The Ghost of Christmas Past
A HOUSE UNITED story

By Sarah Hendess

 

Ponderosa Ranch
Nevada Territory
December 24, 1861

            His bedroom was chilly, but Hop Sing had thoughtfully placed a bed warmer under his blankets, so Adam’s bed was snug the moment he crawled into it.  Despite the Civil War raging on the other side of the country, Adam Cartwright felt more in the Christmas spirit than he had in years.  After more than a decade of missing her, the Cartwrights had their cousin and niece, the newly minted Dr. Josephine Cartwright, back on the Ponderosa.

            Adam and Josie had grown close when Adam was in Massachusetts for college when Josie was just a little girl, ten years Adam’s junior.  Adam had spent all of his school holidays in Washington, DC, with Josie and her parents, Jacob and Hannah Cartwright, who had taken him in as their own.  After Adam’s college graduation, the eastern Cartwrights had escorted Adam back to Nevada and visited the Ponderosa for a month.  When Josie had returned home at the end of the visit, Adam had felt like his heart had been torn to shreds.  But now, with the Civil War boiling dangerously close to Washington, Josie had returned to the Ponderosa right after she had graduated from medical school seven months ago.  Now, for the first time in twelve years, Adam and Josie were together for Christmas.

            As he settled his head on his pillow, Adam thought back to that last Christmas they had spent together.  As Christmases went, it was the most special one of his life to that point – happy, yes, but also sad, frustrating, and fulfilling.  Adam smiled fondly at the memories as he drifted off to sleep.

 

Boston
December 1849

            Dr. Jacob Cartwright laid a hand on his nephew’s forehead and smiled as he announced that the boy’s fever had not returned and he could now get out of bed.

            “Finally!” Adam exclaimed as he leapt out from under the covers and grabbed the pair of trousers he had tossed into his wardrobe the previous day when his uncle had ordered him to bed.

            The nineteen-year-old still felt foolish for ending up feverish in the first place.  He was in his third and final year at Harvard University and had come to his aunt Rachel Stoddard’s home in Boston for the Christmas holidays.  Typically, he would have traveled to Jacob’s home in Washington, DC, but the family had chosen to spend Christmas together in Boston this year.

            Adam had arrived at Rachel’s home from Cambridge the previous day, several hours before Jacob, Hannah, and nine-year-old Josie had arrived by train from Washington.  Adam had attempted to pass the time by chatting with Rachel, his deceased mother’s older sister, but Rachel had made some deeply upsetting comments about Adam’s father, Ben, and Adam had stormed out of the house and into a driving snowstorm without his coat, hat, or gloves.  Having nowhere else to go, he had spent the next three hours outdoors at the train station waiting for Jacob, Hannah, and Josie to arrive.  By the time the other Cartwrights’ train had pulled into the station, Adam was in the early stages of hypothermia.  In retrospect, Adam realized he should have simply ducked into a café for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie, but at the time he had been too upset to think clearly – a mistake he vowed never to repeat.  Instead, his physician uncle had rushed him back to Rachel’s house, where the family got him warmed up.  Adam had run a low-grade fever for a few hours, and Jacob had made him stay in bed until the fever had been gone for a full day.

            Those had been the longest twenty-four hours of Adam Cartwright’s life to that point.  He did not take well to being babied; he had spent the first seven years of his life crossing the continent from Boston to the Utah Territory in a covered wagon with his father, so he had learned at an early age to take care of himself.  But he had not complained at all when little Josie had popped into his room the previous afternoon with a book and a peppermint stick for each of them, and they had spent a few blissful hours snuggled up to each other on his bed as they read their books and crunched their candy.  Today, however, Josie had been permitted only two short visits to Adam’s room; her parents otherwise kept her downstairs so Adam could rest, so that sweet diversion was gone.

            Adam loved the two little brothers he had left behind in the territory, but he and Josie had a special bond.  Her mother was the younger sister of Adam’s mother, Elizabeth, who had died just hours after giving birth to him in Boston.  Grief-stricken, Adam’s father had almost immediately left Boston for the West with infant Adam in tow, but that did not stop Ben’s younger brother, Jacob, from traveling from Philadelphia, where he was attending college, to the Stoddard home in Boston to express his condolences to Hannah, Rachel, and their father, Captain Abel Stoddard.  Jacob and Hannah had met on a few previous occasions, most notably at Ben and Elizabeth’s wedding, but it was on this visit that they fell in love.  They married four years later once Jacob had completed medical school, and six years after that, Josephine Elizabeth Cartwright was born.

            Adam finally met Jacob, Hannah, and Josie a little more than two years earlier when Ben had sent him east for college.  The then-six-year-old Josie had been positively delighted to meet her double first cousin, whom she affectionately dubbed “Cousin-Cousin Adam.”  They had connected instantly.  An experienced older brother, Adam fell naturally into the role of Josie’s big brother, and because both Josie and Adam so strongly favored the Stoddard side of the family, most people assumed they were brother and sister – a fiction that the cousins were happy to maintain.  They had the same wavy black hair, heavily lidded hazel eyes, and subtly upturned nose.  Sometimes, when something caught their interest, they both pricked up an eyebrow at exactly the same angle, setting onlookers to laughing. 

            Developing a relationship with his eastern family – especially Josie and Hannah – had been fulfilling for Adam.  Ben had given him a portrait of his mother and told him a bit about her, but getting to know his mother’s sisters and niece had answered more of Adam’s questions about that part of his heritage than his father’s stories ever could.  And there was no question that Josie was the apple of his eye.  From their first meeting on a boat dock in New York City, Adam had been wound tightly around Josie’s little finger, and he hoped she would never let him go.

            Josie returned Adam’s adoration.  As an only child, she had often craved the company of a brother or sister, and having Adam around – even if it was only during his summer and winter school holidays– was like a dream come true to her.  When Adam was in Washington, Josie followed him around like a puppy, and he delighted in taking her all over the city, especially to the new Smithsonian museum and the theater.  So when Josie had sprung off the train the previous day and seen Adam standing back in an alcove, coatless, pale, and shivering violently, her stomach had seized.  Her fear mounted on the carriage ride back to Rachel’s as Adam grew confused and sleepy – an ominous sign that he was succumbing to the cold – and she had sat in his lap and pressed her back tightly against his chest to share her warmth with him.  Like a good Stoddard, she had remained outwardly calm and assisted her father by checking Adam’s fingers and ears for signs of frostbite, but once Jacob had taken Adam upstairs to put him to bed, Josie retreated to her guestroom, buried her face in a pillow, and sobbed for a full ten minutes.  When Jacob had come in and told her that Adam was out of danger and sleeping soundly, Josie had slipped into Adam’s room and sat on the floor next to his bed for three hours until he awoke.  Not being allowed to sit with him the second day had been agony for the nine-year-old, and when Adam now triumphantly descended the stairs and entered the sitting room where Josie was reading, she squealed with delight and leapt into his arms.  Jacob followed Adam down the stairs and smiled as his daughter wrapped her skinny arms around Adam’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder.

            “You’re all better?” she asked, her voice muffled by Adam’s shirt.

            “Good as new!” he announced cheerily.  He held Josie close for a moment before swinging her to the ground and depositing her lightly on her feet.  “So first thing tomorrow, we can start having fun.”

            Josie grinned.  She and Adam had been exchanging letters all semester, planning out what they would do together while they were in Boston for the holidays.  Adam had promised to take her on a tour of the historical sites she had been learning about in school, and Josie hoped that she could persuade him to take her tobogganing.

            “Why wait until tomorrow?” she chirped.

            “Because it’s only a couple hours until suppertime, silly,” Adam replied, ruffling Josie’s dark hair.  “As soon as we got anywhere, it would be time to come home.”   

            Josie stuck her lower lip out in a mock pout, which made Adam smile.  She grabbed his hand and dragged him over to the settee where she had been reading, and the cousins plopped onto the burgundy-velvet seat together.  Adam picked the day’s newspaper up off the coffee table and tried to read, but no matter how much he shifted and squirmed, he could not get comfortable.  The cushions on Rachel’s sofa were plush enough, but the high, wooden back was unpadded and nearly perpendicular to the seat.  Adam never figured out how Josie could sit there and read for hours on end.  Given his druthers, he would sprawl out on the floor in front of the fireplace; Aunt Rachel’s plush Oriental rugs were much more comfortable than her settees.  But had Rachel caught Adam lounging thus in the middle of her ornate sitting room in the Stoddard family home in Boston’s finest neighborhood, Adam would have had to ask Jacob to please reattach his head. 

Adam was proud that after retiring as a ship’s captain, his maternal grandfather had done so well for himself as the owner of his own shipping line, but he did wish that Rachel had not insisted the family abandon its modest home on the waterfront, in which Adam himself had been born, for this mansion in Beacon Hill.  Ben had been dirt poor for many of the early years of Adam’s life; he had had plenty of money when he left Boston for the West, but it ran out quickly, and by the time they were only halfway across the continent, Ben had often gone to bed hungry, having spent what little money he could scrounge up to feed Adam.  Even now, after establishing one of the largest ranches west of the Rocky Mountains, Ben Cartwright and his sons lived in a small, four-room house, where the three boys shared a bedroom.  Now in his third year studying architecture at Harvard, Adam had nearly finished his design for an enormous new ranch house that he would help construct when he returned home, but he still intended it to be a homey sort of place, where a man did not have to worry about tracking in dirt after a long day in the saddle.  Adam was proud of his New England roots, but he did miss the simplicity of life back home.

When the doorbell rang a short time later, Adam leapt to his feet, only too happy to have an excuse to abandon the settee, but as he strode past Hannah, who was sitting in a nearby armchair, she grabbed his arm and shook her head, pointing toward the sofa to indicate that he should sit back down.  Adam sighed.  He had forgotten that in Boston’s high society it was uncouth to answer one’s own door.  He trudged back to the settee and dropped back onto the cushion next to Josie.  He could only pray that whoever was at the door would give him a reason to get up.

Adam’s prayers were answered.

No sooner had he recommenced his uncomfortable perusal of the day’s news than Rachel’s butler stepped into the sitting room and announced “Mr. John Quincy Adams the Second” as he held out a small white calling card on a silver tray.

Rachel, who was also sitting in an armchair in the sitting room while she worked on a piece of embroidery, let out an audible gasp at the familiar name.  Her hands immediately flew to her hair, and she patted her graying coiffure all over to make sure not a strand was out of place.  Hannah’s and Jacob’s eyes widened, but neither of them spoke.  Adam’s face, however, lit up brightly.

“Adams!” he exclaimed as he once more leapt from the settee and made to exit the sitting room.  This time, however, it was the butler who stopped him.

“No need to get up, sir,” the man intoned slowly as he held up a hand.  “I shall escort the gentleman in here.”

Adam hung his head and plodded back to the settee once again.

“I thought he was dead!” Josie piped up, a bit too loudly; her voice bounced out of the sitting room and echoed down the hallway toward the entrance to the house.  Hannah and Jacob bit back smiles as Rachel cringed.  She opened her mouth to chastise her niece for poor manners, but Adam jumped in first.

“You’re thinking of the first John Quincy Adams, our sixth president,” he told Josie.  “And you’re right; he died last year.  But this is John Quincy Adams the Second.  He’s the president’s grandson.”

“And President John Adams’s great-grandson,” Josie added.

“You got it.”  Adam grinned at his sharp little cousin.  “And a friend of mine from school.”  He gazed around at the awed expression on the faces of the other adults in the room and added, “Who, apparently, I failed to mention.”

As they waited for the butler to escort the young Mr. Adams into the sitting room, Adam quickly explained how he had met the presidential descendent.  Per Adams family tradition, John Quincy II had been sent to college young – he was still three weeks from his sixteenth birthday when school commenced in September – and on the first day of the term, Adam had spotted the slight young man staring agog at the classroom buildings.  He had recognized instantly that the boy was hopelessly lost and had shown him the way to his first class.  In a hurry to reach his own class on time, Adam had not caught the boy’s name, but the young man had sought him out later that day to thank him for his help.  It had actually been quite funny.  Over cups of coffee in the College Commons, John had admitted that he had tracked Adam down by asking his classmates if they knew the dark-haired senior who spoke without a New England accent.  They had enjoyed a good laugh, and as the semester progressed, Adam fell into his natural big-brother role and looked out for John, checking in with him every so often to see how the young man was getting along at school and swapping stories about their younger siblings – John was the second of seven children – and in Adam’s case, Josie, too.  When John had learned that Adam would be spending Christmas in Boston, he had offered to drop in and say hello.  The Adams family home was in nearby Quincy, and John often went into Boston, especially during the holiday season.

Rachel was beaming by the time Adam finished his tale, and Adam could tell she was pleased that he had befriended a member of such a prominent family.  She had no time to congratulate him, however, because just then, John Quincy Adams II stepped into the room behind the butler.

He was a slim young man with close-cropped brown hair, a strong brow and jaw, and deep-set brown eyes.  Though a good five inches shorter than Adam, who had topped out at just over six feet, John carried himself confidently with squared shoulders and a decisive stride.  He was dressed like a true Victorian gentleman in neat black trousers, vest, and morning coat, all made of the most luxurious wool.  Adam assumed the fine wool overcoat, silk gloves, and black silk top hat the young man typically wore had already been taken by the butler and stored carefully in the hall closet.  Rachel smiled approvingly as the entire family leapt to its feet to greet their guest.

Adam strode across the sitting room, grateful that he was finally allowed off of the settee.   “Adams!” he greeted his friend, who accepted his outstretched hand and shook it vigorously.  “So glad you could stop by.”

“Good to see you, Cartwright,” John replied, grinning broadly.  “I was very pleased to catch you at home.  I hope this is not an inconvenient time?”

“Not at all,” Adam replied.  “Please, meet my family.”  He beckoned his aunts, uncle, and cousin to come over.  John bowed formally to Rachel and Hannah as Adam introduced them, and he shook hands with Jacob. 

“And this must be Miss Josephine,” John said, turning his bright smile on Josie.  He bowed low to the little girl, who giggled and, much to everyone’s surprise and amusement, executed a flawless curtsey. 

“Oh, how wonderful!” Rachel whispered delightedly to Hannah.

“You sure don’t look like the president,” Josie blurted out, wrinkling her nose.

“And then that mouth,” Rachel muttered under her breath.

To Rachel’s great relief, John threw his head back and let loose a burst of mirth.

“And am I ever glad!” he laughed, running a hand through his short brown locks.  “My grandfather started losing his hair at the age of twenty-one!  I hope to hold onto mine a bit longer than that.”

Josie giggled again and decided she liked Adam’s schoolmate. 

“Anyway, Cartwright,” John continued, turning back to Adam, “I stopped in to see if you and the young lady would like to accompany myself and three of my siblings on a tobogganing excursion tomorrow.”

“Would we ever!” Josie exclaimed as her face split in a wide smile.

“Josephine!” Hannah chastised.  “Mr. Adams was not speaking to you!”  Hannah tolerated a good number of behavioral faux pas, but she would not stand for her daughter to interrupt a guest.

Josie’s cheeks reddened, and she dropped her gaze to the floor.  She had not meant to be rude; her excitement had simply gotten the better of her.

“I apologize, Mr. Adams,” she mumbled.

“Not at all,” John assured her.  “So, what do you say, Cartwright?  Have the same enthusiasm as your young cousin here?”

Josie cast Adam a pleading gaze, and he chuckled.

“Not quite, but I think if I refuse she’ll never speak to me again,” he answered.  “So, yes!”

