A Midnight Clear
Authors: Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner
ONTENTS
Annapolis, Maryland, 1948
Frances Dumfries is the perfect admiral's daughter. She runs the household, hosts the parties, and never falls for the midshipmen surrounding her. Having fun or putting herself first is definitely not on her schedule. And she doesn't want anyone—particularly not a man too handsome and kind for his own good—to point that out.
Midshipman Joe Reynolds sympathizes: Ever since he tumbled headlong into love with Frances, life hasn't been much fun. With only so much time until he ships out from the Naval Academy, he’s racing the clock, and her refusal to give him a second look, to secure her affection. But this sailor isn’t surrendering in the campaign to win her heart.
Torn between duty and selfishness, it will take a Christmas miracle to show Frances and Joe that love is rare, precious… and worth fighting for.
“… no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage…”
- William Shakespeare,
As You Like It
HAPTER
O
NE
Annapolis, Maryland
October 1948
Frances Dumfries wanted to careen down Main Street. She wanted to fly. It was the view of the boats down in the harbor, shifting at their moorings and sending their masts bobbing. It was the ancient maples, filled with shuddering leaves that had gone all to crimson just this week. It was all the things she had to do before tonight’s dinner party.
There was only one problem. Well, one problem with sixteen hundred manifestations.
“Miss Dumfries!” This interruption came from a boy in navy blue lurking in a doorway. Like all the others, he wanted to pin her down. “Fancy running into you here.”
Yes, fancy that—since we both live in the same tiny town.
“Mm,” she replied vaguely, and her response was motivated only in part by the fact she couldn’t remember if his name was MacMillan or Monahan. From the insignia on his shoulder, she could tell he was a second-class midshipman, which was when they started to get especially antsy about the future.
“Where are you off to?” the probably Celtic-named midshipman asked. Or leered, rather. He was good looking in a clean-cut, athletic way, but the thing was—they all were.
“The florist’s. Right there.” She pointed to emphasize how close she’d been. She wasn’t likely to run into any ambitious would-be Naval officers there, but she wouldn’t put it beyond them.
Through squinty blue eyes, he watched her closely, precisely as a man might a dog he was thinking about acquiring. “I’d imagine you get enough flowers.”
You have no idea.
She said nothing, however; she didn’t want to encourage him.
He leaned a bit closer. “Did you get mine?”
Frances canted away and tangled her hands together. He would have sent flowers, wouldn’t he? “They were the, uh, calla lilies?”
“The carnations. We talked at the Mercers—”
Now she remembered! “Three weeks ago. Yes, they were lovely, thank you.” She thought she’d sent a note, but she couldn’t be sure. And the notes tended to encourage them so…
He—whatever his name was—relaxed a bit. He wasn’t offended. To the contrary, he seemed to think this was going well. “I was hoping I could take you out.”
And there it was: the inevitable destination of every version of this conversation. “Well, I’m quite busy at the moment.” This was true. “I have classes, and there’s my sister, and my father’s social calendar alone—”
“I’m not particular. I could stop over for dinner almost any night.”
Frances gritted her teeth. Most boys weren’t nearly this direct. Most of the time they at least pretended they wanted to see
her
. Most of them went to the trouble of taking her out a few times, and not merely sending the cheapest possible flowers. They’d go on walks or to parties. They’d express condolences for her mother’s passing. They’d hold her hand and maybe even offer a tepid kiss.
And after all that, they’d suggest they might come to dinner.
For this reason, she’d stopped seeing midshipmen. She’d stopped seeing men at all. So this one’s approach saved them both time.
Frances drew herself up to her full height, which was considerable, and raised a brow slowly. “Did you just invite yourself to dinner? With the admiral?”
“I, no, that is, I want to have dinner with
you
.”
“And my father.”
He swallowed. He didn’t apologize or even appear contrite—he didn’t have quite enough poise—but his cheeks colored. She let the moment sit between them, stretch until it broke. And when it did, she wasn’t the one to look away—he took to inspecting his shoes.
They never could outlast her.
“Thank you for the flowers.” She swept past him and into the florist’s shop.
Inside gawking through the glass was her sister, Suzanne. When Frances swung the door open and set the bells jingling, Suzanne began speaking. “Let me guess: He adores you. He can’t live without you. You are the Juliet to his Romeo.”
Frances shut the door and leaned against it. “You saw all of that and you didn’t think to rescue me?”
“Every woman for herself.”
