Christmas Bells Read online

  • • •

  She left Belmont and Mount Auburn streets behind and, quickening her pace, lamenting the impossibility of stopping for coffee, she eventually reached Brattle Street. Even though she was running late, she paused on the sidewalk before the stately Georgian mansion that had inspired one of her selections for St. Margaret’s Christmas Eve concert.

  Although Boston was rich with history, the former residence known as Longfellow House captivated her imagination as much as any of the city’s more famous locales, as did the great poet who had once called it home. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had known great love and success, but also terrible heartbreak. Sophia would never forget how moved she had been when she learned the origin of a Longfellow poem she particularly loved, written one Christmas Day during the Civil War. After suffering tremendous personal loss and enduring along with the rest of the divided nation the hardships of a terrible war, Longfellow had been inspired to compose one of his most beloved and faith-affirming poems—and yet most people, even as they sang the carol his poem had become, had no idea he had written it.

  A distant bell tolled the quarter hour. “I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play,” Sophia sang softly, gazing at the house, at the window to the room where, perhaps, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had written the poem. “And wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, good-will to men.” And women too, she added silently, smiling wistfully. She could have used a little peace and goodwill right about then.

  Mindful of the time, Sophia hurried on her way. The wind had picked up while she had stood lost in reverie in front of the historic residence, whisking snowflakes in graceful swirls and eddies on the sidewalk.

  Soon thereafter, about a half hour after setting out from school, Sophia arrived outside St. Margaret’s Catholic Church. She went around to the side door, which was always left unlocked on choir rehearsal nights, and had just placed her hand on the latch when the door swung open and a tall figure stepped forth. “There you are,” said Father Ryan, relieved. He caught the door before it swung shut and held it open for her. “Lucas was getting worried, so he sent me out to search for you.”

  Sophia quickly stepped into the warmth of the little foyer. “I’m not late, am I? I should’ve taken the bus.”

  “No, you’re right on time, but you’re usually early, and that was cause enough for worry.” Father Ryan was around thirty-five, with an athlete’s build, thick strawberry-blond hair, and a dimple in his right cheek that deepened when he smiled, which was often. Sophia had heard more than one parishioner sigh mournfully that his handsome face was wasted on a priest. “Lucas cares about you, you know.”

  Sophia laughed and shrugged out of her coat. “He just doesn’t want to be left alone with that pack of wild hooligans.”

  “That’s not fair,” Father Ryan protested, grinning. “Not to the kids and not to Lucas. He’s great with them and you know it. He’s leading them in warm-ups as we speak.”

  Then she was even later than she feared. Thanking the priest for his concern, Sophia stamped the snow off her boots on the mat, draped her coat over her arm, and hurried up the staircase and through the side entrance to the nave. Behind the altar in the choir loft stood forty children clad in a colorful array of sweatshirts and sweaters to ward off the chill, warming up with scales and solfège in rounds, accompanied by Lucas on piano. He wore his dark brown hair long, and his eyes were serious and kind and the color of comfortably faded denim.

  As she quietly set down her bag and coat and scarf on a front pew, several of the children noticed her and grinned—ginger-haired Alex even broke form to wave, earning him a look of shocked reproach from his elder sister, Charlotte—but with his back to her, Lucas was unaware she had arrived.

  For all of her teasing, Sophia admired Lucas’s patience with the boys and girls, his manifest kindness, his sudden flashes of humor that never failed to bring the young singers’ wandering attention back to the music. Lucas was a brilliant pianist, a graduate student at Harvard, steadily booked for paying engagements, and not particularly religious, which made his unwavering commitment to his volunteer gig at the church a bit baffling, or so Sophia had thought when they first met. It was not long, however, until she concluded that he obviously loved playing the piano, he enjoyed the challenges and rewards of working with children, and the acoustics in the church were excellent. What other reason did he need to spend two evenings a week, most of his Sunday mornings, and one Saturday afternoon a month at St. Margaret’s?