Josie cheered for joy and caught Adam up in a big hug around the waist.  He stumbled two steps to the left as Josie’s attack caught him off guard, and John reached out and steadied him with a hand on his arm.

“Wonderful!” the younger man exclaimed.  “I will be bringing two of my younger brothers and my little sister, Mary.”  He turned to Josie.  “How old are you, Miss Cartwright?”

“I am nine years and two and a half months old, Mr. Adams,” Josie replied sweetly.

“Perfect,” John replied with a smile.  “Little Mary is only four years old, but Henry is eleven, and Arthur is eight, so you fall right between them.”

“Wow, that is a lot of brothers and sisters,” Josie remarked. 

“And that is not all of them,” John told her.  “I have an older sister and two more younger brothers.”

Josie’s wide eyes said everything her mouth could not formulate words for.  She had thought that Adam had a big family, what with two brothers, and she could not wrap her young brain around the idea of having four brothers and two sisters.

“I should be heading home, I am afraid,” John said.  “But we shall see you in the morning, Cartwright.  Shall we meet atop Flagstaff Hill on the Common about nine o’clock?”

Adam agreed, and John said his farewells to the family.  Rachel smiled warmly at the young man and told him that he must come for dinner some evening.  John said he would like that very much and would look for Rachel’s invitation.  Then, shaking Adam’s hand a final time, he followed the butler out of the sitting room.

When she heard the front door latch behind John, Josie squealed with delight once more and caught Adam up in another exuberant hug.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she shrieked.

Hannah laughed at her daughter’s reaction, but when she kept laughing a bit longer than the situation warranted, Jacob asked her what was so funny.

“Only a Cartwright could befriend a descendent of two presidents and rather than being offered a job in politics get invited outside to play!” she exclaimed before dissolving into giggles once more.

“At least we know how to have fun,” Jacob quipped as he tweaked his wife’s cheek.

Adam smiled at the exchange.  He loved watching his aunt and uncle interact; it was like having two parents again.  He had adored his father’s second and third wives.  Both women had mothered the young Adam like he was their own son, and he had mourned their deaths every bit as much as his father and brothers had.  Ben did his best to be both mother and father to his sons, but there was something comforting about having a true mother in the home.  Jacob and Hannah together were complete, and though Adam would never admit it aloud, being with his aunt on school holidays made him feel safer somehow.  He had even caught himself once or twice imagining that Jacob and Hannah were his parents and Josie truly his little sister, and he wondered what his life would have been like had his mother not died.  He knew his father still would have taken the family west, but perhaps Ben and Elizabeth would have had more children along the way – little brothers and sisters with dark wavy hair and hazel eyes like Adam’s.  He loved his actual younger brothers, Hoss and Little Joe, but growing up, Adam had craved a family member who looked like him.  He, Hoss, and Little Joe had all managed to favor their respective mothers, and people usually had to take them at their word that they were brothers.  He often marveled that he and his brothers could look so dissimilar while he and Josie were like long-lost siblings.

“You are going to love Flagstaff Hill, Adam!” Josie crowed, breaking Adam’s reverie.  “It is the best hill in the city for tobogganing!”  Adam grinned at her and ruffled her hair as Jacob leaned in close to his ear.

“You’ll be sure to dress warmly,” his uncle muttered.

Adam rolled his eyes skyward and let out an exasperated sigh.  “Yes, sir,” he replied sheepishly.

******

            All that could be seen of Adam Cartwright the following morning were a few wild locks of raven hair sticking out from the top of his bed covers.  The fire in his bedroom’s small fireplace had guttered during the night, and in his sleep, Adam had pulled the heavy quilts up over his head.  Now as he woke, he smiled as he slowly remembered that he was taking Josie tobogganing that day.  He threw back the bedcovers and instantly regretted cracking open the cozy little cocoon he had created while he slept.  He shivered in the brisk air as he stepped onto the wool rug next to his bed.  He grabbed his trousers from the wardrobe and yanked them on over the long johns he had slept in, leaving his nightshirt in place for the time being, too.  When he finally pulled off his nightshirt, even his thermal top could not block the frigid air from stabbing his chest like a thousand tiny knives, and he felt he could not get his shirt buttoned up quickly enough.  When he pulled on his socks, he made sure that they overlapped the bottoms of his long johns to keep the cold air out.  He wished he had not left his old cowboy boots in his dorm room at Harvard – he had worn them from Nevada two and half years ago, and they now pinched his toes a bit, but they would have been better suited to tromping around in the snow than the brogues he had been wearing at college.  But with no other options, he laced up his shoes and made to head downstairs for breakfast.

            Just as he threw open his bedroom door and took his first step into the hallway, a small figure popped out of the shadows and pounced in front of him.

            “Hi, Adam!” Josie exclaimed.

            Adam hollered in surprise and jumped backward, catching his heel on the threshold to his room.  His arms windmilled wildly for a few seconds, but he could not regain his balance and landed hard on his rump on the floor.  He sat there, eyes wide and right hand clutching his chest as the rush of adrenaline dissipated and his breathing and heart rate slowed to normal.  Josie cackled with delight, her laughter echoing down the hall.

            Downstairs at the breakfast table, Jacob, Hannah, and Rachel heard Adam’s cry of surprise and the thump of his backside connecting with the floor.  They all leapt from their seats, and, his physician’s reflexes surging, Jacob raced from the dining room and bounded up the stairs two at a time.  He arrived in the upstairs hallway to see his dazed nephew splayed on the floor and his daughter clutching the doorframe for support while she laughed hysterically, tears streaming down her face.

“Man alive, Josie!  That was not funny!” Adam declared, accepting Jacob’s outstretched hand and letting his uncle pull him to his feet.  “That’s gonna leave a bruise,” he moaned, massaging his sore rear end.

At this comment, Josie, who had finally started to catch her breath, burst into a fresh round of hilarity so strong that she started to hiccup.  Jacob had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at Adam, too.  Josie loved to pop out at people from around corners, and Jacob knew without asking that Adam had just become Josie’s most recent target.  Adam tried to glare sternly at his cousin, but the little girl beamed up at him, still hiccupping, and Adam’s face broke into a grin.

“I’m gonna get you for that,” he threatened.

“You’ll have to catch me first!” Josie shrieked and tore off down the hall and down the stairs, Adam hot on her heels.  Jacob smiled and shook his head before following his daughter and nephew to the dining room.

Josie was so excited to go tobogganing that she bolted her breakfast, despite her mother’s warnings that she would upset her stomach.  To pay her back for scaring him, Adam ate his breakfast with comic slowness.  Josie scowled at him as he deliberately took a geological age to lift his spoon from his porridge bowl to his mouth. 

When at long last the cousins had finished their breakfast, Hannah bundled Josie into two pairs of heavy wool leggings, her coat, a bright-blue knit cap that tied securely under her chin, and a pair of thick, wool mittens.  As a final touch, she wrapped a scarf around Josie’s mouth and nose, leaving only her eyes exposed. 

Adam accepted his coat and hat from the butler, but as he was about to plunge his arms into the sleeves of his coat, Jacob handed him a heavy, cream-colored fisherman sweater that still smelled faintly of sheep.

“Put this on first,” he ordered.

“Aw, Uncle Jacob, I’m all right,” Adam insisted.  “I’ve got two layers on already.” 

“Adam!” Jacob snapped in a deep growl that sounded so startlingly like his father’s that Adam accepted the sweater without another word and pulled it on overtop his shirt.  He supposed he was lucky to be allowed out in the snow at all after his escapade two days before.

Once he had put on both Jacob’s sweater and his own coat, Adam’s arms were so thickly ensconced in wool that he could not bend his elbows all the way.  Josie was in a similar state.  Hannah had bundled her up sufficiently for an arctic expedition, and the little girl was waddling around the foyer with her arms forced several inches outward from her sides by all the layers.

“Come on, Adam!” she demanded, her voice muffled by the thick scarf.  She stamped one booted foot on the floor for emphasis.

Adam grinned, pulled on his gloves, and grabbed his hat.  He reached for the weighty, wooden toboggan the butler had brought up from the basement the night before and leaned next to the front door.

“One moment, Adam,” Hannah’s voice rang out. 

Curious, Adam turned around, and Hannah caught him up in a thick scarf.  She wrapped it securely around his neck, tucking the ends into the collar of his coat.  The wool itched horribly, but again, Adam counted himself lucky for going outside at all and swallowed his protests.  And secretly, he enjoyed this little touch of motherly affection. 

Hannah smiled and patted his cheek.  “Have fun,” she said, then dropped her voice nearly to a whisper.  “If it looks like Josie is getting too cold, bring her home, no matter how much she complains.”  She smiled again, and Adam knew she was asking him to take care of himself, too.

“I will,” he promised.  “All right, Josie, let’s go!”

Josie cheered as Adam slung the toboggan’s steering rope over his shoulder and extended his free hand to her.  She held his hand as best she could through her thick mittens and his leather gloves, and together, the cousins stepped outside onto the porch. 

The air outside was frosty, but the sun shone brightly, and Adam and Josie squinted in the blinding glare reflecting off the knee-deep snow.  After warning Josie to watch for icy patches, Adam led her down the front steps onto the sidewalk.  Adam reflected that as much as he wished his family had not left the waterfront, living in Boston’s wealthiest neighborhood had its advantages: city workers had cleared the sidewalks, so he and Josie did not have to blaze a trail over to Boston Common.

It was only half a mile to the Common, and Adam and Josie walked briskly, despite Adam’s being weighed down by the toboggan.  Josie skipped along merrily, her hand still clasping Adam’s, as she wondered aloud if the Frog Pond on the Common was frozen over solid enough for ice skating.

“One activity at a time, kid,” Adam replied with a grin.  Josie’s enthusiasm for life reminded him of Little Joe, and the similarity eased the mild homesickness he had been feeling as he faced another Christmas far away from his father and brothers. 

Flagstaff Hill was already a hive of activity by the time they arrived.  Dozens of children – and a number of adults, too – zipped down the snow-covered slope, screaming and laughing as they went.  Someone had helpfully placed a few haystacks at the bottom of the massive hill to prevent runaway toboggans, and more than one child had bits of hay sticking to his or her clothes and hair, prickly testaments to their bravery.

Adam paused at the bottom of the hill and looked up.  It was massive, the highest point on the Common, and much, much higher than the hill behind the Cartwright house in Nevada that he, Hoss, and Little Joe tobogganed down in the winter.  He thought about how much energy it would take just to keep walking back up the darn thing, and he wished he had eaten more breakfast.  But his ruminations were cut short by Josie tugging on his hand, urging him to hurry up.

When they finally reached the top of the hill, panting and rubbery-legged, they saw John and his three siblings waiting for them next to the giant flagpole for which the hill had been named.  Raised in 1837, it was thirty-seven feet tall and rumored to have been crafted from a single tree.  John spotted Adam and Josie approaching and raised a hand in greeting as the cousins picked their way across the packed snow to their friends. 

After shaking Adam’s hand, John introduced Adam and Josie to his younger siblings, Henry, Arthur, and Mary.  Josie giggled as Henry and Arthur tried to outdo each other in giving her the grandest bow, and little Mary just smiled, her chubby, four-year-old cheeks dimpling adorably. 

“Well, no sense wasting time,” John said, once the introductions were concluded.  “Too cold to be out here very long.  Shall we commence?”

Adam and Josie grinned, and Adam, John, and Henry dropped their toboggans onto the snow.  Josie hopped eagerly onto the front of the Cartwrights’ sled and grabbed the steering rope with both hands, her wild grin hidden behind the folds of her blue scarf. 

“Let’s go!” she called impatiently as Adam settled himself on the toboggan behind her.  He briefly assessed his situation and concluded that he was not comfortable leaving his nine-year-old cousin in control of what little steering their vehicle possessed.

“Why don’t you let me get that,” Adam said, reaching his arms around Josie and prying the steering rope from her fingers.  “You hold onto the front of the sled.”  Josie obediently grabbed hold of the front loop of the toboggan that curved up and over her feet.

Next to them, John had situated Mary in a similar position in front of him, while Henry and Arthur leapt expertly aboard the Adams’ second sled. 

John glanced over at Adam.  “Last one to the bottom buys lunch on the first day of next term!” he declared with a roguish grin.

“You’re on,” Adam replied.  “On three.  One… two… THREE!”

Adam, John, and Henry all kicked off hard, sending up jets of snow as they dug their feet in for the push start.  The two girls screamed with delight as the three toboggans rocketed down the hill.  Even through her heavy wool cap, Josie could hear the wind whistling past her ears, and she instinctively ducked low over the front of the toboggan to cut down on wind resistance as they shot down the hill.  Being the lightest, Henry and Arthur took an early lead, but Adam and Josie, having the greatest collective weight, soon drew even with them and began inching ahead.  Adam glanced over his shoulder and saw that John and Mary were several yards behind them, and he grinned.

“We’re winning, Josie!” he called over the rushing wind.

Josie cheered and gripped the front of the toboggan a bit harder as they continued to pick up speed.  Even Adam held on more tightly as they zipped downhill.  He had never managed this kind of speed on a sled before, and he was not entirely certain whether he should be exhilarated or alarmed.

He chose exhilaration.

The icy air stung his face and whipped into his eyes, making them water, but Adam hunkered a little lower as the rush of adrenaline went to his head, and he let out a loud whoop as they raced toward the bottom of the hill.

“Look out below!” Josie hollered as the haystacks at the bottom of the hill grew ever larger in their field of vision.

Children scattered like frightened chickens as the Cartwrights’ toboggan hurtled toward them.  Just before they hit the haystacks, Adam stuck out his right foot and dug it hard into the snow.  The toboggan banked sharply to the left, losing its momentum and jerking to a stop.  Adam wrapped one arm around Josie’s shoulders and collarbone to keep her from being thrown off.  The little girl was quaking with laughter, and she reached up and hugged Adam’s arm to her.  Her laughter was infectious, and by the time John and Mary slid to a dignified stop next to them only seconds later, Adam was overcome with mirth, too.

John shook his head in good-natured defeat as he saw that Henry and Arthur had also beaten him, and he and Mary had come in dead last.  “What do you say to best two out of three?” he asked Adam.

“No way!” Adam replied, still laughing.  “You owe me lunch.”  He stood, offered John his hand, and pulled the boy to his feet.  The young man slapped Adam on the back.

“All right, Cartwright,” he conceded.  “That was the bargain, and I will honor it.  But don’t for a moment think that you can choose the most expensive restaurant in town.”

Adam grinned and turned to help Josie up, only to discover that she had already sprung to her feet and was congratulating Henry and Arthur on a good race.  She raced back over to Adam and tugged at his elbow.

“Again, Adam!” she demanded.  “Let’s go again!”

Adam chuckled as he, John, and Henry heaved the toboggans to their shoulders and began trudging up the hill.  Mary, Josie, and Arthur ran ahead, squealing with hyper laughter as they threw snowballs at one another.

“Must be nice to have someone to haul your sled for you,” John grunted as he shifted uncomfortably under the heavy craft on his shoulders.

“You know what they need here,” Adam panted under his own burden, “is a lift system.  Wouldn’t be hard.  Attach a couple pulleys to that flagpole at the top and to one of the trees at the bottom.  Run a line between them.  Have a mule or a couple kids turning a wheel at the top to power it.  You could just hook your sled to the line and meet it at the top.”

John stared at Adam in amazement.  “You really have this all thought out, don’t you, Cartwright?”