Not that Suzanne was a woman at sixteen. No, Suzanne was a scamp who still scraped her knees and tore her dresses trying to climb trees to aid injured birds. She’d been a little girl yesterday, but today, well, she’d lost the childishness from her face and gained a bosom. She hadn’t seemed to notice it herself, but Frances had and surely she wasn’t alone. Most of the midshipmen would consider Suzanne too young. Most, but not all.
At nineteen, Frances no longer had that shield. It was always open season on the admiral’s eldest daughter. Too bad the prey couldn’t fire back.
“Give it two years and this won’t be funny,” Frances said.
“Maybe Father will have retired by then.”
At that, both Dumfries girls roared with laughter—because the admiral was going to outlive them all. Generations of midshipmen were going to come up knowing the old man’s imposing stare and even more imposing temper. And for all that they were terrified of him, they’d still chase his daughters.
When they caught their breath, Frances linked her arm through Suzanne’s and they strolled up to the counter. “Good morning, Mr. Ossing. I need some flowers for centerpieces and they need to hold up through two parties.”
An hour later, they had ordered flowers—roses and baby’s breath, which were Father’s favorites—and stopped in at the butcher’s, and were finally on their way home. When they reached South Street and were nearly safe, Frances let Suzanne tug her toward a bookshop.
“We have a thousand and one things to do before tonight,” Frances said, not putting up much of a fight.
Suzanne would hear none of it. “Nonsense. Colleen”—she was their cook—“is doing most of the work.” That was true. “Live a little, sis.”
“All I do is live.”
Frances knew she was alive. She was breathing, eating, reading, entertaining, going to school, and raising a younger sister. If there was anything more to this living business, she hadn’t experienced it—and therefore it must not be important.
Once they were inside the bookshop, Suzanne muttered something about animal husbandry and wandered off. For her part, Frances strode over to the fiction. She ran her fingers over the spines of the books until she found a Georgette Heyer she hadn’t read:
Devil’s Cub
. It sounded scandalous. Romance was always better in fiction than in life.
She contemplated the mysteries and the non-fiction, but she couldn’t find anything Father might like—and it wasn’t as if he had much time for books in any event.
When Suzanne came over with a book about horse training in hand, they paid, stowed their books amongst their shopping bags, and received no propositions. It had been a productive digression.
But when they were leaving, it happened. They approached the door and it swung open, and who should be holding it except for
him
—the only sailor in the whole city who stood out.
He was in uniform, but somehow on him, working blues looked like civilian clothing. Like his skin and not a costume.
He’d been waiting outside. He must have been observing her for who knew how long. That didn’t make any sense because since the first time she’d seen him, she’d felt stupidly, doggedly, specifically aware. Her body had found a function it didn’t know it had in sensing him. Whenever he was near, every part of her lit.
He held the door wide open, his brown eyes on her, willing her to look at him. And like a fool, she did.
Under her sweater and jacket, she could feel the hair on her arms rise. Her breath went shallow and her lungs wouldn’t stay full. She ran her free hand over the coarse wool of her skirt, needing in some way to move.
Right! She was supposed to be walking. But when she tried to do so, her toe caught on the flagstones in front of the door. She would have pitched forward and into the ground if not for Suzanne’s arm.
“Oof!” Frances huffed out.
“Aren’t we clumsy? We’ll have to bring back the walking with a book lessons.” Suzanne said thank you to the boy holding the door and began to tow Frances into the street—which was going to bring her right past him. Closer to him than in fact she’d ever been.
And her sister, because she didn’t know something momentous was happening, kept on talking. “I was thinking about the recital next week. I might—”
“Hello.” He didn’t just look. He spoke too.
Which of course she knew from when they’d met, but it still surprised her.
He had a gentle, smooth baritone, the kind of voice that would sound so enticing when it suggested she ought to have him to dinner, and that he’d love, simply love, to meet her father. And couldn’t she be a dear and mention something about his ambitions to the Secretary the next time he dropped by?
And somehow from him—from those eyes brimming with so much yearning—she couldn’t take it. The rest of them could be the grasping, ambitious imbeciles they were and she was unmoved. From him, it would hurt too much.
So for the first time all day, she was truly rude. She brushed out onto the sidewalk and then pulled Suzanne closer. She didn’t glance in his direction. Instead, she looked across the street at the houses with paper decorations pasted in the windows and pumpkins on the stoops. The focal point, the distraction, was what she needed. She inhaled deeply, trying to pull the promise of fall into her lungs.
“What about the recital?” she asked, impressed that she was able to form cogent words with everything churning inside her.