A Magical Christmas Read online

  With over twenty million copies of her books in print, Heather Graham is one of the world’s most widely read and best-loved novelists. In A Magical Christmas, she tells her most heartwarming story yet, an unforgettable re-creation of a love that neither time nor war could destroy … and a family renewed by a special kind of miracle. Nobody ever said love was easy—but oh, what a special kind of wonderful it is.

  A Magical Christmas

  “Unique … magic … surprisingly different.”

  —Rendezvous

  “Swift-moving. Appealing.”

  —Library Journal

  “Heather Graham is an incredible storyteller.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  A Magical

  Christmas

  by

  Heather Graham

  A TOPAZ BOOK

  TOPAZ

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairu Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Topaz, an imprint of Dutton Signet,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Previously published in a Topaz hardcover edition.

  First Mass Market Printing, November, 1997

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Heather Graham Pozzessere, 1996

  All rights reserved

  EISBN: 9781101573648

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  To Cynthia Bethe,

  for her real estate prowess

  To Father Dennison (St. Augustine’s)

  & Father Moras (St. Theresa’s), for

  understanding Christmas

  all year

  &

  To Jason, Shayne, Derek,

  Bryee-Annon & Chynna Pozzessere,

  for being the magic

  of my Christmases,

  always!

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Christmastide

  Northern Virginia

  1862

  Darcy Gannon leaned against the library door of the Oak River farmhouse, a small plantation now held by the Federals and housing a number of Confederate prisoners. Cavalrymen, soldiers known as “Mosby’s Men.”

  They were men who had infuriated a very young Union brigadier general, a certain George Armstrong Custer, with their ability to raid supply wagons, sabotage Union lines, steal Union horses, medicines, ammunition, and more.

  Custer had sent out a stern warning: Those caught would be hanged. The sheer outrage of it had rung clearly throughout the mountains, throughout the Shenandoah Valley, to Front Royal, and all the way to Richmond. But there wasn’t much to be done about such an affront—this was war.

  Sergeant Darcy Gannon, his ear pressed to the glass in his hand, which was hard pressed to the wood of the door, listened to the verbal dispatches being relayed in the foyer beyond the library.

  Darcy winced, eased the glass from the door, and turned to his companions. “Captain,” he said, looking to their leader, a slim, handsome man in worn butternut and gray, “that damned Custer, he does intend to do it. Five of our number. Five of us are to hang. Only five ’cause of the holiday, but those five will be hanged—right on Christmas Eve.”

  The captain acknowledged that information with a nod. Not a shudder, not the slightest paling of color betrayed his emotion at the news. “Well, now, five of our number. We knew this was war, gentlemen, and we knew we risked all when we rode with Mosby. Not that I’m anxious to die, but there’s no finer man in the Confederacy to die for than our Mosby, and no finer state to fight for than Virginia.”

  “Here, here!” came a murmur from the men, but the sound of it was somewhat weak. And as he looked around the room, the captain saw as well that the faces surveying him were ashen. Sickly. Around their campfires, they had sung sad but hopeful ballads, wishful lyrics about soldiers going home for Christmas. Now, once they accepted the dire truth of their situation, they’d be singing with grim humor about soldiers being hanged for the holiday instead.

  “Five of us, eh, Sergeant Gannon?” the captain inquired. He looked over what was left of his company. Twenty-four men. He himself made twenty-five. One-fifth of their number. Hanging only five of them probably was what Custer would consider a generous concession to Christ’s birth, considering how bitter Custer was because of Mosby’s abilities to ride circles around him and rob him blind. Custer was an ambitious man, and Mosby’s boys sure made him look bad to his superiors. “Five,” the captain murmured again. “Naturally …” he began, then found himself at a loss for words, a major obstruction seeming to have lodged in his throat. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to go home. To her. Even if they had parted in anger. Especially because they had parted in anger. She had warned him, pleaded with him, begged him to leave the service. He had served far longer than he had ever intended, but she simply hadn’t understood that a man, a captain, didn’t just walk away in the middle of a war.

  She had been weary of the war, raising their crops alone, raising their children alone—even if only their daughter remained now. His son’s determination to lead his own life was another blade of steel that seemed wedged within his heart now—they’d had such terrible differences between them! How awful now to wonder if he’d ever have the chance to say, I love you, and I respect the way that you have stood up for what you have believed in.