Adam shrugged his shoulders as best he could under the toboggan.  “It’s quite simple, really.  What would be even better would be to use a steam engine for power.”  He chortled at the image.  “You’d make it to the top in no time!”

John shook his head.  He enjoyed studying law at Harvard, but he was always fascinated to see scientific minds at work – and Adam had a good one.  John knew that when Adam had first arrived at Harvard two years earlier there had been talk among the students that the young man from the Utah Territory had been accepted only because he was the grandson of a prominent Boston businessman, and many had expected Adam would not last one term.  But within his first few weeks, Adam had proved that he belonged at the prestigious university and had other students coming to him for tutoring.  His classmates and professors alike were both surprised and disappointed that he intended to return to the territory after graduation next spring – a talented young man such as Adam Cartwright would have no trouble finding profitable and worthwhile work in any of the major cities in the East.

“I will have to suggest it for next year,” John said, smiling.

When Adam, John, and Henry finally reached the top of the hill, sweating despite the cold, the three youngest children were dancing with anticipation.  The little group spent the rest of the morning careering down Flagstaff Hill in various combinations.  On one trek, all four children decided to cram onto a single toboggan, leaving Adam and John each with a sled all to themselves.  Another impromptu race broke out with the stakes this time being that the loser had to carry the winner’s books for the entire first week of the spring term.  It looked like fortune would favor Adam once more, but in the home stretch of the race, he hit an unexpected bump in the hard-packed snow that jolted him from his toboggan, flung him through the air, and deposited him head-first into one of the haystacks.  Josie was so impressed by Adam’s attempt at human flight that she forgot to be frightened for her beloved cousin’s safety and laughed hysterically as John grabbed Adam’s feet and pulled him out of the hay.  She and the Adams children declared themselves jury and ruled that while Adam had, technically, reached the bottom of the hill ahead of John, he was disqualified for arriving without his sled, and John, therefore, was the victor.

“Well, at least I still get lunch out of you,” Adam said as he congratulated John on his win.

“True,” John agreed, “but you having to carry my books around campus is a much more public admission of failure than my having to buy you lunch, especially since you are a senior, and I still a lowly freshman.”  He smiled smugly at Adam, who, quick as a flash, dropped to the ground, scooped up a few inches of snow, and flung it at him.  The little clump of snow hit John squarely in the face with a hissing “piff” sound, and within seconds, all five of them were battling it out in a massive snowball fight that quickly absorbed dozens of the other children on the hill.

Anyone passing by Boston Common just then would have thought a there was a raging blizzard localized on Flagstaff Hill.  The air was thick with swirling snow, bits of hay, and the shouts of happy voices.  By the time the melee subsided fifteen minutes later, Josie, Adam, and their friends were covered in snow from head to toe.  Adam knew it would not take long for the heavy, wet snow to soak through their top layers, and given that it was nearly lunchtime, he turned to Josie and told her it was time to head home.  She stuck out her lower lip, trying to coax him into one more run down the hill, but Adam could see her beginning to shiver and stood firm.

“We’ll come back before the holidays are over,” he promised.

Placated, Josie bid farewell to her new friends and promised to let Henry, Arthur, and Mary know the next time she was in Boston.  Adam and John shook hands warmly and wished each other Merry Christmas before they each rounded up their respective siblings – a much easier job for Adam than for John – and headed home.

Worn out from their exciting morning, Adam and Josie walked a bit more slowly on the way home than they had on the way to the Common, but their conversation was every bit as bright as it had been earlier.  The butler spotted them making their way down the street toward the house and opened the door for them when they reached the top of the porch steps, and Adam and Josie burst into the house, still talking and laughing and stamping snow from their shoes.  Adam had been right about his brogues; they hadn’t done much to keep out the cold and damp, and his feet felt like two blocks of ice.

Hannah and Jacob joined them in the foyer as Adam and Josie peeled off their layers and related the tale of their adventure.

“You should have seen it, Mama!” Josie exclaimed as Hannah helped her out of her coat.  “Adam FLEW!”

Adam laughed as he handed Jacob back his sweater – he would not admit as much, but he was grateful his uncle had made him wear it.  “Yeah, I sure did,” Adam admitted.  “It would have been really fun, too, if I hadn’t been so worried about the landing.”  He scratched at an itchy spot on the back of his head and extracted a piece of hay from his hair.  Hannah and Jacob laughed, and Jacob draped his arm around Adam’s shoulders.

“Come on, son,” he said.  “Lunch is on the table.  Mrs. Wilson prepared some nice hot soup for the two of you.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Adam said gratefully.

Josie and Adam were ravenous after their hard play that morning, and Hannah’s eyes widened when even little Josie asked for a third helping of chicken soup.  She was pleased, however, to see that her daughter, and especially her nephew, had had such a thrilling morning.  Adam had given up so much of his childhood to help his father raise his younger brothers, and Hannah worried that he took himself – and life in general – too seriously sometimes.  Josie was good for Adam, Hannah reflected.  He could enjoy her without having to parent her.

After lunch, Adam retired to the coziness of the sitting room.  Though its furniture was more stylish than functional, the sitting room boasted the largest fireplace in the house, and when the fire was roaring, as it was this afternoon, it was the snuggest room in the house.  Adam rushed to reach the sitting room before the rest of the family so he could snag one of the two armchairs rather than being relegated to the back-breaking settee again.  He settled comfortably in a squashy armchair next to the fire and propped his feet up on an ottoman, sighing contentedly as his half-frozen toes soaked up the warmth from the fire.  He had just cracked open the copy of Frankenstein that Josie had lent him while he was stuck in bed when the child flitted into the sitting room and crawled into his lap.

“You’re getting a bit big for this, you know,” he said gently, even as he wrapped his arms around her.  After their cold morning, it felt good to have Josie’s toasty little body snuggled up against him. 

Josie said nothing, just curled up in a little ball in Adam’s lap and nuzzled her head into his chest.  Adam reached behind him and pulled a blue-and-white quilt off the back of the chair and draped it over the pair of them.  He thought Josie might fall asleep, but then she handed him a slim book he had not noticed she held.  It was Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Adam smiled.  Two years ago, he and Josie had begun a tradition of reading the story together at Christmastime, and it looked like Josie could not wait any longer for this year’s reading.

“It’s only December fifteenth, Josie,” Adam pointed out.  “If we start this today, we’ll finish it well before Christmas Eve.”

“Read slowly,” Josie mumbled into the quilt.

“Your wish is my command,” Adam replied obediently.  As the butler silently slipped into the room and set two mugs of hot chocolate down on the small table next to Adam’s chair, Adam opened the book to Stave One and began:  “Marley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that…”

******

The next two days were so bitterly cold that none of the family ventured outside.  Josie and Adam spent most of their time playing checkers, writing out Christmas greetings to send to friends, or snuggling under the quilt in the sitting room as Adam finished reading A Christmas Carol aloud.  When the temperature warmed a bit midweek, however, Adam took Josie on the long-promised tour of Boston’s historical sites.  They skipped Bunker Hill – both of them were still tired of climbing hills after their sledding adventure – and instead went straight to Boston Harbor, where Adam gave Josie a rousing recounting of the Boston Tea Party.

“Why did the colonists ruin all that tea?” Josie asked as they stared out across the shimmering harbor.  “Seems wasteful, if you ask me.”

“They were upset that the British were taxing the tea,” Adam explained.   “The colonists didn’t have any representation in the British government, so they felt they were being taxed unfairly.”

Josie processed this for a few moments as a cold, salty breeze swept across them, and she stepped a bit closer to Adam for warmth.  “That’s why all the states have representatives in Congress, now, isn’t it?” she asked.

Adam grinned proudly.  “That’s right,” he confirmed.  “Very good.”

Josie waved a hand dismissively at this comment.  “You learn these things when you live in Washington,” she said airily.  She shivered a little, and Adam drew her close to his side.

“Come on,” he said.  “I saw a café just down the street.  Let’s warm up a bit, and then I’ll take you over to the Old North Church and tell you all about Paul Revere.”  He wrapped an arm protectively around Josie’s shoulders and led her to the café at the end of the block.

Josie was quiet most of the way to the café, but just before they reached the door, she blurted out, “Adam we should have a tea party!”  She gazed up at him with shining, adoring eyes.

Adam tried not to grimace in disgust.  He had done well fitting into New England culture except for its delight in tea.  Adam thought it a bitter, nasty beverage that only a ten-pound bag of sugar could make nearly tolerable.  “Aw, Josie,” he began, “I’ll play dolls with you, but I am not drinking tea.  A man has to draw a line somewhere.”

Josie giggled.  “Not a doll tea party, silly!” she exclaimed.  “A Boston Tea Party!  Like the colonists!”

Adam laughed at his mistake.  “You want to dress up like an Indian and throw tea into Boston Harbor in the dead of night?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“Now there’s an idea I can get behind.  Best use for tea I’ve ever heard of.”  Chuckling, Adam opened the door to the café and offered Josie his arm.  She threaded her arm through his and let him lead her to a small table next to the large front window where they could watch the locals bustling past, many with brown-paper-wrapped packages tucked under their arms as they hurried home, grinning with excitement over the Christmas surprises they bore.

The cousins settled into their seats, Adam very gallantly assisting Josie with her chair, and Adam ordered coffee for himself, hot chocolate for Josie, and a slice of pumpkin pie for each of them.  They chatted happily as they ate their pie and sipped their beverages, grateful just to be together in a warm place as Christmas approached.  Adam beamed proudly when Josie told him how she had earned the highest mathematics marks in her class that term, and Josie doubled over with laughter when Adam recounted how he and a few classmates had snuck into their biology professor’s classroom after hours to put clothes on the skeleton that hung there.

“Poor Professor Cavanaugh,” Adam chuckled.   “He was halfway through his lecture on the circulatory system the next day before he realized the skeleton was wearing a bowtie and top hat.”

Josie’s joyful giggling caught the attention of a few other diners, who glanced over and smiled at the pair they assumed were siblings.  One lady, however, kept staring long after the other patrons had turned back to their own conversations.  Josie’s skin crawled as she felt the woman’s eyes boring into her from across the café, and she kicked Adam lightly under the table.

“Hey!” Adam protested.  “What was that for?”

Josie hissed at him to lower his voice and jerked her head in the woman’s direction.  “That lady,” Josie whispered.  “She’s staring at us.”

“Really?!” Adam chirped hopefully as he straightened up in his chair and ran a hand through his hair.  He glanced briefly in the direction Josie had indicated and was disappointed when he spotted the woman in question.  He had hoped she would be a comely young lady who was captivated by his devastating good looks.  Instead, he saw a dignified-looking woman who was about twenty years too old for him.  With still-brilliant blond hair and piercing brown eyes, she certainly was not unpleasant to behold, but Adam estimated she was in her late thirties or early forties.  She sat across from another woman her own age, who seemed not to notice her friend’s interest in the brother and sister across the café.  Adam slouched back in his seat, a bit let down and wondering what the woman found so interesting about him and Josie.

Adam and Josie returned to their pie, beverages, and conversation, but five minutes later, Adam cut his eyes to the side and saw the woman was gawking at them again.

“She’s still doing it, Adam,” Josie whined.

“Yeah, I see that,” he replied.  Adam was growing uncomfortable now and cast about for their waiter.  He thought it best for them just to satisfy their bill and leave.  He was not concerned for their physical safety – distasteful as he found the idea, Adam knew he could easily overpower two middle-aged ladies if need be – but he did not want to make a scene.  As it was, the two ladies were clearly having a hushed argument, and Adam had a strong hunch their disagreement had something to do with him and Josie.

Before Adam could signal their waiter, however, the blond woman rose from her seat and crossed the café to Josie and Adam’s table.  Josie scooted her chair around next to Adam’s so she sat between the table and the window.  Her hand groped under the table until it found his, and she grabbed it fast.  Adam gave Josie’s hand a reassuring squeeze and then let it go as he rose to his feet to greet the lady.  During his two and a half years in Massachusetts, Adam had become skilled at quickly determining a person’s social status, and one glance at the woman’s stylish burgundy gown and matching hat told him she was upper middle class – not quite as high in status as the Stoddard family had risen but certainly comfortable.

“May I help you, ma’am?” asked Adam with a friendly smile.

The woman smiled awkwardly at both Adam and Josie, and her cheeks pinked ever so slightly.  “I apologize for interrupting,” she began, her eyes darting back and forth between Adam and Josie.  “I noticed you and your sister from my table.”  She waved a hand vaguely in the direction of her own table, where her friend was trying to look like she was not eavesdropping.  “I did not intend to stare,” she continued.  “It is just that the two of you – especially your little sister here – look so much like a dear old friend of mine that I was actually a bit spooked.”  She laughed at her own foolishness, but the sound was forced, as if her intuition was telling her she was not being silly.

Adam’s pie unexpectedly whirled in his stomach, but he kept the friendly smile plastered across his face.  “That’s quite all right, ma’am,” he replied.  “Josephine and I come from two old Boston families.  I expect we have doppelgangers all over the city.  Merry Christmas!”

The lady wished them a very happy Christmas and began walking back to her own table.

“Ma’am?” Josie called out, surprising herself.  She had not intended to speak up; the word simply flew out of her mouth all of its own volition, her own intuition running high.

The lady turned back to them.

“What is your friend’s name?” Josie asked.

The blond woman smiled sadly at Josie.  “Oh, you would not know her,” she said softly.  “She died, oh goodness, nearly twenty years ago.  We were children together.”  She again turned to go back to her table.

Adam’s stomach stopped whirling and clenched hard, his body understanding before his brain did.  As with Josie, the words flew out of his mouth of their own accord.

“Please, ma’am!” he exclaimed, surprised by the urgency in his own voice.  “What was her name?”

When the lady turned toward them again, Josie and Adam could see realization washing over her face.  The rosiness drained from her cheeks, and she stared open-mouthed at Adam as if he were a ghost.

“Elizabeth,” she whispered.  “Elizabeth Stoddard.  But she was married about a year before she died.  A man named –“

“Benjamin Cartwright,” Adam blurted, cringing over his interruption even before the name was fully out of his mouth.

The lady’s eyes grew so wide that Josie imagined they might pop out of her head.  “Yes,” the woman breathed.

Adam swallowed hard and extended his hand.  “My name is Adam, ma’am.  Adam Cartwright.  Elizabeth Stoddard was my mother.”

“That is not possible,” the woman said, not noticing Adam’s extended hand; her startled eyes were still locked on his face.  “Benjamin took the baby west after Elizabeth died.” 

“Yes, ma’am, he did,” Adam confirmed.  “We have a ranch in the Utah Territory.  But I came back a couple years ago for college.”

“Adam is studying at Harvard,” Josie boasted, lifting her chin high.  “He likes to dress up the biology professor’s skeleton.”

Adam reddened, but the lady burst out laughing as she finally grasped Adam’s hand and shook it vigorously.  “You must be Elizabeth’s son!” she exclaimed delightedly.  “Goodness, that is exactly something she would have done!”  She gazed nostalgically at Adam for a few moments until she could collect herself.  “I am so sorry, I have not introduced myself.  I am Sarah Bradlee, though your mother knew me as Sarah Lyman.  She and I lived just down the street from each other when we were children.  She was my dearest friend.”  Half a dozen tears slid silently down Sarah’s face as she uttered this last sentence.

A frisson of excitement shot down Adam’s spine.  He was always hungry for more information about his mother.  He had asked both his aunts about her, but Rachel was rather tight-lipped on the subject, and Hannah almost always ended her stories about Elizabeth by bursting into tears, which left Adam wracked with guilt.