  Sophia and Lucas were not alone in enjoying the children’s rehearsals. Sister Winifred smiled and nodded in time with the music as she quietly walked the aisles, raising kneelers and replacing hymnals and missals. A few parents were scattered among the pews, some in pairs chatting in whispers, others alone, frowning at laptops or tapping on smartphones. Charlotte and Alex’s mother was there too, a perky red beret pulled over her long blond hair, her gaze fixed on the young singers, her expression incongruously bleak. Ever since her husband, Jason, had been deployed overseas with his National Guard unit, Laurie had become markedly tense and unhappy, but at that moment she looked more stricken and upset than Sophia had ever seen her. Concerned, Sophia was just about to approach her when her attention was abruptly pulled away by the muffled boom of one of the tall, heavy doors at the back of the church falling shut. A woman in her early sixties had entered, her short, dark hair neatly coiffed, a black handbag dangling from the crook of her arm. Her eyes met Sophia’s; she smiled apologetically, unbuttoned her long coat to reveal a well-tailored red tweed suit and a double strand of lustrous pearls, and settled into the back pew.

  At that moment the warm-ups concluded. “Well done, kids,” Lucas said, rising from the piano bench. “As soon as Miss Sophia arrives—”

  “She’s over there,” Alex interrupted, pointing. Lucas gave a start and turned, evoking a smattering a giggles from the sopranos.

  “We’re all here now, so let’s continue,” Sophia replied, crossing the transept and joining Lucas at the piano. “Let’s begin with ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.’” As the children turned to the proper page in their binders, Sophia sniffed the air, sighed, and said to Lucas in an undertone, “Some very lucky person nearby has coffee.”

  “Yes, you.” Busily arranging his sheet music, Lucas nodded to the floor beside his bench, where she discovered a travel mug and a small brown paper bag. “I figured your concert would run late and you wouldn’t have time to stop. There’s a cranberry scone in the bag if you’re hungry.”

  “Lucas, you didn’t,” she exclaimed, picking up the cup and bag. “You’re a lifesaver, a saint, an angel.”

  “Not really. Just a guy who walked past a coffee shop on his way here.” He spared a glance for the children, who were becoming cheerfully restless. “How was the concert?”

  “The concert was great, but—” To her horror, a sob burst from her throat. “I lost my job. Or I’m going to. In June.”

  “You’re not going to teach us anymore?” protested Alex shrilly. “Father Ryan fired you? He can’t do that! We like you too much.”

  “No, no, Father Ryan didn’t fire me,” Sophia quickly assured him, and the other children too, for they all were regarding her with alarm. “I meant my other job. I’m not leaving St. Margaret’s.” As the anxious looks faded from the children’s faces, she murmured to Lucas, “Curse his sharp young ears. I didn’t mean for him to hear that.”

  “It’s okay,” said Lucas, his brow furrowing. “Take a deep breath. Have some coffee. We can talk about it afterward.”

  Cradling the mug in her hands, Sophia nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She closed her eyes and took a long, sustaining drink of coffee—still hot, comfortingly delicious, exactly the way she liked it. Lucas could deny it all he liked, but he was a saint.

  The children were waiting.

  “Trebles, let’s hear from you first,”
she said, straightening her shoulders, mustering a smile. “Remember the eighth rest before you come in. Lucas, if you will?”

  He nodded, his gaze full of concern and kindness as he placed his hands—strong, long-fingered, elegant—upon the keys.

  She raised her baton, the children came promptly to attention, and the music began.

  CHAPTER TWO

  December 1860

  On Christmas morning as the Longfellow family walked home from church, bells pealed gloriously overhead until all of Cambridge resounded in exultant euphony. Harness bells chimed in, light and cheerful, as horse-drawn sleighs glided swiftly down Brattle Street, their laughing passengers bundled warmly in blankets against the nip in the air. The sky was a flawless azure redolent of Iberian seas with nary a cloud, the sun shone with golden morning light, and a soft, downy blanket of snow covered the earth. Everywhere friends and neighbors called out greetings, and even strangers wished one another a Merry Christmas and courteously made room to pass on the sidewalks. With the promise of a Yule log burning on the hearth at home, a sumptuous feast to come, a good bottle of wine at the table, and friends gathered round to share it, Henry could almost believe that the tidings of that holy day could turn even the angriest hearts to reconciliation.

