While I am no writer and could never do Catherine Marshall's book justice, I love this TV series and book enough to try.

Please review and follow, I'd like to hear your feedback.

This is set sometime before David's proposal, which this story will include. And happily so (for me), I am writing this story as if Margaret has passed away, like the novel. I never liked resurrecting Margaret from the dead; I think it was a cheap plot device. I also won't include Ida or Dan, just because it's too many voices and characters to capture (though I do love them). Everything else follows similarly to the TV series during the second season.

Disclaimer: Catherine Marshall's Christy is the property of the Marshall-LeSourd family. I am in no way seeking credit or profit for her story; this work of fanfiction is for amusement only. All references to Scripture, songs, books, etc. belong to their respective owners.


Chapter 1 - A Moral Dilemma

Spring, 1913

Candlelight flickered across Christy Rudd Huddleston's youthful face as she swept the straw broom across the rough wooden floor of the church. Sometimes, in the stillness of the night, she heard Tennessee bullfrogs bellow their chests to her favorite song, Near to the Heart of God. For that was the very song that led her from Asheville, North Carolina, to Cutter Gap, Tennessee all those months ago. And was she ever nearer to the heart of God. Christy felt nearer to Him this past year than she had in her formative years combined.

Her heart swelled in reverence for God's timely provision. He had answered her cry for purpose during a dark season of her life. And if He'd never spoke to her again, she knew He cared, existed, and gave her an example to walk by—Jesus.

Christy lifted her sweetly tone deaf voice up to the rafters and swept to the beat of her song:

"There is a place of full release,

Near to the heart of God;

A place where all is joy and peace,

Near to the heart of God."

Cutter Gap. . . an unsuspecting place for Christy to find joy, peace, and full release. Joy in the children and her abiding walk with God, and peace with her long-term calling to minister to her highlanders. Now if only she'd have peace with one highlander in particular: Dr. Neil MacNeill.

She blew a wisp of hair out of her face. That man taunted her like. . . like. . . she couldn't think of an apt response. He completely exasperated her. She banged her hip into one of the student's desks and bowled over in pain. That's what I get for arguing with a bull-headed man like Neil MacNeill. Pain.

Yet, she had to admit, after their frays she never felt more alive or invigorated. He challenged her, tested her mettle, and while she often left feeling like a child, he made her feel like her voice mattered.

"Do I hear singing, Miss Huddleston?" The doctor's familiar brogue lit her ears and warmed her stomach. A warm blush scattered across her face like Ruby Mae's orange freckles. "I am not familiar with that song." He laid his saddlebag across a bench and walked to her purposefully, his riding boots rhythmically sending a hollowed noise underneath the wooden planks.

"Dr. MacNeill, what are you doing out here so late? It has to be past nine o'clock. Soon you won't be able to find your way home." She leveraged the broomstick between her and the doctor lest he see her deep blush.

"I could ask you the same thing," he remarked, the candlelight catching a teasing glimmer in his eyes. "I've got a bunk set at Grantland's cabin tonight. I saw candlelight through the window and thought you'd be out here." He ran a hand through his sandy-red hair, setting his curls off like the fireworks in her stomach.

He cleared his throat. "Look, I wanted to talk about our conversation a few days ago in private. . ." Christy waited for him to continue. Maybe this time he'll eat his words like I do mine. "I've thought long and hard about what you said, about Grantland preaching about the dangers of public displays of affection, especially after we saw Bessie Coburn and John Spencer together by the river. . ."

Neil and Christy had stumbled upon them privately during a walk after one of his science lessons. Her cheeks blazed for what seemed the thousandth time at the recollection.


She skirted around the springtime blossoms, her sage green skirt swishing against her laced boots as she and Neil made their way down the side of a hill. "Sometimes, Neil, all I want to do is bask under the sun with a good book. . . get lost in the world of Gaston Leroux or some sort."

"Gaston Leroux? What's he written?" Neil's accent nicked through the steamy air.

"Recently, a book called The Phantom of the Opera. It's all the rage from the letters my friend Emma sent me."