“Really?” he asked eagerly.  “Did you go to school with her?”

“Yes,” replied Sarah with an edge of laughter in her voice.  “Oh, the stories I could tell you!”  Her tears vanished and were replaced by a radiant smile.

“Well, please, join us,” Adam insisted, gesturing to his empty chair.  He caught Josie glaring at him and added, “Oh!  Where are my manners?  This is my cousin Josephine.  She’s the daughter of my mother’s sister Hannah and also my father’s brother.  That’s why we look so much alike,” he finished lamely.

Sarah laughed.  “Yes, I heard that Hannah had married another Cartwright, though I never had the pleasure of meeting him.  It is wonderful to make your acquaintance, Josephine.”  Sarah stretched her hand out to Josie, who shook it formally.

“Likewise,” the little girl chirped.

Adam was still pointing to his vacated seat, but Sarah looked at him apologetically and shook her head.  “I am afraid I cannot stay,” she said.  Adam glanced over her shoulder and saw Sarah’s friend rising from the table across the café.  “But I would certainly love to sit down with you and have a nice, long chat,” she added.  She dug into her pocketbook and withdrew a navy blue calling card, which she handed to Adam.  “This is my husband David’s card,” she explained.  “It has our address on it.  We would be honored if you – and Miss Josephine, of course – could join us for lunch on Saturday.  Shall we say noon?”

Adam glanced at the card and saw an address downtown – a respectable area for middle-class businessmen.  He would have to ask Rachel for directions, but he was confident he could find it without too much difficulty.

“That sounds wonderful, Mrs. Bradlee,” he replied, eyes shining.  “Thank you very much.”

Sarah smiled at him.  “Until Saturday then.”  She shook Adam’s and Josie’s hands one last time and swept out of the café with her friend.

Adam stared after her, still stunned by this chance meeting.  Josie snapped him out of his reverie.

“How about that, Adam?!” she declared.  “And to think, all we came in for was pie!”  Josie was thrilled on Adam’s behalf.  She had seen him with her own mother: the way he let Hannah pile extra helpings of mashed potatoes on his dinner plate, how he never pushed Hannah’s hand away when she caressed his cheek, though he would rebuff anyone else who tried to pet him, and, most recently, how he had smiled while Hannah tucked that scarf around his neck before he and Josie went tobogganing.  Josie was happy to share Hannah with him, but she knew Adam longed to know more about his own mother, and now they had found someone who not only had known her quite well but was also eager to talk about her.

“Yeah,” Adam muttered, still staring at the now-empty doorway that Sarah Bradlee had swept through.  “How about that.”

******

            Over dinner that evening, Josie entertained everyone with a stirring account of Paul Revere’s ride.  Jacob had asked her which historical site she had enjoyed the most, and Josie was only too happy to tell him all about the Old North Church, where the two lanterns had hung to alert the colonists that the British were arriving by sea, though Adam had to chime in now and again to correct a few of Josie’s historical “facts.”

            “But you know what the best part of the whole day was, Papa?” she asked.  When Jacob simply raised an interested eyebrow, Josie continued, “Before we went to the church, Adam bought me hot chocolate and pie in a café by the harbor, and we met a lady who knew Aunt Elizabeth when she was a little girl!”

            Hannah’s head snapped up.  “Who?” she barked, then softened her voice.  “And how did the conversation turn that direction?”

            “A Mrs. Sarah Bradlee,” Adam answered.  “Though she said her maiden name was Lyman.”

            Hannah’s eyes immediately lit with recognition.  “Of course!” she exclaimed.  “Sarah Lyman!  A blond girl.  She was over at our house nearly every day.  She was Elizabeth’s best friend.”

            “She’s invited Josie and me for lunch on Saturday,” Adam said.  He spent the next several minutes recapping their chance encounter with Sarah Bradlee.  Hannah kept shaking her head in disbelief, and even Rachel, usually so composed, looked amazed.

“Where does she live?” Rachel asked casually as she daintily buttered a dinner roll.

“Downtown,” replied Adam.  “I was hoping you could give me directions.”  He pulled David Bradlee’s calling card from his pocket and handed it to his aunt.

Rachel studied the card for a moment.  “Ah, yes,” she said, her eyes lighting with recognition.  “I will write down directions for you after supper.  It should be easy to find.  A lovely neighborhood, though not quite as nice as our own Beacon Hill, of course!”

“No, of course not,” Jacob mumbled under his breath.

Adam and Josie smirked at each other.  They had heard Jacob’s snide comment, though fortunately, Rachel had not.  Adam winked at Josie, and they both looked back down at their roast pork and dumplings and did not look back up until they had finished their supper, both of them knowing further eye contact would make them break out laughing.

******

            The next two days passed quietly, and soon it was Friday, December 21, only four days until Christmas and the day before Adam and Josie were to have lunch with the Bradlees.  Adam received a parcel from his father that afternoon and initially placed it under the enormous Christmas tree the butler had set up in the sitting room, but Josie insisted he open it early.  That evening after supper, with Josie hopping from foot to foot in anticipation behind him, Adam sat on the floor next to the fire and ripped the brown paper off the box.  The butler retrieved a hammer so Adam could pry the nails out of the small wooden box’s lid and withdraw four envelopes and a pair of thick, black-leather gloves.  Adam’s face lit up as he tried on the gloves.

            “Wonderful!” he exclaimed.  “I’ve been needing a new pair.” 

            Jacob swiped the glove off his nephew’s left hand and admired the craftsmanship.  “You could mold some real nice snowballs with these,” he quipped, handing the glove back to Adam.

            “What is in the envelopes?” Josie squealed, hoping for something more exciting than a pair of gloves, though she hoped Adam would put those to use helping her build a snowman.

            Adam picked up the envelopes from where he had placed them on the floor next to him and read the front labels.  “Here, Uncle Jacob,” he said, handing the top one to the physician.  “This one’s for you from Pa.”

            Jacob grinned as he took the envelope from Adam.  He and Ben had kept in touch over the years, but an additional benefit to having kept his eye on Adam over the past couple years had been more frequent correspondence from his older brother.  Jacob hoped it would continue even after Adam returned west.

            Adam studied the other three envelopes, deciding which to open first.  He could tell who each one was from just by the penmanship on the outside: the fine, flowing script was Ben, the painstakingly crafted letters carved deeply into the paper by a too-heavy hand was from Hoss, and the chicken scratch was definitely seven-year-old Little Joe.  He began with his father’s letter, skimming it quickly.  It was full of typical Ponderosa news: the weather was turning cold, they had had to patch up the old barn again and were planning to build a new one come spring, and they were all looking forward to coming to Massachusetts for Adam’s graduation in May.  Adam smiled and passed the letter to Hannah while he opened the one from Hoss.  Hoss’s envelope was plump enough to be used as a pillow; the boy had crammed so many sheets of paper into it that they nearly burst forth like a geyser when Adam broke the seal.  Adam riffled through the pages and laughed when he counted ten, each one written in the same heavy, exacting hand. 

            “Bless him, this must have taken hours!” Adam exclaimed, touched that Hoss had gone to so much trouble on his behalf.  He pulled Josie to the floor next to him and put an arm around her shoulders so they could read Hoss’s letter together.  Hoss’s grammar was often unique, but no one could tell a story quite as well as Adam’s gigantic thirteen-year-old brother.  Adam and Josie were soon in stitches over Hoss’s recounting of how much trouble he and Little Joe had gotten into when they had hidden a toad in their teacher’s desk drawer (Hoss swore up and down that it had been all Joe’s idea).

            When they finished Hoss’s letter, Adam and Josie wiped their streaming eyes as Adam reached for the envelope from Little Joe.  This one was much thinner, and Adam extracted only two sheets of paper.  The first held Joe’s short message:

Hey Adam,

Pa said I had to write.  I don’t like writin.  Just come home so I can talk to you like I used to.  I miss you.

Love,

Joe

P.S. I been takin good care of Beauty for you.           

Adam smiled at the letter and turned to the second sheet Joe had included.  On this page was a child’s crudely drawn portrayal of a lumpy, lopsided brown horse and a curly-headed boy Adam assumed was Joe, though the child in the picture was taller than the horse.

            “Oh, isn’t that the most darling thing!” Hannah cooed, snatching the drawing from Adam and admiring it.

            “Yeah, Joe’s pretty cute,” Adam admitted, smiling up at his aunt.  “Good thing, too.  It’s the only thing that’s stopped us from killing him.” 

            Everyone laughed as Adam took the drawing back from Hannah and studied it.  He already knew that he was going to hang it on the inside of his wardrobe door at school so he would see it first thing every day.  He gently refolded it and tucked it safely back in its envelope with Little Joe’s letter.

            “I cannot wait to meet him,” Josie sighed.  “We will have so much fun!”

            “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Adam replied, leaning down to kiss the top of Josie’s head.  Jacob, Hannah, and Josie were planning to accompany Adam back to the Ponderosa after his graduation in May, and Adam was already bracing himself for the hijinks that were certain to ensue when Josie and Little Joe joined forces.

            By that time, the butler had brought in Adam and Josie’s customary mugs of hot chocolate, and the cousins snuggled up in one of the armchairs to read for a bit before bed.  Since they had finished A Christmas Carol a few days before, Adam was now reading aloud to Josie Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth.  It was not as good as A Christmas Carol in his opinion, but Josie was enjoying it, so he carried on.

            “Too bad there are no crickets this time of year,” Josie yawned as Adam finished that evening’s chapter.  “I would set hundreds of them loose in here.  This house could use a little music.”

            Adam stifled a chuckle as Rachel snapped her icy glare on the pair of them.  “You think so?” he asked, his eyes twinkling with suppressed amusement.  When Josie nodded, he said, “Well, how about you go get ready for bed, and I’ll bring my guitar in, and we’ll have a few songs before you go to sleep.”

            Josie beamed adoringly up at Adam for several seconds before springing from his lap and tearing upstairs to change into her nightgown.  Adam gave her ten minutes before he ambled up to his own room and retrieved his guitar.  He headed down the hallway to Josie’s room and paused before knocking on the door.  Listening closely, he could hear her giggling softly to herself, and he wondered what she was plotting now.  “Probably some shenanigans with Little Joe,” he thought to himself with a small chuckle.  He raised his right hand and rapped lightly on the door.  Josie cheerily invited him in, and Adam stepped into the bedroom, where the butler had lit a fire in the small fireplace in the corner.  The flickering flames cast dancing shadows on the walls, and the entire room felt snug and safe.  On the opposite side of the room, Josie sat up in her bed, all wrapped up in a cozy flannel nightgown.  The twinkling firelight glinted off her black hair and pale skin, and Adam thought she looked just like a perfect little porcelain doll – until she started bouncing up and down with excitement.  He laughed and sat himself on the edge of the bed and settled his guitar into playing position.

            “What shall we sing first?” he asked, poking Josie in the belly to make her giggle – Josie’s laugh was Adam’s favorite sound in the entire world.

            “The ships!  The ships!” Josie squealed.

            “Are you the granddaughter of a sea captain, or what?” Adam returned, chucking her under the chin.  Josie giggled again as Adam launched into the carol.

            Down in the sitting room, even Rachel cracked a smile as Adam’s rich baritone wafted down the stairs:

            “I saw three ships come sailing in, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.  I saw three ships come sailing in, on Christmas Day in the morning…”

            The adults heard Josie chime in on the second verse, and Rachel marveled at how seamlessly Josie’s clear treble blended with Adam’s deep voice.  “It’s a wonder the Harvard music department has not recruited him,” she opined.

            “They tried,” Jacob said, not looking up from his newspaper.  “One of the music professors has been giving him singing lessons, but he couldn’t tear him away from architecture.  More’s the pity.  A voice like that should be shared.”

            “Oh, he is sharing it,” Hannah said with a soft smile as Adam and Josie reached the end of “I Saw Three Ships,” and Josie begged “Sing another one, Adam!  Sing another one!”

            Adam obliged with “The Holly and the Ivy,” and then Josie joined him for “Silent Night.”  Adam had taught her the original German lyrics two years ago during their first Christmas together, and Josie delighted in showing off that she still remembered them.

            “All right,” Adam said at the end of the song as he set his guitar carefully on the floor.  “You need to go to sleep.  You don’t want to be groggy at Mrs. Bradlee’s lunch tomorrow.”

            Josie scowled but obediently lay back on her pillows.  Adam leaned down to kiss her forehead, and Josie whimpered, “Just one more song, Adam.  Please?”  He raised an eyebrow at her, and she added, “And then I will go right to sleep.  I promise.”

            Adam sighed.  After thirteen years as an older brother, he should have been more immune to a child’s wounded-puppy look, but he melted in the gaze from Josie’s sad hazel eyes.  “All right,” he conceded.  “One more, but then you really have to go to sleep.”

            Josie’s face split into a wide grin, and she nestled more deeply under her covers.  Rather than picking his guitar back up, Adam stretched out on top of the blankets next to Josie, propping himself up on his left elbow.  He reached out with his right hand and gently stroked her hair as he began to sing.

            “O come, o come, Emmanuel…”

            Josie’s eyelids immediately began to droop, and by the time Adam had reached the end of the first stanza, her breathing had evened out, and she was sound asleep.  Adam cut the song short, brushed a stray lock of raven hair out of Josie’s face, and kissed her forehead.  He swung his legs off the bed and winced as his feet dropped onto a crotchety old floorboard that protested noisily under his weight.  Fortunately, Josie did not wake.  She simply smacked her lips once and rolled over onto her side, facing away from the door.  Adam exhaled slowly, picked up his guitar, and crept out of the room, extinguishing the oil lamp on his way out.

            In the hallway, Hannah, Rachel, and Jacob had all crowded around Josie’s bedroom door to listen to the cousins’ singing, Hannah occasionally dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief.  The loud groan from the floorboard alerted them to Adam’s approach, and they scattered like chickens to avoid being caught eavesdropping.  Rachel scurried into her bedroom at the end of the hall, and Hannah and Jacob dived into their guestroom mere seconds before Adam stepped out into the hallway.  Having no reason to suspect his aunts and uncle were upstairs with him, Adam put his guitar back in his room and then sauntered down the stairs and into the sitting room to say goodnight.  He was surprised to find the sitting room deserted – Jacob’s newspaper lying open across the settee where he had been sitting, and Rachel’s needlework abandoned on the seat of her armchair next to the fire.

            “Huh.  Guess they went to bed already,” Adam said.  Then, addressing the empty room and its dying fire, he turned and wished the Christmas tree goodnight.  Chuckling at his own wit, he headed back upstairs to bed.

******

            The next afternoon, Josie leaned back in her seat at the Bradlees’ dining table and sighed contentedly. 

            “That was wonderful, Mrs. Bradlee,” she said, patting her distended belly.  “Your cook certainly knows how to roast a chicken.”

            “And you certainly know how to eat one,” Adam chimed in, tweaking Josie’s cheek.  He was genuinely impressed by his teensy cousin’s outsized appetite and suspected that Hannah would soon have to procure a new wardrobe for Josie.  Back home on the Ponderosa, accepting third helpings at a meal usually meant that one of the Cartwright boys was about to grow too tall for his britches.

            Sarah Bradlee laughed delightedly at the cousins.  It was clear that they adored each other.  As the Bradlees politely inquired about Josie’s interests throughout the meal, they had been amused that nearly all of her replies had some connection to her cousin.  They had learned that her favorite school subjects were “mathematics and science, just like Adam,” and that her favorite book was “The Children of the New Forest.  Adam gave it to me.”