  Yet even as the gospel reading told the story of the birth of the Prince of Peace, Henry had overheard murmurs in the pews, troubling reports from South Carolina. After the service, as the worshippers filed from the church, conversations quickly turned from the exchange of holiday greetings to the rising enmity between North and South. The slave states had been threatening to leave the Union for more than forty years, but ever since Abraham Lincoln had won the presidential election in early November, tensions had soared and calls for secession in the Southern press had become even more frenzied and furious. Equally troubling, foreboding letters from Henry’s closest friend, Charles Sumner, the senior senator from Massachusetts, told of rising animosity within both chambers of Congress. Henry trusted Sumner’s judgment, for purely as a matter of self-preservation, his friend had become a careful observer of the temper of the Senate. More than four years earlier, Sumner had been beaten nearly to death in the Senate chamber by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who had taken great offense to one of Sumner’s more vitriolic speeches condemning slavery. Sumner’s head trauma and psychic wounds had been so severe that he had not resumed his Senate duties for three years.

  Through the post, Henry and Sumner debated the likelihood that South Carolina would make good on her threats and leave the Union. “What I am afraid of,” Henry confided to his friend, “is not that they will go, but that the North will yield. The tone of the Boston papers—the Atlas only excepted—is very weak and spiritless.”

  In conversations with his wife—his dear, beloved Fanny—Henry tried to be more optimistic. “Nothing will come of this bluster and outrage,” he had assured her only a few weeks before Christmas. “The Southern firebrands will settle down after Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, just as they always have.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Fanny, her large, dark eyes full of worry and doubt. “Their anger seems different this time. The Southern aristocrats seem inflamed by a particular hatred for Mr. Lincoln, and a desperate fear that he’ll take away their slaves with a stroke of a pen on his first day in office.”

  “If only it were that easy,” said Henry ruefully. “Even with Mr. Lincoln as president I believe the abolition of slavery will take time, and it’ll come only after the usual squabbling and deal-making in Washington City.”

  “Then you don’t believe war is inevitable?”

  “No, my dearest, I don’t, not war and not secession.” He smiled and kissed her. “I’ll believe that South Carolina truly intends to leave the Union when she leaves it and not before.”

  Fanny had seemed reassured, and Henry too had allowed himself to hope, but then, only a few days before Christmas, at a state convention at St. Andrew’s Hall in Charleston, the delegates of South Carolina had voted unanimously to secede from the Union. The stock market roiled, politicians debated what to do, and citizens North and South wondered—some in trepidation, others eagerly—which states would follow South Carolina into rebellion.

  With the Christmas bells ringing joyfully and his beloved Fanny on his arm, smiling warmly up at him from beneath the blue woolen hood of her cloak, it seemed to Henry almost unfathomable that anywhere thoughts could be troubled or hearts twisted in anger. He patted Fanny’s hand where it rested in the crook of his elbow and felt a familiar surge of wonder and happiness when she squeezed his arm tenderly and briefly rested her cheek against his shoulder. For all his poetical gifts, he could scarcely put into words what an inexpressible delight Fanny was to him, always and in all things. Although they had been married more than seventeen years, he still never caught a glimpse of her without a thrill of pleasure; she never entered a room where he was without his heart quickening, nor departed without feeling that some of the light went with her.

  Henry and Fanny had first met more than twenty-four years before, not in Boston though they lived but five miles from each other, but while traveling in the Bernese Alps—Henry, alone and grieving the recent loss of his first wife in childbirth; Fanny on a European tour with her father, elder brother, sister, and cousin. At nineteen, Frances Appleton had known her own share of heartbreak, and knew more yet awaited her; her mother had died of consumption three years before, a brother a year later, and the same disease afflicted her dear cousin William, who was among the traveling party, seeking respite from his illness in the crisp mountain air.