"That doesn't strike me as a book you'd read. Didn't you tell me you're afraid of the dark?"

"It's not that type of ghost, Doctor. It's about a man that haunts an opera house."

"Fair enough. I'll leave it to the schoolteacher to read what she wants to read. . . I've a mind to read something other than my monthly medical journals."

"Oh!" Christy had gasped, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. Despite living in Cutter Gap for over a year, her Victorian modesty often got the best of her, and, for what it seemed, at the most inopportune times.

"What is it?" Neil followed her eyesight, grabbed her arm, and hid her behind a copse of hickory trees. "We don't want to bother the lovebirds," he stated matter-of-factly, as if finding two adolescents wrapped in each other's arms was a daily occurrence for him.

This wasn't a kiss like David had given her weeks prior—quick, perfunctory, chaste. This was a man and woman in love, twined together on the grassy outskirts of the river near Neil's house.

Her voice came out in a near squeak. "I need to do something!"

The tree bark was rough on her back, scraping through her cambric shirtwaist. "Oh, no you don't!" Neil trapped her between two thick arms, his faded green flannel taut against his forearms. Flames leapt on her cheeks and in her eyes. His hot breath thickened the humidity. His eyes fixated on her, like a mountain lion eyeing a jackrabbit.

"Why not, Neil? They are only teenagers! Bessie is barely fifteen!"

A wicked smile formed on the doctor's full lips as if they held untold secrets. "And you are just barely a young woman, Miss Huddleston."

Ire rose in her chest at his targeted approach to tear at her pride. She had already felt childish, what with her breaking a precious glass vase and forgetting to buy grain in El Pano the day prior. Currently, David was in El Pano, paying for the broken vase and the grain.

"I am almost twenty-one years old, Neil MacNeill. And I am their school teacher, a Christian school teacher! I can't let them—"

His baritone laugh shook the tree he leaned on. . . as if the very trees were laughing with him.

"Neil! Don't mock me!"

"I'm not mocking you, Christy. I am laughing at how your nose wrinkles when you get mad. Every time, without fail, that nose wrinkles up like an English pug. Besides, let them have their fun. It is a lovely day, the birds are singing, the bees are buzzing. . ."

A sprightly curl fell languorously across his brow, momentarily distracting Christy's attention. The breeze picked up the rare scent of aftershave, a smell not often found on the man she associated leather and pipe tobacco with. His full lips taunted her for a taste, and not for the first time, she imagined what it would be like. . . strong, sweet, passionate. Her mouth watered.

"Neil, still. . ." She removed her eyes from his lips to his hazel eyes, "My students need to learn how to wait for the proper time. I'm sure David could preach a sermon about this, maybe something found in Song of Solomon. . . or Ecclesiastes."

Christy sensed Neil bristle when she brought up the young preacher. "Grantland doesn't need to preach a sermon about Bessie and John. It would be to no effect. Actually, he'd do more harm than good."

"That's not true—" Neil put a square-tipped finger on her lips.

"Haven't you had a childhood beau you stole kisses from? Or wish you did? I'll certainly not ruin their innocent fun." He lightly skimmed his thumb across her lips before cradling her face in his wide palm. The hickory creaked from the stirring wind, and a coil of her auburn hair swept onto Neil's lips.

He leaned closer, the rays in his eyes heating her skin and her heart like a warm sunny day. Oh, it wasn't just a sunny day, it was one of the best. She enjoyed her time with the doctor, enjoyed the passion in his voice and the tremor he aroused in her when he stood near. "Perhaps the school teacher needs some fun, too. . ."

He was nothing if not persistent, his Scottish charm like harsh whisky down her throat. She felt like she was choking on his vitality. . . it made her veins throb under her skin. She could only give in to the curiosity - the intoxication - she had for the enigmatic doctor.

Reason overrode sense, and she placed a well-timed hand on his chambray-cloaked chest, his heart hammering underneath her fingertips. "Doctor," she said breathlessly, "we cannot idly stand by and allow my students to behave in such a manner."