            “It is wonderful the two of you have had the opportunity to grow so close,” Sarah now said, beaming at her dear friend’s son and niece.

            “Well,” Josie piped up, “my Uncle Ben wrote me a letter before Adam came out here and asked me to take good care of him, so that is just what I have done.”  She nodded her head once for emphasis.

            “I can see that,” Sarah replied, smiling again at the little girl.

            As they ate, Adam had filled Sarah and David Bradlee in on his and his father’s lives since they had left Boston nearly two decades earlier.  A banker, David had been especially interested to hear about the business side of running a ranch as large as the Ponderosa, and Sarah was pleased that Ben Cartwright had done so well, though the mood in the room grew somber as Adam reached the parts in his story in which his family had lost not only Ben’s second wife, but his third as well.  Sarah had glanced at her own two children, fourteen-year-old Thomas and twelve-year-old Abigail, and shuddered at the thought of not being alive to see them grow up.

            “Well, everyone,” David said, pushing back from the table.  “Shall we adjourn to the sitting room?  It will be a much more comfortable place to sit and chat.”

            Sarah caught a pleading look from Abigail and turned to Josie with a warm smile.  “Josie, we may be sitting around and talking for some time,” she began.  “It might get a bit boring for you.  Would you like to go upstairs and play with Abigail?”

            Josie’s face lit up at the prospect of another child’s companionship, but then she remembered the reason she and Adam were visiting the Bradlees, and she turned to Adam uncertainly.

            “It’s all right, Josie,” Adam assured her.  “Go and play.”

            Josie studied him intently.  She was worried that hearing stories about his mother might make Adam sad, and if that happened, she wanted to be there with him. 

A few more agonizing seconds passed before Adam caught on to Josie’s dilemma.  Touched by her concern, Adam took her hand and said softly so no one else could hear, “I’ll be fine.  You go play.”

“You promise to tell me all the stories about Aunt Elizabeth?” Josie asked.

“Every last detail,” Adam promised.

Satisfied, Josie took Abigail’s proffered hand, and the two girls raced upstairs to Abigail’s bedroom.

“She really does keep a close eye on you, doesn’t she?” David observed.

“Like a hawk,” Adam replied with a grin.

The three adults and Thomas retired to the Bradlees’ sitting room.  Though not as spacious and ornate as the Stoddards’, the room was attractively decorated in shades of gold and burgundy and, to Adam’s great relief, furnished with comfortable pieces he could sit upon without causing irreversible damage to his spine.  Adam settled himself on the settee next to Thomas, while David and Sarah took places in armchairs facing them.  A housemaid materialized with a tea tray, which she placed on the coffee table between the settee and armchairs.  Adam valiantly held back his reflexive grimace as Sarah handed him a cup of tea.  He plopped two sugar cubes into it – he wanted at least ten, but any more than two would have been indecorous – and swirled them around with his spoon until they dissolved.  Josie had recently taught him the trick of waiting until the tea cooled and then drinking it in gulps to minimize the amount of time he spent tasting it, so until then, Adam raised the cup to his lips every so often and pretended to take sips without allowing any of the vile beverage to trickle into his mouth.

“You know,” Sarah said with a bit of a laugh as she dropped a sugar cube into her own cup, “your mother despised tea.”

Adam reddened, certain he had given himself away, but none of the Bradlees seemed to have noticed his charade.  His shoulders sagged ever so slightly in relief.

“That’s funny,” he said casually.  “Especially considering she lived in Boston.  Tea is pretty hard to avoid around here.”  The chuckle he produced sounded a bit too forced, so Adam cleared his throat and hurried to move the conversation away from tea.  “I am really curious to know what she was like as a child,” he said.  “Pa knew her only as a young woman, and Aunt Rachel and Aunt Hannah still have a hard time talking about her, even after all these years.”

“I expect they do,” Sarah replied, sipping at her tea.  “I have never seen sisters as close as your mother and aunts.  I am sure that when Elizabeth died it left an irreparable hole in each of their hearts.”  Sarah noticed Adam cast his eyes downward at the mention of his mother’s death, and she quickly added, “Adam, I hope you do not blame yourself.”

Adam glanced back up and met her gaze.  “No, ma’am,” he replied.  “I did once, but even Aunt Rachel said my mother’s death wasn’t my fault, and, well, if Aunt Rachel says that…” he trailed off.  Most days what he was saying was true, and today was one of those days. 

To his surprise, Sarah burst out laughing.  “I see Rachel has not changed one bit!” she exclaimed.  “She means well, but she does not shy away from laying blame.”  Now Sarah decided to divert the topic of conversation; she knew the young man sitting opposite her was not here to discuss Rachel Stoddard.  “Anyway,” she said, “your mother as a child.  Where do I even begin?  She and I were only six years old when we met at school.  I remember being immediately drawn to her, as most people were.  Even as a small girl she radiated warmth and charm, but she was never coquettish.  Very genuine and compassionate, but also a bit mischievous, and she unequivocally disliked being underestimated.”

Adam raised a curious eyebrow.  “Oh?” he asked.  “How do you mean?”

Sarah stared intently at her husband for a moment, as if the lines on his forehead would tell her how to illustrate her point.  “Well,” she said at last, “for example, we must have been about twelve or thirteen years old at the time – I know it was not long after her mother died – and Elizabeth had gotten into an argument with our schoolmaster regarding the Missouri Compromise, of all things.  I expect you are familiar with the Missouri Compromise?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Adam confirmed.  Adam knew very well how the Missouri Compromise had helped the nation avert civil war nearly thirty years ago by setting the southern border of Missouri as the line between slaves states and free in the vast region acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  States entering the union north of that line would become free states, and states entering south of it would allow slavery.

“Well,” Sarah continued, “your mother insisted the compromise would not end the debate over slavery, but our schoolmaster was adamant that it would.”  Sarah dropped her voice an octave to mimic the old teacher.  “’Young lady,’ he said, ‘the federal government knows a good deal more about the issue than you do.  You should leave the thinking to the good men of the Congress.’  By that point, Elizabeth was annoyed, and she muttered something about how if the ‘good men of the Congress’ were really all that bright, we never would have needed the compromise in the first place.  Our schoolmaster was a cantankerous old codger, and if there was one thing he hated it was a student contradicting him.  Unfortunately, he heard your mother’s comment and sent her home, saying he did not understand why parents sent their girls to school anyway.  In his opinion, it was about as useful to educate a woman as it was to educate a mother hen.”

Adam’s jaw dropped.  He believed that given the proper educational opportunities, women were every bit as capable as men – Josie was shaping up to be proof of that.  Then he nearly laughed when he tried to imagine what Josie’s reaction would have been to the schoolmaster’s remark.  Nothing polite, Adam was sure of that.  “What happened next?” he asked eagerly, leaning forward in his seat, his unwanted tea abandoned on the coffee table.

“She outsmarted him,” Sarah boasted, her chin high.  “She came back to school the next day all sugar and spice with a letter of apology for our teacher.  But as she returned to her seat, I noticed she was carrying a large canvas sack.  I thought it a bit unusual because she never carried anything but a small school satchel like the rest of us.  When she sat down, she reached into the sack and pulled out the biggest, fattest hen you ever saw and sat it right on top of her desk!”

            David and Thomas threw back their heads and laughed, but Adam was dumbfounded.  “Was it- Was it alive?!” he sputtered.

            “Yes!”  Sarah practically shrieked with laughter.  “But that is not even the best part!  Then she pulled a tiny bonnet out of her school satchel, settled it on the hen’s head, and tied a dainty little bow right under its beak!”

            Now Adam broke out in hysterics at the image of a plump hen wearing a bonnet in the middle of a New England schoolhouse.  It was several minutes before he could compose himself enough to ask how Elizabeth managed to keep the hen so calm.

            “I have no idea,” Sarah said, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.  “She refused to reveal her secret, even to me.  My guess is she stuffed that poor bird so full of grain the night before that it could not have moved to save its life.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Adam burst out laughing again, though he suddenly wished he had not promised to tell Josie every detail he learned about his mother.  He did not want her attempting to mimic her aunt.

When he finally caught his breath, Adam asked, “What did the schoolmaster do?”

“Oh, he sent her – and her chicken – right back home again,” Sarah replied.  “But not before thrashing the backs of her hands with the edge of his ruler.”  She grimaced at the memory.  “He broke open every single one of her knuckles.”

White-hot fury boiled up in Adam’s chest at the thought of his mother being abused by her teacher, but as quickly as the anger had appeared, it was replaced by a sense of foolishness.  The incident had occurred nearly thirty years ago – whoever he was, that schoolmaster was most likely long dead.  But then Josie’s and Little Joe’s faces popped into his mind, and he realized it was his protective big-brother instincts cropping up again.  If a teacher ever injured either of them, Adam thought he would probably end up on trial for murder.

Sarah saw the anger cross the young man’s face and smiled at him.  “Don’t worry, Adam,” she said kindly.  “Your grandfather took care of it.  Elizabeth staunchly refused to cry, but I walked her home anyway.  I did not want to spend another minute with that tyrant of a teacher – none of us had ever liked him – and I was worried about what your Aunt Rachel would say when Elizabeth arrived home early two days in a row.”  Adam let out a snort of poorly concealed laughter, eliciting another smile from his mother’s friend.  “As luck would have it,” Sarah continued, “Captain Stoddard was at home.  I could tell he had only just returned home from a voyage – he was still wild-eyed and reeking of saltwater!”  Her eyes grew warm with fondness at the memory.  “I think some of that salt made its way into his veins because the howl he sent up when he saw your mother’s hands nearly tore the roof off of the house.

“Elizabeth, of course, had to tell him the whole story from the disagreement through to the chicken in the bonnet.  I remember half-hiding behind an armchair, worried that he would be angry with her, but Captain Stoddard threw his head back and laughed so hard I thought he might never stop.  When he eventually collected himself, he told Rachel to bandage up Elizabeth’s hands while he went down to the school to have, as he called it, ‘a wee chat’ with our schoolmaster.”

Adam’s eyes were wide with anticipation, and a grin began spreading across his face.  “What did he say to him?” he asked, eager to hear how the story ended.

“I am afraid I was not privy to the minutiae of their conversation,” Sarah admitted.  “I do know the captain was gone all day; he did not come home until just before supper.  But I think he must have also tracked down a few members of the school board because this happened on a Friday, and when Elizabeth and I returned to school Monday morning, we had a new teacher.  We never saw the old schoolmaster again.”

Adam nodded approvingly.  He was not one to bask in another’s misfortune, but he felt being fired was no more than the schoolmaster deserved for hurting his mother.

“The real funny thing is that Elizabeth was right,” David broke in.  Adam started a little; he had been so absorbed in Sarah’s story that he had nearly forgotten the banker was still in the room.  “Or at least she will turn out to be right in the end.  I have been reading reports that California will want to become a state soon, and if you extend that Missouri Compromise line all the way to the Pacific Ocean, it divides California fairly cleanly in half.  Then what do we do?  According to the compromise, the southern half should be a slave state, but the northern should be free.  I doubt the Californians will stand for their state to be divided like that.”

“They won’t,” Adam agreed.  “Congress is going to have to deal with this slavery issue again.”  Despite the gravity of the topic, Adam smiled as a new thought occurred to him.  “Sounds like my mother was a pretty bright little girl.”

“Oh, she was,” Sarah confirmed.  “She was always at the top of our class.”

“A trait, it would seem, she passed on to her son and niece,” David added.

Adam smiled bashfully.  “One does one’s best,” he said modestly.

“It is a shame there were no colleges admitting women then like there are now,” Sarah continued, gazing wistfully into her now empty tea cup.  “Oh, the things Elizabeth could have been!”

“You still miss her very much, don’t you?” Adam asked after a pause.

“Yes, I do,” replied Sarah.  She gazed at Adam, but it was as if she were looking past him rather than at him.  “She was my best friend for fourteen years.  I was a bridesmaid when she married your father.  You never stop missing someone like Elizabeth.  I still visit her grave every year.”

Adam’s eyebrows shot up.  “You mean she’s buried nearby?!” he asked incredulously.

Sarah had to fight back a bark of laughter at the young man’s surprise.  “Well, of course, dear boy!” she replied.  “Elizabeth was Boston born and raised.  Where did you think your father and grandfather buried her?”

Adam’s shoulders slumped as he considered this question.  “To be honest, ma’am, it never occurred to me to think about it at all,” he confessed.  “Living out in Nevada, all our family is buried so far away we don’t have any graves to visit.  Well, except Little Joe’s mother; we buried her down by the lake.  But I never go down there.  It would feel like I was intruding on Pa and Little Joe’s space…”  Adam realized he was rambling and allowed his voice to trail off.  An awkward silence settled over the sitting room, and Adam picked up his now-cold tea cup and swirled the liquid as he debated whether he was brave enough to drink it.

“She is in the Granary Burying Ground,” Sarah said at last in a soft voice.  “It is adjacent to the Park Street Church.  Should you decide to visit – and no one is saying you must – it will be easy to find.  Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock are all buried there, so just about anyone on the street could direct you there.  You will find Elizabeth in the northeast corner next to her mother, and her father now, too, God rest his soul.”

Adam could think of no response to this information, and he sat so still and quietly that Sarah worried she had upset him, so she turned the topic to the family’s Christmas plans.  Adam gradually came back to the conversation and asked Thomas several polite questions about school and what career he intended to pursue in a few years when he graduated.  But even though Adam participated in the conversation – and even drained his tea in two quick gulps – his mind was churning with the idea that his mother was so close by. 

At the end of the afternoon, Adam and Josie bid the Bradlees a very fond farewell.  Sarah made Adam promise he would stop by to see them again before he returned west the following summer, and Josie hugged Abigail warmly and promised to write to her.

It was snowing lightly when Adam and Josie stepped out onto the street, and Adam was grateful for this excuse to hail a cab.  It was less than two miles back to Aunt Rachel’s, but Adam’s head was swimming with everything Sarah Bradlee had poured into it that afternoon, and he was not sure he could get Josie home without getting lost.  Better to give the cab driver their address in Beacon Hill and let him navigate.

Josie’s face lit up at this little treat, and she clambered happily into the cab, snuggling up next to Adam as soon as he settled in next to her.  He automatically wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her tightly to his side.  She nuzzled against his chest and plucked at a piece of lint on the front of his coat.

“So,” Josie began as the cab lurched away from the curb, “tell me everything.”

Adam chuckled.  He should have known better than to hope that Josie would forget to ask what Sarah had told him, and he had promised to tell her, so with a sigh, he launched into the tale of Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boston Chicken Party.  Josie screamed with laughter when Adam reached the part where Elizabeth tied the bonnet on the chicken’s head.

“Don’t you dare get any ideas!” Adam warned, even as his shoulders began quaking with laughter all over again.

“Too late!” Josie crowed with a wicked grin.  “It is too bad we do not have any chickens.  Mama buys our eggs from a lady down the street.”

“What a shame,” Adam commiserated, his eyes dancing with amusement.

Their laughter died off, and the cousins settled into a comfortable silence, broken only by the squeaking axles of the cab and the occasional waft of cheerful voices from the street.  Josie sensed that there was something Adam wasn’t telling her, but she also knew that pressing him to divulge it would yield no results.  It was best to let Adam simmer; he would speak up in his own time.

Josie was right.