  Upon discovering that members of one of Boston’s most respected families were staying at his hotel in Thun, Henry had sent up his card to Fanny’s father, Nathan Appleton, a prominent member of the Whig Party and a prosperous businessman who had built a fortune developing New England’s textile industry. The Appletons were out at the time, but several days later, when they all had moved on to Interlaken, they finally met.

  Drawn together by their sympathetic understanding of each other’s loss, Henry and Fanny became fast friends. For nearly three weeks, amid the sublime beauty of the snow-capped Swiss mountains rising above pure, crystal lakes, they passed many pleasant hours together, strolling, reading, discussing art and literature, boating, sketching, and translating German poetry. Henry enjoyed the company of the rest of her family too, especially her elder brother Thomas—witty, irrepressible, and artistic—and her cousin William, whose fragile health and undaunted spirits evoked Henry’s respect and sympathy.

  All too soon duty summoned Henry elsewhere, but he parted from Fanny and her family in the consolation of knowing that they would meet again in Boston in a year’s time, after their grand tour concluded. Although Henry was by then an accomplished poet and a respected professor of modern European languages at Harvard, he realized that a significant disparity in social rank separated him from the Appletons. Yet he had been confident that the Appletons were too good, too noble-hearted a family, to let that impede their burgeoning friendship.

  What he had not anticipated in the midst of mourning for his lost wife and unborn child was that, over time, his feelings for Fanny would grow beyond friendship. More than a year after they met, Henry declared his love for Fanny, only to be clearly and decisively told that she did not return it. Humbled, he withdrew for a time to recover from the sting of her rejection, but the Appletons remained fond of him, and eventually friendship won out over pride and he resumed calling at their gracious townhome at 39 Beacon Street. He tried to conceal his enduring admiration for Fanny, but failed badly enough that he regularly found himself the object of amiable teasing within Boston society.

  Then, two years after Fanny spurned him, his infatuation and his pen conspired to ruin any chance for even friendship between them.

  In August of 1839, his philosophical travel novel, Hyperion: A Romance, was published to perhaps more puzzle
ment than acclaim. The story told of a young American, Paul Flemming, who fell in love with an Englishwoman, Mary Ashburton, while both were traveling in Germany. Mary, whom Paul described to a fictional friend as “not beautiful, but very intellectual,” refused him as a suitor despite his many excellent qualities. Hyperion was widely read, with sales invigorated by American readers’ eagerness to learn about German culture, but within Boston society it provoked intrigue for entirely different reasons. No matter how often and how emphatically Henry protested that his book was a novel, a work of fiction, every mutual acquaintance insisted on believing that Mary and Paul were thinly veiled renditions of a certain young heiress and a hapless, lovelorn professor. Within days of the novel’s publication, a chill—no, a veritable arctic whirlwind blowing down from the heights of Beacon Hill—descended upon their association.

  This second, sterner, seemingly irrevocable rejection plunged Henry deep into melancholy. Writing offered him some solace, but teaching none, so he eventually requested a leave of absence from Harvard and traveled to Germany in hopes of recovering his health. After several weeks partaking of the regimen at Marienberg on the Rhine—morning sweats, four cold baths a day, vigorous walks, a simple, healthful diet—he felt restored enough to befriend some of the other patients and even to compose some poetry. Yet his longing for Fanny did not ease in proportion to his dawning resignation that she would never have him.

  In the autumn of 1842 he returned to America, and soon thereafter he published several poems on slavery he had written during the tempestuous Atlantic crossing. He knew he risked damaging his professional reputation by expressing his abolitionist sentiments, not to mention jeopardizing friendships with acquaintances whose livelihoods in the textile industry depended upon Southern cotton—including the Appletons.