A Regency Christmas VI

by Mary Balogh, Jo Beverley, Sandra Heath, Edith Layton, Laura Matthews

  “There,” Caroline said, pointing downward. The snakes were still there, but there were more of them now and they were moving faster. She could not see them too clearly herself, though, because she was not kneeling down and leaning across the window seat.

  And then her uncle set his hands at her waist and lifted her up to stand on the seat. He kept his hands where they were so that she would feel safe. Caroline did not like to tell him that it was forbidden to stand on the window seat. She waited for Nurse to scold him, but she did not do so. Perhaps Nurse was being polite to guests.

  “They do indeed look like snakes,” her uncle admitted.

  “And they really are all going the same way,” her aunt said. “It is because of the wind, you know. They are not as strong as the wind and must go wherever it decides to blow them.”

  Caroline was encouraged to say more. People usually called her silly when she said such things. These days she usually kept them to herself.

  “One is going to go back the other way soon,” she said. “A hero snake. A prince. He is going to rescue the princess.”

  “Ah,” her uncle said. “Of course. Hero princes always rescue princesses.”

  “And marry them and live happily ever after,” her aunt added.

  “Miss Caroline is given to flights of fancy, my lord and my lady,” Nurse said quickly, her voice breathless and flustered. “If the children are a trouble to you...”

  “They are not,” Caroline’s uncle said. “They are our kin, Mrs. Chambers.”

  “Perhaps you would care to take the opportunity to go down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, Mrs. Chambers,” her aunt added.

  “The fierce dragon has taken her captive,” Caroline said. It was getting dark. It did not look as if the hero were going to slither back across the path today. Perhaps tomorrow. The princess would have to spend another night in captivity.

  “Dragons have a tendency to do that,” her uncle said.

  “I do believe it is starting to snow in earnest,” her aunt said. She did not sound too happy about it.

  “We are not to build snowmen,” Rupert said. He was talking in his own voice again. His own voice, but sad.

  “Or to make snow angels,” Patricia said. She sounded sad too.

  Caroline remembered last year and the dreams that had not come true. They were not going to come true this year either. “Or to have Christmas,” she said, forgetting about her snow snakes and staring into the gloom of the road beyond the gate. “Is there Christmas? Or is it just a story?”

  “We are in mourning,” Rupert said. He had changed voices again.

  “Our mama and papa have passed on,” Patricia said, “and we must wear black out of respect for them.” There was a silence.

  Caroline turned on the window seat and looked into her uncle’s face. It was not so far above her own now. He looked a little bit like a prince himself, only old, of course. She liked his eyes. They stopped her from feeling frightened of him. And she liked his embroidered waistcoat. Her eyes were drawn to the gleaming black button visible above his coat. She reached out a finger and touched it. It was smooth and ridged where the pattern was.

  “Is there Christmas?” she asked him. She suddenly felt very sad, expecting that he would say no, just as Nurse always said that there were no fairy godmothers and no elves at the bottom of the garden. And no dragons with captive princesses. She wanted desperately for there to be Christmas.

  His eyes—they were blue, like Rupert’s—changed and became quite noticeably kind. “Yes, there is Christmas,” he said. “There is always Christmas, every year.”

  “But not this year,” Rupert said. He remembered his manners. “Sir.”

  “And there is a story too,” their aunt said. “A wonderful story that comes true every year.”

  “Except this year,” Patricia said.

  “Mama and Papa passed on to heaven,” Caroline told her uncle, in case he had not heard Patricia or did not know the completion of their story. “They are with angels. And there is a throne.”

  “Yes.” Her uncle did something unexpected. He slid one arm down from her waist to the back of her knees and the other up about her back, and he lifted her into his arms. She was looking down at her aunt and at Rupert and Patricia. She liked being up there. She felt safe. And she liked the way he smelled. It was all snuffy and leathery and soapy. She set one arm about his neck.

  “Are we going to the orphanage, Uncle?” Patricia asked.

  “No,” their uncle said.

  “No,” their aunt said at the same moment.