Adam had rolled up the canvas window of the cab ever so slightly to relieve the musty stuffiness of the cab’s interior, and as he did, he caught a glimpse of a small churchyard on a street corner.  He blew out a puff of air as he flopped back against the seat and put his arm back around Josie’s shoulders.  Josie knew it was time.  She began counting in her head, and just as she expected, as soon as she hit three, Adam spoke up.

“Josie, did you know my mother was buried here in Boston?”

Josie would have smiled at Adam’s predictability had he not chosen such a somber topic.

“Oh, yes,” Josie chirped as if this should have been obvious.  “I remember Mama pointing out her headstone to me when we buried Grandfather a few years ago.  She was born and raised in Boston.  Where else would she be buried?”

Adam rolled his eyes upward and studied the ceiling of the cab.  The cab owner would need to replace the roof before next winter, he thought.  The black leather was a spider-web of cracks, many of which were deep enough that they would soon let in the elements.

“Where else, indeed,” he muttered, annoyed that he had not worked it out for himself ages ago.

“Are you going to visit her?” queried Josie, leaning her head against his chest once more.  Adam reached up and absently stroked her hair with his gloved hand as he pondered this question.  It was a full two minutes before he replied.

“I don’t think so,” he sighed.  “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Adam said, smiling down at Josie, “it isn’t like she’d know I was there, is it?”  He chuckled, trying to make it into a little joke, but Josie frowned.

“She might,” the child whispered into the wool front of Adam’s coat.  She tilted her head back and gazed up at him.  “Ebenezer Scrooge talked to all those spirits in A Christmas Carol.”

“That’s just a story, Josie,” Adam said gently.  Even as he corrected her, Adam smiled at her faith that stories were real.  He remembered the first time he had read The Steadfast Tin Soldier to Little Joe.  Just four years old, the boy had sat up all that night staring at his own collection of tin soldiers, fully expecting them to spring to life at any moment.

“It could still happen,” Josie insisted, lowering her head.  “Mr. Dickens had to get the idea from somewhere.”

“I suppose,” Adam conceded.  He did not feel like arguing with a nine-year-old.  He found the topic emotionally exhausting, and the cab was now rolling up in front of the Stoddard home anyway.  Adam paid the driver and lifted Josie down from the cab, setting her carefully on a patch of sidewalk that was clear of ice.  He then took her by the hand and led her up the front steps and into the warmth of the house.

******

            At supper that evening, Adam recounted his and Josie’s visit to the Bradlees’, and even Rachel erupted in laughter when Adam related the tale of Elizabeth and the chicken. 

            “Oh my goodness, I had forgotten about that!” she exclaimed, wiping her eyes with her napkin. 

            “How could you possibly forget that?!” Hannah nearly shouted between peals of laughter.

            “Don’t you go getting any ideas, young lady,” Jacob said to Josie, his voice full of mock sternness.

            “Don’t worry, Papa,” Josie said sweetly.  “Adam already warned me.  Besides, I don’t need anyone else’s ideas.  I have plenty of my own.”

            The adults around the table exploded in hysterics again, all of them too caught up in their joy to care that the meal on the table was growing cold.

******

            That evening, Rachel excused herself to take a hot bath, and Jacob took Josie upstairs to tuck her into bed, leaving Adam and Hannah sitting quietly together in the sitting room.  Though it was still three days until Christmas, the family had lit the candles on the Christmas tree for the evening, and Adam reclined in his seat and lost himself in their twinkling.   Christmas trees were one of Adam’s favorite parts of the season.  The clean, crisp pine scent reminded him of home, and though he hid it better than Josie did, he was anxious to see what was waiting for him inside some of those brightly wrapped packages under the lowest branches.

            Hannah gazed over her needlework at her nephew and admired the way the candlelight glinted off his hazel eyes.  His mother’s eyes, she thought.  She was grateful to whatever divine Providence had placed Sarah Bradlee in his path.  The adorable dimpled smile he had worn since returning home that afternoon spoke volumes about how good it had been for him to spend time with a friend of his mother’s.  But Hannah also sensed the quiet reflection that lay beneath Adam’s glowing countenance.  She had sensed it often in her sister Elizabeth when the older girl was deep in thought, though she, too, had typically hidden her contemplation under a mask of cheerfulness.  It was not a sadness, but rather the sedate thoughtfulness of a keen mind chewing through some new bit of information that altered a previously held conviction.

            “I am glad you and Josie had a good time this afternoon,” she ventured, trying to draw out her nephew without pressuring him.

            Adam glanced over at her and smiled.  “Me, too,” he agreed, then fell silent.  Like Josie had done earlier that day, Hannah began counting silently in her head, and like he had done earlier that day, Adam spoke up right when Hannah reached three.

            “I didn’t realize my mother was buried so nearby.”  He said this casually as if he were remarking on nothing more noteworthy than the weather.

            “Yes, she is,” Hannah said carefully, casting her gaze back down to her embroidery as her nimble fingers deftly punched the needle in and out of the taut fabric.  “Just on the edge of Boston Common, actually, in the Granary Burying Ground.  I have to admit, I have not been out there since we buried Father three years ago, and that was the first time I had been there since we buried your mother.  I guess I am just not one for visiting graves.”

            This revelation piqued Adam’s curiosity.  Grave-visiting was very common, especially in New England where people tended to live on the same plot of land their families had occupied for a century or more.  It seemed to be the sort of thing that well-bred people did.  Adam had even seen people in Cambridge enjoying cheerful picnic lunches next to the headstones of their ancestors.

            “May I ask why?” he queried.

            Hannah dropped her needlework into her lap and stared at the Christmas tree while she formulated an answer.  “Because the people I love are not truly there,” she said at last.  “It is just the place we left their bodies for the Earth to reclaim.  But their spirits, their souls, if you will, that spark of light that made them who they were is not there, not in that small hole in the ground.  My mother is here,” she laid her hand over her heart, “helping me to raise my child and teaching me to be a good a wife.  My father is in the salty sea breeze that blows in off the harbor.  And my sister, well, Elizabeth is in you.  And Josie.”  She caught Adam’s gaze and gave him a watery smile.  He reached over and squeezed her hand.

            “Well, we do look just like her,” Adam said, returning his aunt’s small smile.

            Hannah held his gaze for a moment before continuing.  “You do,” she agreed.  “This may sound silly, but I have always considered Josie to be a parting gift from Elizabeth.”

            Adam cocked an eyebrow and waited for his aunt to explain.

            “You see,” Hannah said, “Jacob and I fell in love the night he came by the house to offer his condolences to the family for Elizabeth’s death.  Had she not died, Jacob would not have visited, and my life would have turned out very differently.”  She paused, turning her gaze back to the tree.  “And I cannot imagine my life without Jacob and Josie.  You never get over the loss of a sibling; you just learn to live your life around the heartache.  Not a day goes by that I don’t wish Elizabeth were still here with me, but at the same time, if she had to die, I am eternally grateful to her for bringing me Jacob.”

            As if on cue, Jacob entered the sitting room, ambled over to Hannah’s armchair, and kissed his wife on the cheek.

            “Wonderful news, my love,” he announced.  “The future of our family is finally asleep.”

            Hannah smiled.  “Not all of it,” she corrected, nodding toward Adam.   “Though I suppose we could allow this portion to stay up a bit longer.”

            Adam grinned; he hadn’t had a bedtime in years, and the thought of his aunt and uncle sending him to bed amused him.  “Actually, Aunt Hannah,” he said as he stood and stretched, “I’m pretty worn out.  Think I’ll head to bed, too.”

            Jacob shuffled around his wife’s armchair and over to his nephew, his brow etched with concern.  “Are you feeling all right, son?” he asked, reaching out a hand to feel Adam’s forehead.  Adam had seemed to make a full recovery from his chill the previous week, but Jacob worried that perhaps he had let the boy spend too much time outdoors in the cold since then.

            Adam took a small step backward away from his uncle’s outstretched hand and held up his own hands in front of him.  “I’m fine, Uncle Jacob, really,” he insisted.  “I’m only tired.  It was a big day.” 

            Jacob caught and held Adam’s gaze for several seconds, searching for any sign that his nephew was being less than truthful.  Finding none, he smiled and said, “All right, son.  Sleep well.”

            “Thank you, sir,” replied Adam.  “You, too.”  Hannah reached for him, and Adam allowed her to pull him into a hug and kiss his cheek.

            “Goodnight, sweetheart,” she said, softly caressing his cheek where she had just kissed it.  “We will see you in the morning.”

            “Goodnight, Aunt Hannah,” Adam said, leaning ever so slightly into her touch.  “Sleep well.” 

            Hannah smirked triumphantly at Adam’s retreating figure as he strode out of the sitting room and she heard his steps traveling up the stairs.

            “What are you so smug about?” Jacob asked, coming up behind Hannah and threading his arms around her waist.

            Hannah turned her head and glanced back at her husband.  “You need to learn better tricks, Dr. Cartwright,” she teased. 

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean that I was able to discern that Adam is nice and cool.  Not feverish at all.”

            Jacob dropped his face into his wife’s shoulder to muffle his laughter so Adam could not hear him upstairs.  “You tricky little vixen,” he said, turning Hannah to face him and kissing her passionately.

******

            Upstairs, Adam poked his head into Josie’s room to check that she was sleeping soundly before heading into his own room.  Once there, he pulled off his clothes and dropped his nightshirt over his head.  He draped his trousers over the back of the rocking chair for the next morning and climbed into bed.

            Adam had not been lying to Jacob when he said he was tired, but his day with the Bradlees and his conversations with Josie and Hannah had left him more mentally worn out than physically tired.  What he really needed right now was some quiet time alone with a good book.  He had finished reading Frankenstein a few days ago, so Adam grabbed the copy of The Three Musketeers that lay on his night table and got lost in the escapades of d’Artagnan and his friends. 

            After a few chapters, Adam was feeling much more like himself, so he tucked his bookmark into the pages, laid the book back on his night table, and blew out his oil lamp.  He nuzzled into the squashy down pillow and closed his eyes.  Usually the soothing crackling of a warm fire like that which burned in his bedroom’s fireplace would have lulled Adam right to sleep, but tonight he was wide awake.  After tossing and turning for a few minutes, he flopped onto his back, folded his arms behind his head, and watched the shadows from the firelight dance on the ceiling. 

Adam sometimes had to dig deeply into his mind to determine what, precisely, was troubling him, but tonight was not one of those times.  Tonight he knew exactly what was weighing on him: his conversations with Josie and Hannah regarding visiting his mother’s grave.  Now that he knew it was so close by, Adam wondered if he was under some sort of obligation to visit.  He had meant what he had said to Josie: he did not see how visiting would make any difference; his mother would be just as dead as she ever was.  Perhaps if he had known her, like Little Joe had known his mother, he might feel differently.  He knew that Joe liked to go down to his mother’s grave and talk to her sometimes when he was upset, but Joe had had actual face-to-face conversations with his mother while she was still alive.  All Adam had of Elizabeth was a portrait, a little music box that had belonged to her, and a dozen secondhand stories.  Truthfully, when he thought of the mother figures in his life, the first person who came to mind was Hoss’s mother, Inger, who had taken him on as her own son when he was five years old.  And yet, Josie had seemed convinced that some sort of connection with Elizabeth was still possible.  Adam shook his head and laughed quietly to himself at this thought.

“She’s nine years old,” he muttered to the ceiling.  “I’ve been reading her too many stories.”

He heard hushed voices outside his door as Hannah and Jacob made their way softly down the hallway to their own bedroom, and Adam remembered what Hannah had told him about the people she loved not truly being in their graves. 

“She isn’t really there anyway,” he told himself.  “There’s no point in going.”

Satisfied with his decision, Adam rolled over onto his side, closed his eyes again, and drifted right off to sleep.

******

            Josie wanted to go down to Boston Common again the next day, but Jacob nixed this idea on the basis that it was snowing again and no one knew how deep it might get; they already had three feet of snow on the ground as it was.  Josie pouted until Adam offered to put on his new gloves and help her build a snowman.  Josie clapped her hands excitedly and raced upstairs to her bedroom to bundle up.  Since they were going to be just outside the house and could come in any time to warm up, Adam and Josie’s wardrobes were subjected to much less parental scrutiny than they had been for the tobogganing expedition the week before.  Adam was allowed to decline Jacob’s offer of the sweater, and Josie got away with one less pair of wool leggings.  Both cousins were relieved to make it outside still able to bend at the knees and elbows. 

            “Build your snowman in the backyard where the neighbors cannot see it!” Rachel ordered as Josie and Adam slipped out the front door.

            “I’m sorry, Aunt Rachel, we can’t hear you!” Adam called back.  “We’re already outside!”  Josie shrieked with laughter as Adam slammed the front door behind them.

            Adam and Josie spent the next hour building the most carefully designed snowman Boston had ever seen.  They had the base rolled up in no time, but Josie grew impatient with Adam as they worked on the second layer.  He kept stopping to compare the size of the body they were rolling to the base they had already made and making minute modifications here and there to the large mounds of snow.

            When Josie heaved a loud, restless sigh, Adam turned to her.

            “Do you want it done quickly, or do you want it done correctly?” he asked.

            “Quickly!” Josie retorted with an impish grin. 

            Adam playfully stuck his tongue out at her.  “Then you shouldn’t have hired an architect,” he said.

            Josie rolled her eyes.  “It’s not a building, Adam.  No one will be killed if it falls over.”

            Adam jabbed a finger at her.  “You don’t know that for sure,” he pointed out.  “It’s really easy to get stuck in a pile of snow.  Here, I’ll show you.”  He grabbed Josie around the waist and stuck her feet-first into a snowdrift next to the house.  The little girl screamed with laughter as Adam thrust her into the frigid snow.  He let her claw at the snow for a while to try to free herself before grasping her outstretched hands and pulling her loose.  He was rewarded with a snowball to the face.

            “I will admit I deserved that,” he said, spitting out snow.  He saw Josie shiver a bit, and added, “Let’s get this snowman finished so we can go sit next to the fire.”

            Josie grinned and rolled a head for the snowman while Adam finished his precise adjustments to the body.  When their creation was finished, the snowman had a perfectly formed base and body and a lopsided head.  The snowman’s face was a bit high for Josie to reach, so Adam picked her up so she could use a few bits of coal and a carrot to craft eyes, a nose, and a smile.  Josie purposely selected two different-sized pieces of coal for the eyes because she knew the asymmetry would drive Adam crazy.  For a final touch, Josie unwound the old scarf she was wearing and tied it securely around the snowman’s neck.  Their work finished, the cousins stepped back to admire their masterpiece before heading inside to warm up.

            Adam and Josie spent the rest of the day playing checkers and reading their books.  But when bedtime rolled around, rather than getting drowsy, Josie wound up.  She was supposed to be upstairs getting ready for bed, but she suddenly darted into the sitting room where Adam was reading the newspaper.  She dived into his lap, a blur of black hair and white cotton.

            “Save me, Adam!  Save me!” she shrieked, dissolving into hysterical giggles as she buried her face in his shirt.  She had put on her nightgown, but half her hair was still in a braided pigtail while the other half was frizzing out at crazy angles as if she had escaped from Hannah halfway through getting her hair brushed. 

            “Why?” Adam asked suspiciously.  “What did you do?”

            In answer to his question, Hannah came tearing into the sitting room with a hair brush in one hand and a disgruntled expression on her flushed face.  Adam bit back his laughter, scooped Josie up in a little ball as he rose to his feet, and carried her over to Hannah.