  Yet, she lived with all the fear, daily, on her own, worrying alone, ever mindful for the time when Union troops just might come marching through…

  Well, the Union troops had come marching through. But thank God in heaven above for small mercies; his fami
ly wasn’t here. They had gone down to spend the holiday with her sister at Front Royal.

  Thank God, thank God…

  If he could only see her.

  Oh, God, no, that would be worse. She might cry, and he might not be given a single instant to touch her, and it would be so hard then to be the captain, the leader of his men.

  But to think that he might die without touching her face again …

  After the way they had parted …

  The irony, of course, was that he was a prisoner in his own home. And that he would be hanged from one of the huge oaks he had climbed as a boy. Because naturally, as he was trying to tell his men, no matter how desperately he wanted to live, how terrified he was of the hangman’s rope and the hanged man’s death, he would be one of the five. He was their captain.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. He was afraid. He didn’t want to die. He had faced death frequently enough, but always with the belief that he could survive. He’d refused to believe that he might be among the fallen, and yet …

  If he would have been killed in battle, it might have been mercifully quick. No time to ponder the things he had left undone, unsaid. While to hang …

  Hanging was the worst death for a man. Ignoble. Pathetic. God be with him.

  God give him courage.

  “Naturally,” he said briskly then, “I will be one of the five. My friends, I’ve never ridden with finer men. I’d die for all of you if I could.”

  “Captain—that ain’t right,” old Billy Larson said. God alone knew just how old Billy was. He’d hailed from a small town just down the creek from Oak River Plantation, and he’d been an old man when the captain himself had still been climbing trees.

  “That’s right,” Darcy agreed. “You just can’t decide you’re going to be one of the ones to die, Captain. You got a wife, a family.”

  “We all have families, Darcy. Every one of us has someone, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, child. And God knows, this war has been no quick picnic like we all thought it would be when the Rebs crushed the Yanks back at First Manassas. They’ve all been hurt enough.”

  “I ain’t got no one,” Billy Larson said. He started to spit tobacco on the floor, then seemed to remember that it was their captain’s library—even if the Feds were keeping them prisoner here. He edged on over to the spittoon. “My wife died of the smallpox in fifty-three, my boy died the day he was born. They’ll take me, for one.”

  “Hell, now, Billy, don’t you go being noble that way,” Pierce Roswell protested. Pierce was one of the older men in their company as well, a graybeard nearing sixty, but a man with the agility of a boy.

  “Hell, we’re Mosby’s Men, we’re all noble!” Jake Clary, a grinning twenty-four, informed them. Laughter rose.

  From everyone but Jimmy Haley.

  Little Jimmy Haley. They hadn’t really wanted the boy with them. He was just thirteen—their mascot, and he’d wound up with them because his ma had died alone in the mountains and his pa was either dead or fighting somewhere and Jimmy didn’t know where. And he might have starved to death in winter, left up on that mountain, so he’d come with them as a drummer boy. He’d been in uniform with them, and he’d been taken with them. And now, it seemed that Jimmy knew, just like everybody else, that he had a one out of five chance of dying, and he was damned green.

  “Don’t be afraid, Jimmy,” the captain said.

  “I ain’t afraid, Captain,” Jimmy said. He tried to smile. “Ain’t no Yankee gonna scare me, sir. And I ain’t afeered of dying, Cap. They can count me in, just like the rest of the men. I’m one of you, right?”

  “Sure, Jimmy, you’re one of us.” The captain looked at Darcy across the room. They wouldn’t let Jimmy die; that was for certain.

  “Hell, those of us who don’t die will be going to a prison camp,” Lem Smith said. “Like as not, it will be better going by a rope than a slow death in one of those wretched Yank camps.”

  The captain held silent. They all knew that the Southern camps were more wretched. The Northern blockade was slowly strangling the South. The South couldn’t feed her own men, much less her Northern prisoners. In the North and the South, there were prisons that were really bad, and prisons that weren’t so bad. Like it or not, a lesson was being learned across the divide of the states. Good men were Yanks; bad men were Rebs. Bad sons of bitches were Yanks—and their counterparts could be found among the Rebs as well.

  “It’s going to be a draw,” Darcy said. “It ain’t gonna matter none which of us wants to die. We’re going to draw lots.”

  “Lots?”

  Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s going to be the luck of the draw. That’s what Custer’s man said to the guard out there, anyhow.”

  “Well, gentlemen, we’ll have to see what unfolds, and deal with what happens as it comes along,” the captain said.

