A Victorian Family Christmas
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Carla Kelly
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Chapter One
How shallow can a man be? Ezra Eldredge asked himself as he plonked his valise down on the bunk aboard the USS Sullivan, packet steamer bound for Portsmouth, Great Britain. I know I can live for a few weeks without my valet. Can’t I?
Mackie usually travelled with him. He was a free Black, paid a fair wage—always had been—whose Yankee accent was more pronounced than Ezra’s.
Mackie had objected to being left behind until Ezra had explained. ‘I prefer having you with me, but I dare not,’ he’d said that last night before taking the train to Boston from New Bedford. ‘Here we are in December of 1861, Mackie, at war. Rebel commerce raiders are prowling the oceans. They would have no qualms about selling you into slavery, if they captured you.’
‘I see, Mr Eldredge,’ was Mackie’s quiet reply as he packed that valise. ‘Will you be taking along Mrs Eldredge?’
Ezra always took Priscilla with him. ‘Not this time.’
Consequently, his valise did not contain the charming miniature of his late wife, dead these ten years. Priscilla had graced him with her presence on all business trips, but not this time, and by design.
She probably would have come along, if he hadn’t just endured his thirty-fifth birthday, complete with cake from his employees at the ropewalk, that wonderful one-thousand-two-hundred-foot-long brick building he had taken a chance on after his father’s death. ‘A shed is good enough for your workers,’ he had heard from other merchants. But it wasn’t, not in coastal New England’s frigid winter damp. He’d taken a chance and prospered as the best rope twiners and twisters competed to work for him. Soon Eldredge cables, miles of them, graced the most beautiful clipper ships ever to sail. A man could be proud of that and he was.
So many candles on his cake—lit, of course, outside, for safety. They had still been on his mind that evening as he’d readied for bed, then looked down at Priscilla’s miniature on his night table. For some reason this time the sight of her twenty-five-year-old loveliness reminded him that she was always young and now he was not. Thirty-five. Good Lord.
This time, he gazed at her image and thought he detected a little reproach, a mild scolding, from as generous a lady who ever lived. This time, she seemed to silently remind him that lonely years had passed, and what was he doing about it?
The obvious answer was nothing; he had no second wife, no hopeful heirs. His heart had broken with those two deaths, hers and their son’s born too soon. In grief, he’d thrown himself into turning New Bedford Ropewalk and Marine Supply from a small firm into New Bedford’s largest such emporium. If he wanted to puff up the matter, he doubted there was a better marine business in all of New England.
He enjoyed success, but who cared? Could it be that Priscilla’s sweet silence in the miniature was starting to nudge him into action beyond business?
‘Why now, my dearest?’ he asked the miniature. ‘You know I’m busy. I haven’t time for another wife. There’s a war on.’
Why had he never noticed that thoughtful look the miniaturist had somehow captured even in so small a frame? He knew that look. The matter was something to consider when he returned from England, not now. Ezra knew this was no time to travel, but he was an ambitious man. The ropewalk and marine supplies were already increasing his fortune during a war where President Lincoln had declared a naval blockade of the southern coastline.
Everyone had said the war would be over by Christmas, which, at this point, was less than a month away. No one had told the Rebels that, though.
The letter from Courtney and Howe, solicitors, located in Salisbury, had changed matters.
In efficient legalese, they had explained that his English mother’s late father had left her several thousand pounds. All he needed to do was show up at Melton Manor, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, to collect. Andrew Melton, Mama’s uncle, would do the honours. Courtney and Howe had confirmed that with the passing of his mother, Maude Melton, six months previously, the legacy was now his.
The amount made him smile. Now he could safely invest in railways. He knew that ropewalks would eventually become a relic as sails vanished. His business sense assured him that once this miserable war ended, Americans would be moving West, travelling by rail.
So to Wiltshire he would go. Travel by steamship meant a shorter voyage than under sail, where the winds ruled. Curious about being aboard a steamer for the first time, he wasted no time returning to the deck once his gear was safely stowed.
He moved to the railing on the port side and watched Boston recede. For the next two weeks he had nothing to do but eat and read. He had left both his business and his home in capable hands.
That reminded him of what his housekeeper had said to him before he’d left. ‘Mr Eldredge, come home with a wife,’ she had begged. ‘Your father did, years ago.’
He had, but was Ezra’s business his housekeeper’s business, too? He had told her so, in no uncertain terms, surprising himself.
She had been undeterred, and had dropped unhappy news on him next. ‘Cook wants to retire from service. You will need to replace her when you return.’
‘What?’
She’d given Ezra a kindly smile. ‘Don’t fret, Mr Eldredge,’ she’d replied. ‘I’ll stay here, but do be thinking about a replacement for Cook.’
‘If I must,’ he had grumbled.
That had earned him a finger-wag. ‘Seriously, sir. You’re so set in your ways you’ll be turning into an old man too soon.’
As he leaned on the rail, he reflected on the conversation. Am I turning into a geriatric before my time? he asked himself. Surely not.
‘Ezra Eldredge?’
Oh, God, I know that voice. Ezra blanched in horror and turned to face the barrage of sound that was Rectitude Blake. ‘I had no idea you were travelling to England, Mr Blake. How, um, delightful.’
Rectitude Blake was a prosy, fat fellow who rejoiced in the friendship of the illustrious Adams family, from John through Quincy and now to Charles, serving as United States envoy to England’s Court of St. James. The fact came up at every opportunity, appropriate or not.
As if on cue, the man said self-importantly, ‘I am bearing a note from President Lincoln himself to Minister Adams. It’s in regard to the Trent Affair.’
‘Good for you, sir,’ was the best Ezra could manage. With other Yankees, he had fumed over the recent news of the capture of two Confederate envoys heading to England and France on a packet boat much like this one but British. Overtaken by Captain Wilkes in the USS Trent, those Rebs now cooled their heels in a Washington, DC jail. What had happened was a flagrant violation of all the rules of diplomacy, but there was a war on. Her Britannic Majesty was aghast, Prime Minister Palmerston appalled, and the French none too pleased either.
‘P’raps you should keep the matter quiet,’ Ezra said, even as he doubted the other man could. Seldom had a fellow been more ill named.
‘Even the decks have ears?’ Mr Blake bellowed out, laughing.
Ezra smiled weakly. ‘Just think, laddie,’ Mr Blake said. ‘We have two weeks to renew our acquaintance!’
This voyage can’t end soon enough, Ezra thought despairingly.