            “I think this belongs to you,” he said, smirking, as he handed Josie over to her mother.

            Hannah set Josie on her feet and lightly swatted the child’s behind with the hairbrush.  “Back upstairs, you little scamp!” she ordered, brushing back a lock of dark hair that had come loose from her demure bun and had fallen into her face.  “Honest to goodness, what has gotten into you?!”

            “It’s almost Christmas Eve, Mama!” Josie replied.  “How can you not be excited?!”

            Adam grinned at Josie’s enthusiasm as he wished her goodnight and Hannah marched the little girl back upstairs.  “So much like Little Joe sometimes,” he chuckled as he resettled in the armchair and picked the newspaper back up.

            “Speaking of Christmas Eve, Adam,” Rachel spoke up from the other armchair, “we will attend church services tomorrow, so set your suit out in the morning to be pressed and brushed.”

            “Yes, ma’am,” Adam replied.

******

            Adam was still buttoning his shirt the next morning when the butler rapped on his door to collect his suit.  He invited the man in and waved him toward the wardrobe.

            “Thank you,” Adam said as the butler extracted Adam’s suit from the wardrobe.

            “My pleasure, sir,” the man replied in his dry monotone.

            “Oh, I forgot to ask last night,” Adam said as he pulled on his right shoe.  “Where does Aunt Rachel attend Christmas Eve services?”

            “Miss Stoddard attends Park Street Church,” answered the butler.

            “That sounds familiar,” Adam said, knitting his brow as he tried to remember why the name rang a bell.

            “It is less than a mile away,” the butler suggested.  “You can see its steeple from the sitting room window.  Perhaps you have passed it.  ”

            Adam grinned at him.  “That’s probably it,” he agreed.  “Thank you again for taking care of my suit.”

            The butler bowed to him and glided out of the room.

            As Adam bent to tie his shoe, his stomach fluttered as he suddenly remembered why Park Street Church sounded familiar.

            “She is in the Granary Burying Ground,” Sarah Bradlee had told him two days ago.  “It is adjacent to the Park Street Church.”

            Park Street Church was next to the cemetery where his mother lay.  Adam glanced up and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over his dressing table.

            “No matter,” he told his reflection.  “It makes no difference that I’ll be that close.  Doesn’t change a thing.”  With a decisive nod of his head, Adam rose to head downstairs and join his family for breakfast, stubbornly ignoring the persistent quivering in his stomach.

******

            The family spent most of the day trying to keep Josie from bouncing off of the walls.  She was so certain that there was a new pair of ice skates waiting for her under the Christmas tree that nothing – not even Adam offering to read to her – could calm her down.  Finally, shortly after lunch, Rachel grabbed Adam’s elbow and hissed in his ear, “Would you please take that child outside!”

            Wondering how Josie had become his responsibility but not particularly minding, Adam bundled the dancing child up into her wool leggings, coat, scarf, hat, and mittens.  Fortunately, being Little Joe’s older brother had given Adam plenty of practice with dressing wriggling children, and within ten minutes, he was herding Josie out the front door.  They spent the next thirty minutes constructing a companion for yesterday’s snowman, the five minutes after that arguing about which snowman was better, and the following ten minutes settling their disagreement with a raging snowball fight, which ended abruptly when one of Josie’s snowballs went rogue and knocked the top hat off a gentleman who was passing by on the sidewalk.  Josie and Adam each ducked behind a snowman and held their breath, hoping the gentleman had not seen exactly where that snowball had come from.  Adam knew he should rush over to the man and apologize, but Josie’s holiday excitement was contagious and making him feel mischievous.

            “I say!” the man declared indignantly as he retrieved his fallen hat and brushed the snow from it.

            Adam and Josie bit back laughter until tears leaked from the corners of their eyes as the man stood on the sidewalk and pontificated for a full five minutes on the lack of character among today’s young people.  When he at last let out his final “Harumpf!” and stalked off down the sidewalk, Adam peeked out from behind his snowman and declared the coast clear.  He grabbed Josie’s hand and, lest the disgruntled gentleman return for another round of browbeating on his invisible assailants, dragged her quickly into the house.

            The cousins burst into the foyer red-cheeked and laughing merrily as they stomped the snow off their shoes.

            “Did you see the look on his face?!” Josie squealed as she pulled a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of the gentleman at the moment when Josie’s snowball struck his headpiece.

            “The look on whose face?” a shrill voice resounded in the entryway as Rachel stepped into view.

            Adam clapped a hand over Josie’s mouth to keep her from blurting out.  “No one, Aunt Rachel,” he said.  “Just an old story.”

            Rachel raised one skeptical eyebrow and peered through the curtains of the window next to the front door.  She frowned.  “I see you have constructed another of those ghastly effigies on the lawn,” she grumbled.

            “They’re just snowmen, Aunt Rachel,” Adam countered, his hand still firmly over Josie’s mouth.  “I think they’re rather festive.”

            “Mmhmm,” Rachel said doubtfully as she swept back into the sitting room. 

            “We should make ourselves scarce for a while,” Adam suggested to Josie, who nodded in agreement.

            The pair spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs in Adam’s room where Adam wrote letters back to his father and brothers and Josie drew a picture of their snowmen to include for Little Joe.  When suppertime rolled around, they slipped quietly into their seats, angelic portraits of cleanliness with freshly scrubbed hands and faces. 

            Supper was an abbreviated affair that evening as everyone had to dress for church with enough time left for the ride over; Rachel, of course, had already arranged for a driver to ferry them to the church.  Adam thought this unnecessary as the church was less than a mile away, but Aunt Rachel seemed determined that the family would arrive in style, so he kept his mouth shut.

            As Adam donned his suit after supper, he could hear Josie screeching in the next bedroom as Hannah attempted to wrestle her hair into something resembling a formal up-do.  Apart from a stubborn forelock that all the Stoddards seemed to inherit, Josie’s hair was not particularly difficult to manage; it was the child herself who was difficult.  Josie despised having her hair styled; given her druthers, she would wear it long and loose every day.  Adam chuckled as he heard Hannah pleading with Josie to hold still. 

            “Good luck, Aunt Hannah,” he muttered as he adjusted his cravat and tucked it neatly into the front of his vest. 

            Adam made it downstairs before Hannah and Josie, and he stood with Jacob in the sitting room as the physician puffed on his pipe a few final times before they left.  Rachel soon joined them, a picture of high fashion in a green velvet gown with white fur trim.  She smiled approvingly at Adam and Jacob but frowned when the clock struck half-past seven.

            “We are going to be late,” she fussed. 

            Jacob was about to venture upstairs to prod his wife and daughter along when they heard footsteps approaching.  Hannah and Josie soon appeared in the doorway to the sitting room, and Adam and Jacob broke into wide smiles.  The ladies were wearing matching gowns of burgundy silk trimmed with white at the cuffs and collar.  Josie’s neckline was a little higher than Hannah’s and her skirt a little shorter, hitting at mid-calf rather than reaching the floor.  Hannah had pulled most of Josie’s hair up into a complicated chignon, leaving two tendrils loose to curl on each side of her face.

            “You ladies look absolutely stunning,” Jacob said, swiftly kissing the back of his wife’s hand.  She giggled girlishly and allowed him to help her into her coat. 

            Adam moved to assist Josie with her coat, then remembering protocol, cast the little girl an apologetic look and assisted Rachel instead.  He offered her his arm, and the family stepped out of the sitting room and swept through the front door to meet their waiting carriage outside.

            The ride to the church was short, and just as the family was finally comfortably settled in the carriage, it was time to get out again.  Jacob and Adam were first out of the carriage and turned back to extend hands to Rachel, Hannah, and Josie.  As Adam gave Rachel his arm again, he craned his neck to look up at Park Street Church’s soaring, four-tiered white steeple.  At 217 feet high, the church steeple was one of the tallest buildings in the United States, and Adam marveled at the structure of it and began daydreaming of constructing such a building in Nevada. 

            “Adam, stop gawking,” Rachel rasped in his ear.  “You look like a bumpkin.”

            Adam almost reminded her that he was a bumpkin, but instead, he clapped his jaw shut – he had not even noticed it had dropped – and lowered his gaze to the front of the church.  Like so many buildings in Boston, the church had a bowed front, but it also included a series of six white columns, three on each side of the enormous main door.  The front and both sides of the church were peppered with tall windows, and Adam imagined how beautiful it must look inside when the windows caught the morning sunlight.  So preoccupied with the architecture of the church was he that Adam completely forgot about the large cemetery that he could have seen had he just glanced over to his right.

            Jacob led his family into the church, stopping frequently so Rachel could greet her friends and introduce Adam and Josie.  Most of the old Boston families were already acquainted with Hannah and Jacob, both of them coming from old Boston families themselves, but this was the first time Adam and Josie were making an appearance in Boston’s high society, and the churchgoers were delighted to meet them.  Adam had no hope of remembering everyone’s names, but he met several people who remembered his father and asked him to pass along their best wishes.

            Rachel directed the family to her pew, which was, naturally, front and center in the sanctuary.  Josie made a point of seating herself between her father and Adam, who was staring around in wonderment at the inside of the church.  It was all white marble and red velvet with a balcony that extended all along the back of the church and down both sides.  In the back balcony was the most magnificent pipe organ Adam had ever seen.  Its pipes extended from the floor of the balcony all the way up the soaring ceiling, with an additional bank of pipes at the front of each of the side balconies, and Adam wondered how Rachel could attend services here regularly without going deaf.  On the whole, it was a church unlike any Adam had ever seen.  His father had raised him in the Christian faith, but his church attendance as a child had been sporadic because most of the time there was no church for him to attend.  When they were on their way west, Ben had occasionally taken his small son to church if they were passing through a town that had one, but the Ponderosa was a four-hour ride from the nearest church, so Ben typically read the Bible aloud to his sons at home.  Since arriving at Harvard, Adam had attended the chapel inside University Hall every Sunday with his classmates, but it was a dingy shack compared to the opulence of Park Street.

            Adam nearly jumped out of his skin when the organist struck the first chords of the prelude, and Josie giggled softly and grabbed hold of his hand.

            “Don’t worry,” she whispered.  “I won’t let it get you.”

            “Thanks,” he replied, smiling down at her and giving her hand a gentle squeeze.

            Her hearing annoyingly keen, Rachel glared across Hannah and Jacob at the cousins, who fell silent and faced obediently forward.  They kept quiet until the processional.  Just as the Reverend Andrew Stone passed by their pew, Josie emitted a little “Eep!” and squeezed Adam’s hand hard.  He looked down at her and mouthed “What?”

            Josie tugged at his sleeve until he lowered his head so she could whisper in his ear.

            “Adam, that is the man I hit with my snowball!”

            Adam’s eyes shot wide as his head snapped back up to get a good look at the minister.  Sure enough, he was the same man whose hat had been the unfortunate victim of Josie’s wild throw.  Adam felt his face blush bright red; even the tips of his ears burned.

            “It’s all right, Josie,” Adam whispered back.  “He didn’t see us this afternoon.”  Mentally, he added, “I hope.”

            Now Jacob glared at the cousins and made gestures to indicate that if they let out one more peep, then he would separate the two of them for the rest of the service.  Not wishing to draw attention to themselves from the man now at the pulpit, Adam and Josie both bit their lower lips and stared unblinkingly forward once more.

            Adam tried to pay attention to the minister’s Christmas message, but his mind kept wandering as he gazed at the incredible architecture surrounding him.  As Josie’s usual bedtime came and went, the little girl grew drowsy and sagged against Adam’s arm.  He smiled and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, giving her a gentle shake every so often to keep her awake.  She roused as the congregation rose to sing “Silent Night” at the end of the service and she realized how close she was getting to Christmas morning. 

            As the family filed out behind the other parishioners, they paused at the door to shake the minister’s hand and wish him a merry Christmas.  The reverend greeted Adam warmly, saying he had heard much about him from Rachel, but he gave the young man a slightly suspicious look, as if he had seen him before but could not remember where or when. 

            Much to Rachel’s displeasure, their carriage driver had not managed to secure a place directly in front of the church to meet them when they exited, so the family stepped back into the narthex to stay warm while they waited for some of the other carriages to clear.  Josie, however, was now fully awake and irritating Rachel with her Christmas exuberance, so Hannah and Adam offered to stroll down the sidewalk with her to burn off some of her energy.

            The trio exited the narthex and turned left, Adam and Hannah each holding one of Josie’s hands, and Josie skipping along happily between them.  They had gone no more than a few dozen paces when they came upon an iron fence to the left of the sidewalk.  Adam, who had been looking down at Josie, now glanced up and saw a huge stone gate.  Adam immediately recognized its architecture as Egyptian Revival; if nothing else, the winged globe relief at the top was a dead giveaway.  Adam’s stomach jumped.  In his awe over the church, he had nearly forgotten that the cemetery where his mother lay was just next door.  He stopped abruptly, accidently jerking Josie and Hannah to a halt as well, as he stared at the entrance to the enormous Granary Burying Ground.

            Still in a line holding hands, the three Cartwrights stood silently for several moments as Adam processed the implications of his location.  Finally, Hannah let go of Josie and reached out a hand, which she placed gently on Adam’s shoulder.

            “Adam?” she asked softly.  “Would you like to go in?”

            Adam glanced over his shoulder at his aunt and plastered a smile on his face.  “No,” he replied.  “She isn’t really there.  Besides, I think Josie’s cold.”  To illustrate his point, Adam picked Josie up and held her close, even though the little girl was not shivering in the slightest.

            “All right,” Hannah conceded.  She turned and accompanied Adam and Josie back to the church where their carriage was now waiting directly out front.  Adam and Jacob helped the ladies back into the carriage and climbed in after them.  As the driver pulled away from the curb, Hannah reached over and gave Adam’s hand a little squeeze.

            It was past ten when they arrived home, so Hannah took Josie straight upstairs to get ready for bed.  Claiming fatigue, Rachel said goodnight and retired to her bedroom as well.  Down in the sitting room, Jacob poured two large brandies and handed one to Adam.

            “Cheers!” he said happily.

            Adam grinned.  “Cheers!” he replied, clinking glasses with his uncle.  Both men drank deeply as they admired the twinkling candles on the Christmas tree; Adam surmised that the butler must have lit them while the family was at church.  They were onto their second brandies by the time Hannah reappeared sans Josie.

            “I will take one of those,” she sighed.

            Jacob chuckled and poured another brimming snifter for his wife as she turned to Adam.  “Josie would like you to come up and say goodnight,” she informed him.

            Adam grinned again.  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.  He downed the rest of his brandy in a single gulp and handed the snifter back to Jacob.  “Ooooh,” he said, shaking his head.  “That stuff has a bite.”

            Hannah and Jacob chuckled and bid him goodnight. 

            “Rest well,” Jacob ordered.  “You will need your strength for opening gifts tomorrow morning.”

            “Yes, sir,” Adam said as he left the sitting room and headed up the stairs, clinging tightly to the banister as the brandy went to his head.  He ducked into Josie’s room and found his little cousin lying in bed with her eyes wide open.  Adam strode over to her bed and sat on the edge.  He pushed back the unruly lock of hair drooping into her eyes and kissed her forehead.  “Sleep tight, kid,” he said.

            “I was not cold,” she replied, queen of the non sequitur.  “We could have gone in.”

            Adam smiled.  “I know,” he said.  “But really, there’s no logic in it.”

            “If you say so,” Josie said as an enormous yawn split her jaw. 