"Christy, let Papa explain." He cleared his throat and took a step back, scratching the nape of his scragged hair. His eyes focused on the couple behind her shoulder, and reframed back on her face. "Right now, John and Bessie are away from the difficulties of life for a few fleeting moments. And soon they will be forced back into the present of backbreaking work, hunger, and tiredness. Give them this time, Christy. They need an escape."

She couldn't. She was held accountable to these students, and to God, no less, and needed to protect them from poor decisions. She slipped out from Neil's blockade and huffed over like a mother hen.

"Bessie, John, stop right this instant!" Bessie and John sprung off one another like two cats thrown into a body of water. She heard Neil groan audibly behind her. "You two know better than that! Go home before I tell your mother, John Spencer! And you too, Bessie Coburn!"

A sense of finality and power settled over her shoulders when they sulked back into the forest to their respective homes. . . until Neil's hand rested on her shoulder and whispered, "Always have to be in control now, do we?"

"You're a boor, Neil MacNeill!"

"And you're going to miss your turn soon if you'd stop seeing red!" Neil called after her, the mirth in his voice fraying her rigid sensibilities. And sure enough, it took her twice as long to get back to the mission. Well, she most certainly would tell David, and with sweet relish when David firmly agreed to preach about it that next Sunday.


"Christy, are you even listening to me? I've been yammering on about this and you're not even with me." His calloused hand caught her wrist. "Slow down, you've been spinning around me with that broomstick and I'm getting dizzy."

"Neil, I—I don't—I just got lost in my thoughts for a moment. You were apologizing to me?"

The seductive lighting of the church deepened as he blew out a candle, the smoke billowing up into the rafters before disintegrating into the night sky. He shifted his gaze to the floor and squashed a bug under his riding boots. "I came here to state my case that Grantland shouldn't preach about public affection. It's a fact of life here that male and female relations are for pleasure and procreation. Why, it all happens in the same cabin. Love-making isn't a silent activity, Christy."

"Neil! We cannot talk about this in a church. . . alone!"

His booming laugh echoed in her ears, embarrassing her. Her prudish manners enticed him even more than Margaret's flagrancy did. Kept him on his toes.

She moved passed him in a sign of busyness and placed the broom in the closet. She blew out one candle, two, three, four. "I just want to protect the children from maturing too early." Her voice felt small in the room's expansive darkness. She didn't rightfully know what she was saying, and felt all the more insecure because of it. The children know more about love-making than I do, she realized. Even Mountie, her beloved, probably had an inkling to what went on behind the curtains hanging around her parent's bed.

"Christy, haven't you seen their eyes? All of these children have seen more than what outsiders might see in a lifetime; don't forget." Neil swung his bags onto his broad shoulders and followed her down the church steps to the mission.

It's as if he read her mind. "I haven't forgotten. We are talking in circles, Neil. At this point, I'm going to wait for what Miss Alice says."

"And she'll side with me. She knows how futile this will be as well, just like preaching against moonshine was."

Christy stopped and poked a finger at Neil's chest. "With no help from you, Neil! If I recall, you warned the moonshiners before the law could apprehend them!"

"The female brain never ceases to flummox me. I do something, she gets mad. I do nothing, she gets mad." He sighed good-naturedly. "You know you confuse me? Just when I think I understand that brain of yours, I'm reminded to step lively." The crow's feet around his eyes walked from the smile on his lips. "But, Christy, as much as I enjoy debating with you, I didn't come to do that tonight. I do hope you see my perspective though."

"I simply disagree." She paused, realizing her tone had taken quite a cutting edge. "Excuse my impertinence. I do respect your perspective—in fact, I want your perspective on another matter entirely. Do you think we can talk about it tomorrow after church?"

Neil cocked his head to one side like a bloodhound on the hunt for a scent. He'd come running. "Certainly, Christy. You know I am always here for you."

And when Christy laid on her bed that night, the patterned quilt cocooned around her body, she wished it was someone's arms instead. And that frightened her more than the impending sermon tomorrow.