  Later that afternoon, after watery stew and moldy hardtack—the Yank stuff admittedly better than what they’d drawn as rations lately from their Confederate depots—the Rebs were taken outside for exercise. The snow was inches deep on the ground, but it had stopped falling. The day was crystal clear, the sky beautifully blue. The cold felt good.

  The captain could close his eyes and see times gone past. This was his home; he could see Christmastides gone by. Smell roast goose cooking in the oven, see his wife’s face, beautiful, flushed from the work she insisted on doing herself in the kitchen. The house would be decked out in holly and evergreen branches. The warmth would envelop him, along with the aromatic scents of their holiday dinner… and her.

  He could almost hear the laughter from days gone past. The delight of his children as they opened their presents. He could see the glow in her eyes, when all alone, thinking no one was watching, she would open her gift from him.

  Damn, but it was funny. They could just be so mad at one another! Maybe fear had had something to do with it lately, but sometimes, even before the war, they’d gotten caught up in the work of living. They’d forgotten just how much they’d loved one another once upon a time. And right now, with the threat of death all but imminent, she was all that he wanted. He could see her face. Oh, God, yes, in his mind’s eye, and all he wanted right now was one last chance to hold her, one last chance to say he loved her, a chance to say good-bye without the harsh words between them.

  The prisoners were allowed to walk and stretch their legs in one of the paddocks right in front of the main house.

  The captain liked to be out. He’d used this field for his horses. He’d bred damned good horses here.

  All of them gone now. Gone to the Confederacy.

  Gone to war.

  Their guards weren’t actually cruel taskmasters; some of the Union boys set to watch over them seemed downright unhappy about the duty. Southern boys had given over lots of tobacco. The Yanks had shared their good coffee with the Rebs on an equal footing. Still, six guards were set around the fence of the paddock where the Rebs walked, and the captain knew, through Darcy’s fine hearing, that the Yanks had been given orders to shoot to kill if the Rebs made any attempt to escape. He’d ordered them not to do so. They were outnumbered and well-guarded. Their best chance would be to wait for reinforcements. Surely, Mosby himself might manage to come for them. Or some brigade, perhaps from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee was great at breaking up his troops and coming at the Yanks from different angles. They never knew what hit them half the time.

  “Captain! Captain!” Some of the local folk had gathered along the road. They waved encouragement to him and his men, even as the Yanks moved forward to urge them onward. He saw tears in a young girl’s eyes. He lifted his plumed slouch hat to her with a flourish. A sprig of holly grew along the fence, and he plucked it and threw it to her. A cheer went up, and another local woman cried out even as the Yanks urged her down the road at rifle’s length. “The Lord bless you and your men, Captain! We’re praying for you.”

  “God bless you all! Merry Christmas!”
he cried in return.

  The folks moved onward. Then the Yank unhappily in charge of him and his men entered the paddock.

  Billy was suddenly at one side of him. Darcy was at the other.

  Lieutenant Jenkins, not long out of West Point, with barely a bit of stubble on his face, approached him, saluting. “Captain, I regret to inform you that upon direct orders from General Custer…”

  Lieutenant Jenkins faltered. He wasn’t up to this task of execution, and he darned near looked as if he were going to cry.

  “It’s fine now, Lieutenant, you go ahead. Say what you have to say,” the captain said.

  Jenkins rallied. “Five of you got to be hanged, sir. We’re mighty sorry, the boys and I. But it’s got to be five. Would have been ten, but then it’s Christmas… Well, sir, you’ve got to draw straws. Every man of your company is to take a straw. The short straws… well, the short straws are the chosen ones.” Two Yanks, nearly as pathetically green as their Confederate counterparts, carried the straws.

  “Perhaps we should choose among ourselves,” the captain suggested.

  “It’s got to be straws,” Lieutenant Jenkins said firmly. He hated his duty. He apparently feared Custer’s wrath more.

  “Gentlemen?” the captain said politely to his soldiers.

  And the soldiers, to a man—including the boy, Jimmy—drew their straws.

  The captain gripped his in his hand. If it was a long straw, he just might survive the war. The prison camps were hell, but he might be traded, he might survive. He was a healthy man, uninjured. He could withstand a great deal of hardship. Because he wanted to live. He wanted another Christmas, oh, God, just one more Christmas.…

  If his straw was short, he would die. Hanged on his own property.

  Thank God she wasn’t here to see it.

  If he could just touch her one more time, say he was sorry, say he loved her…

  Say good-bye.

  God, it was hard not to want to live. Especially when the sky was so beautifully clear a blue, when the sun was making diamond patterns upon the snow.