            Shaking his head, Adam kissed her forehead a second time.  “Goodnight, Josie,” he said.

            “Goodnight, Adam.”  Adam turned and left the room.  As the door clicked shut behind him, Josie muttered, “Doesn’t have to be logical.” 

******

            Back in his bedroom, Adam fumbled with the buttons on his shirt and trousers.

            “Stupid brandy,” he muttered, though he giggled goofily as he said it.  At length, he managed to stumble his way out of his suit and hang it in the wardrobe – a bit lopsided, but good enough, he decided.  Pulling on his nightshirt, he pitched over onto his bed and climbed under the covers.  

            As he had done two nights earlier, Adam stared up at his ceiling and watched the firelight’s shadows flit on the ceiling, though tonight he swayed his head back and forth with them, snickering to himself as he did so.  He heard the sound of Hannah and Jacob making their way up the stairs and the creak of Josie’s bedroom door as they poked their heads in to see if she was asleep.

            Josie.

            Adam frowned at the ceiling, highly annoyed with his little cousin.  He had done such a good job the past few days ignoring the desire to see his mother’s resting place, and with one little sentence – “If you say so” – she had him questioning himself again.

            “She’s nine,” he reminded himself once more.

            He scowled at the ceiling, as if daring the flickering shadows to contradict him.  They didn’t, but his own mind turned against him.  He had been so close that evening, probably no more than a few hundred feet.  What kind of a son came that close to his mother’s grave and did not stop to pay his respects?  His thoughts drifted to his brother Hoss, whose mother was buried in an unmarked grave along a dusty trail in the middle of Nebraska.  Adam knew what Hoss would give to be able to visit his mother, and here Adam was, less than a mile from his own mother and making a heap of excuses for not going.

            “Aw, dammit,” he cursed as he threw back the covers and got out of bed.  Still swaying slightly from the brandy he had drunk too quickly, Adam yanked a pair of trousers and a clean shirt out of his wardrobe and pulled them on.  He jammed his feet into his shoes and cinched the laces before tiptoeing out of his bedroom and into the hall.

            As he had hoped, there were no sounds emanating from the other bedrooms.  Adam sighed softly in relief; this was a mission he wished to complete alone and with no questions asked.  He crept downstairs, keeping close to the wall in case any of the risers had grown creaky in the middle, and into the kitchen, where he opened the larder.  He knew there were a few oil wick lanterns stashed there, and he rummaged around as quietly as he could until he found one.  He grabbed a box of matches and checked that the lantern’s oil was full before heading to the hallway closet to retrieve his coat, hat, and gloves.  He set the lantern carefully on the hallway floor as he buttoned his coat.  Adam thought he heard a creak from upstairs, and he held his breath for a full ten seconds, listening intently.  When he heard no other sounds, he finished buttoning his coat, stuffed his hands into his gloves, and settled his hat on his head.  Listening once more for any signs of life from upstairs but hearing none, Adam grabbed the lantern, slipped over to the front door, and turned the knob.  He gently eased open the heavy oak door and slid out into the night.

            The gas streetlamps illuminated the street and sidewalk, casting everything in a hazy golden glow that glinted off the snow and the little puffs of air Adam emitted every time he exhaled.  It had gotten even colder since they had left the church – well below freezing, Adam guessed – and he wished he had grabbed a scarf from the closet.  Too late now, he thought.  He knew if he went back inside now, he might not come back out, and he was not sure if he could live with himself for that.  Hunching down to get as much of his face inside his coat collar as possible, Adam scurried down the sidewalk toward Boston Common and the Granary Burying Ground.

            It was nearing midnight, and Adam found himself quite alone on the streets.

            “Everyone else has the good sense to be warm in their beds,” he muttered, pulling the brim of his hat a little lower against the icy breeze.

            Walking briskly, it took Adam just fifteen minutes to reach his destination.  Nearly a dozen gigantic elms loomed above him, their naked branches rustling in the breeze; Adam estimated they must be nearly ten feet around.  He stood and watched their numerous arms swaying back and forth, and he smiled as he thought how many ghost stories Hoss could be inspired to spin by trees like these.

            “Quit procrastinating, Cartwright,” he scolded himself.  Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out the box of matches, struck one on the bottom of his shoe, and lit the wick of his lantern.  There were no gas lamps inside the cemetery itself, and Adam did not feel like stumbling around in the dark and knocking over headstones.  Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the stone gateway and into the graveyard. 

            “Northeast corner,” he muttered, raising his lantern and starting toward the far end of the cemetery. 

            The burying ground covered two acres, so it took Adam a few minutes to pick his way carefully to the back of graveyard. 

            “Mr. Hancock,” Adam said, tipping his hat to the ornate obelisk marking the resting spot of the famous revolutionary.  At last he found himself in the northeast corner, and he turned slowly in a circle, casting his lantern light on the surrounding headstones, searching for his mother’s name.

            “Warren, Otis, Adams, Lowell,” Adam read aloud.  “Norcross, Coffin – oh, that’s ironic – Winthrop, Putnam-“  He gasped as his light at last shone on the stone he was searching for.  It was larger than he had expected, and a quick glance revealed why: more than one Stoddard shared a single marker.  It made sense, he realized.  Tombstones were expensive; better to buy one large one for the entire family than to shell out for a small one each time someone died.  Adam read over the names and dates on the stone.

            “Stoddard,” Adam mumbled, not realizing he was reading aloud.  “Abel, 1784 – 1846, His beloved wife Ruth, 1786 – 1823.”  He paused, staring at the stone.  “Hello, Grandfather,” he whispered.  “Sorry I got here too late to see you again.  I would have liked to have known you.”  Had he thought about it, Adam would have been ashamed of himself for talking to a tombstone – hadn’t he told Josie it made no difference? – but some deeper instinct had taken over his logic, and speaking aloud seemed to be the right thing to do. 

            He looked at the space beneath his grandparents’ names, searching for his mother’s, but it was not there.  He furrowed his brow, wondering why she was not listed, when his eyes drifted to the smaller tombstone just to the right of his grandparents’.  It was nearly concealed by the snow, so Adam set his lantern down and bent to brush the snow away.

            “Sacred to the memory of Elizabeth Stoddard Cartwright,” he read.  “February 11, 1810 – May 18, 1830.  Daughter of Abel and Ruth Stoddard.  Beloved by her husband Benjamin and son Adam.”

            Adam was startled to see his own name on the stone, and he reflexively dropped to his knees in front of it, not caring about the snow seeping through the knees of his trousers.  Suddenly, seeing his and his father’s names carved there in the stone, Elizabeth no longer seemed like a mythical creature.  Her humanity and the reality of her existence pierced Adam like a bullet, and for the first time he understood the true depth of his loss.

            “Hello, Mama,” he breathed, instinctively using the moniker Josie used for Hannah. 

            He knelt there staring for several long moments before the words began tumbling out, seemingly of their own accord.

            “It’s Adam.  I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you before now.  I didn’t know you were here until two days ago, though as everyone keeps pointing out, I probably should have guessed.”  He paused, wondering what he should say next. 

            “Pa’s done really well,” he continued at length.  “You would be proud of him.  We have one of the biggest ranches west of the Rocky Mountains.  Pa named it the Ponderosa.  And I’ve got two little brothers, too!  I hope you don’t mind Pa married again.  Twice.  Both those ladies died, too.  Pa really has the worst luck.  But you’d like my little brothers.  Hoss – he’s thirteen now – he’s the biggest kid you’ve ever seen!  He was nearly as big as me when I left home two and a half years ago, and I expect he’s surpassed me by now.  But he’s the kindest, gentlest person I’ve ever known. 

            “Then there’s Little Joe.  He’s seven, and he can get into so much trouble that sometimes I think he has a secret twin stashed away someplace.  There’s no way one child can make so much mischief.”  Adam chuckled at this, remembering some of Little Joe’s most notable escapades.  “But he makes up for it with the world’s brightest smile.  I like to make him laugh just so I can see it.

            “I’m at Harvard now.  I’ve been spending my holidays with Uncle Jacob and Aunt Hannah.  They got married, you know.  They have a little girl, Josie.  She looks so much like you, Mama.  Everyone says so, and people are forever assuming she’s my little sister rather than my cousin.  I don’t mind.  She feels like my sister.  I’m sorry you never got to meet her.” 

            Adam’s voice began to falter.

            “I’m sorry for everything,” he croaked, fighting to keep his voice steady.  “Everyone says your death wasn’t my fault – even Aunt Rachel says that – but it still feels like it sometimes.  My god, my birthday is on your tombstone.  Maybe I wasn’t directly responsible, but the truth is you’d still be here if not for me.  I see Uncle Jacob and Aunt Hannah together, and I think of all those years I stole from you and Pa, and I don’t know how he forgives me for it.  I’m going to be twenty next year.  The same age you were, and I feel like I haven’t even gotten started with my life yet.  Is that how you felt?  As you lay dying, did you think about how unfair your circumstances were?  Oh, Mama, I’m so sorry.  I am so, so sorry.  I didn’t mean to-“  Adam buried his face in his hands and broke down sobbing.  He knelt there in the snow and the golden puddle of lantern light and cried, a boy alone in a vast cemetery, grieving for the mother he had never known.

            “What was the point?” he asked at last, lifting his dripping face from his gloved hands and looking skyward.  “What was the purpose of bringing her into the world at all if she was just going to be ripped away again so soon?”  Fresh sobs tore from his throat, and he pulled the collar of his coat up over his face, not caring if he misshaped the wool.

            “Adam?” a tentative voice called out from behind his grandparents’ tombstone.

            Adam hollered in surprise and fell backward.  A wispy figure, cloaked in the shadows thrown by his lantern, slipped out from behind the headstone and stepped toward him.  Adam scrabbled backward on his hands and feet like a crab, eyes wide with fear and shock.

            “Adam!” the voice, thick with concern, called again as the phantom rushed toward him with one hand outstretched.   

            Adam nearly lost his hat as he continued to scramble backward through the snow until he bumped against another headstone and could go no further.

            “Adam, it’s all right!” the specter cried as it fell to the snow next to him.  “It’s me!”

            For a brief moment, Adam thought he was hallucinating as he saw his mother drop to her knees at his side.  Then it dawned on him that the figure was much too small to be a fully grown woman, and there was something very familiar about the white-mittened hand reaching toward him.  He shifted slightly to his left to get his eyes out of the direct glare from his lantern.  As his pupils adjusted, the figure came into focus.

            “Josie!”  His little cousin knelt before him, her face etched with worry, her hand still stretched toward him.  Adam sprang to his feet, suddenly furious.  “Josie!” he shouted again.  “What are you doing here?!”

            The child remained kneeling in the snow, unsure how to respond; she had been certain Adam would be overjoyed to see her.  She hauled herself to her feet and gazed up at him with wide, startled eyes.  “I- I followed you,” she admitted.

            Adam stared back down at Josie, still incredulous.  “That was very wrong of you, Josephine!” he scolded.  Josie shrank back from his anger, but Adam blustered on.  “Not only was it dangerous to run off in the middle of the night by yourself, but it was an appalling invasion of my privacy!  What do you have to say for yourself?”

            Ashamed, Josie could no longer meet her beloved cousin’s gaze, and she hung her head.  “I guessed you were coming here,” she whispered.  “I was afraid you were sad, and I didn’t want you to be alone if you were sad.  I’m supposed to take care of you.”  One fat tear rolled down her cheek and dropped to the ground, burning a tiny shaft through the snow.

            Adam’s livid expression softened as he gazed down at Josie as Hannah’s words from two nights ago came back to him:

            “Jacob and I fell in love that night he came by the house to offer his condolences to the family for Elizabeth’s death.  Had she not died, Jacob would not have visited, and my life would have turned out very differently.” 

            “Yeah, mine, too,” Adam muttered aloud.

            Josie looked up at him with curiosity at this nonsensical reply, and Adam marveled again at how strongly Josie resembled the portrait he had of Elizabeth.  As he gaped at Josie, Adam heard in his head, as clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud, a woman’s gentle voice saying, “If you are looking for a purpose, dear heart, you have found it.”

            Tears coursed down Adam’s face yet again as he opened his arms wide to his cousin.  “Josie, come here,” he implored.

            Josie sailed into his arms, and Adam lifted her and hugged her tightly.  He buried his face in the soft wool of the scarf she had had the good sense to put on before leaving the house and let his tears flow.  Josie was crying now, too, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

            “I love you, Adam,” she whispered.

            “I love you, too, Josie,” he replied, swallowing hard to regain control of his voice.  “And you’ve done a good job taking care of me.  Better than anyone else could have.”

            From behind them, they heard the Park Street Church’s clock chime twelve. 

Josie smiled through her tears.  “Merry Christmas, Older Brother,” she said.

            “Merry Christmas, Little Sister.  Come on, let’s go home.”

            Shifting Josie to his right hip, Adam stooped to pick up his lantern and then turned and strode out of the cemetery, his mother’s parting gift to him clutched tightly in his arms.

 

Ponderosa Ranch
Nevada Territory
December 25, 1861

            Adam smiled as he watched Josie, Hoss, and Little Joe playing with the huge Irish Wolfhound puppy he had given Josie for Christmas.  The three of them sprawled across the wooden floor of the ranch house’s living room as they worked to teach the young dog to sit on command.  Though the house was well proofed against the winter weather and there was a fire roaring in the enormous fireplace, Adam had a quilt wrapped around his shoulders.  It was a blue-and-white patchwork quilt – the same one he and Josie had snuggled under to read A Christmas Carol together all those years ago.  When Josie had discovered that Adam’s mother had sewn the quilt, she had coerced Rachel into giving it to her and had passed it along to Adam as his Christmas gift.

            Josie had made hot chocolate for everyone, and she now rose and collected the used mugs to take into the kitchen to wash up.  When she reached for Adam’s, he snatched it away, insisting he would wash his own cup.

            “Don’t be so stubborn, Adam,” Josie said, rolling her eyes in exasperation.  “It’s Christmas.  Let me take care of you if I want to.”

            Not wanting to incur his cousin’s wrath, Adam capitulated and let Josie take his mug.  As he watched her amble toward the kitchen, her long, black braid swinging pertly behind her, Adam again remembered their Christmas together in Boston and how Josie had insisted on taking care of him then, too.  Draping his quilt carefully across the back of the settee, he rose and followed Josie into the kitchen.

            When Adam arrived, Josie had already pumped some water into the sink and was about to plunge the first mug into its bath.

            “Hey,” Adam said softly.

            Josie turned and saw him leaning on the doorway as he so often did, and she smiled at him.

            “Hey yourself,” she replied cheekily.  Adam just stared at her with a fond smile, and Josie raised one eyebrow, wondering what it was he wanted.

            “Come here,” he said at last, striding across the kitchen to her.  He took the mug from her hand, placed it on the counter, and gathered Josie up into a tight hug.  Surprised by this seemingly random and unwarranted display of affection, Josie initially stiffened but then relaxed and hugged him back.

            Adam held onto Josie a long time, much longer than he usually allowed hugs to last.  When he finally released her, he left a hand on each of her shoulders and gazed at her from arm’s length.

            “Merry Christmas, Josie,” he said.

            “Merry Christmas, Adam,” Josie replied, the bafflement clear in her voice.

            Adam kissed her forehead and strode back out of the kitchen, leaving Josie shaking her head.

            “What in the world got into him?” she asked the empty room.  Shrugging her shoulders, she turned back to the sink and began washing the mugs, humming Christmas carols to herself as she worked.

 

The End