried that David might somehow divine the notion and take offence. For in that moment, just after the preacher kissed me, I found myself wondering if Neil MacNeill’s kiss wouldn’t taste just a little wilder, like mountain berries and moonshine, spruce and honeysuckle.
I might have wondered why an imagined kiss might make the one I just experienced go stale as day-old toast. But as I said, I was burying my feelings. Too shallow, as it turned out.
By the end, I think David knew my mistake before I did.
“I’ve lost you, haven’t I?” David asked me in the bunkhouse, after I’d gone down there and handed him back his ring. The one he’d made me take before I was ready to give him an answer. He’d been foolish too, but recognized it at last, “But maybe I never had you.”
No, he hadn’t. Not since the day old Theo left me stranded in the river and Neil came to carry me to shore. Or even before that, as I met the doctor’s eyes across a dying man and saw something reflected in his gaze that spoke of twin souls.
After Fairlight died and after my illness and all that came with it, I was ready to give David a final answer. I’m glad he knew what was coming. It would have been harder if he didn’t.
“Yes and no,” I didn’t deny it. Not to him, not to myself. Not to Neil. Not any longer.
There’s compulsion in true love that’s absent in a lukewarm heart. Once I knew this, everything else made sense. The months I spent not knowing how to answer David. The days I spent, impatiently, waiting to marry Neil.
Having almost lost me to the typhoid epidemic, he was willing to marry me quickly. Mother and Father hardly had time to make the trip. I think if he’d thought about it longer, he might have cautioned patience and reflection. I was still a city girl and he was still a mountain man.
But I’m glad love blinded him to reason, near as much as me. We’d wasted enough time.
And as his calloused hands slid over the curves of my body the night of our wedding, and nearly every night thereafter, I knew that this was exactly where I wanted to be. In his bed, in his arms. With those passionate and wild-flavored kisses I’d once imagined all mine to claim.
What I didn’t want was to be pacing and fretting for his safe return.
So this is what drove Margaret mad with worry and loneliness? This same fretting, this same pacing. But without a baby’s cry, perhaps it was the howling winds and the haunted silence that bothered her most of all.
These mountains were too old, and the ghosts these Scots-Irish brought over with them were too many.
“Shhh,” I whispered to Cathy, bouncing her a little more as I turned at the end of the row. She’d nearly fallen asleep but then, thunder rumbled outside.
Thunder in a blizzard? And on Christmas Eve? Now the weather was just turning spiteful for the hell of it. This made me rage a little, for Cathy’s sake. She was just a baby. She didn’t deserve to be frightened like this.
I remembered Becky O’Teale sitting right there, in that spot near the fireplace, on another stormy night and how the little girl jumped every time a clap of thunder called out, her ruined eyes tearing up with pain and fear.
What was that story that Neil told her? Something about a selkie-man and the blue-eyed girl who loved him…
“Do you want to hear a story, baby?” I murmured against her temple, my tones low and comforting. Catherine was still crying but softer as I kissed her wisps of hair.
I couldn’t remember all of it, but thought the distraction might serve us well. For both of us. And so I began, Neil’s voice in my head, his smirk as he looked over Becky and looked at me as he spoke of forbidden love.
“Once upon a time…”