  “Why did Mama and Papa pass on?” Caroline asked her uncle.

  His arms tightened about her, but he did not answer her question.

  “Oh, dear,” her aunt said, and Caroline could tell that she was pretending to be cheerful when she did not feel cheerful. “I think we had better ring for tea.”

  The tiresome butler—or, rather, the servant who performed the functions of butler, footman, groom, and probably gardener too—had placed them at opposite ends of a rather long dining table. He—Viscount Morsey—was at the head, of course. She was at the foot. She had thought of asking for a dinner tray to be sent to her room, but she would not give him the satisfaction of believing that he had driven her into hiding.

  She looked down the table at him while the servant was ladling out her soup. “They will not be sent to an orphanage, of course,” she said. “But I cannot be expected to be solely responsible for their care. I live in town, and neither the place nor my home is adapted to the upbringing of young children. You, on the other hand, have three homes, two of them in the country. You would not be inconvenienced by them at all.”

  “Except that I am a single man,” he said. “Children need a mother’s care.”

  “And a father’s,” she added, bristling.

  “Girls need a mother figure on whom to pattern their ways,” he said, spreading his napkin rather ostentatiously on his lap and picking up his soup spoon. He had changed into evening clothes grand enough for a court appearance—black, of course, she noticed, and wondered if he had dressed so immaculately in mockery of her. But then he had always dressed well and still did, if the occasional glimpses she had of him in town were anything to judge by. And he was handsomer now than he had been ... Well, perhaps not. But his good looks irritated her.

  “And boys need a father figure for the same reason,” she said. “This family includes both genders, my lord.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, his empty spoon suspended halfway between his mouth and his dish, “you would suggest that we split the family, my lady? You take the girls and I take the boy?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said tartly. “Did you not see how the little one depends upon her elder brother and how protective he is of both sisters? They must remain together.”

  “At one of my country houses,” he said, setting his spoon down altogether and gazing down the table at her with half-closed eyes. The bored look. The look she had found irresistible as a girl. To say that she had been head over ears for him was to understate the case. Foolish girl.

  “They will not be an inconvenience to either of us there,” she said.

  She cursed him silently for not making an immediate reply. Silence stretched and her words—her callous, heartless words—seemed to echo and reecho about the walls of the large and gloomy dining room. How could she have spoken them? Worse, how could she have meant them?

  “Just as they were no inconvenience here to Marjorie and your brother,” he said at last.

  She felt her cheeks grow hot and made matters worse. “Do not pretend that you want them any more than I do,” she said. “Both our lives are set on a course of childlessness.”

  “Not really,” he said, nodding to the butler to remove his dish and bring on the next course. “I am a viscount, heir to an earl’s title, and this year I reached that dreaded landmark for a single man of title and property, my thirtieth birthday. I will doubtless do my duty and marry and set up my
nursery within the next few years.”

  She felt her blush deepen. They had once intended to set it up together. Four children, they had both agreed. They would do it in good order, he had said laughingly. Boy, girl, boy, girl—the perfect family.

  “Why did you never have children?” he asked.

  She looked up at him, shocked. “My lord?” she said.

  “I have often wondered,” he said. “You married him eagerly enough, less than a month after you ended our betrothal, as I recall.”

  She drew breath slowly. “My marriage and my childlessness are none of your concern, my lord,” she said. “None whatsoever.” She had had no children because after the first month of her marriage Carlyle had made it clear to her that he far preferred his men friends to her, and guessing at his meaning, she had kept her bedchamber door locked against him ever after. He had married her for respectability, she suspected—a suitable fate, perhaps, when she had married him for escape.

  “No. My apologies.” He glanced toward the window, across which the curtains had not yet been drawn. “This is the most damnable time for a snowstorm. We are going to be trapped here together for days, Ursula. And with three children. Over Christmas. Can you imagine a worse nightmare?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “Not even if you gave me an hour to think about it. And I would be obliged if you watched your language in my presence, my lord. And I have not granted you permission—lately—to use my given name.”

  “Lady Carlyle, ma’am,” he said—there was as much frost in his voice as there was snow outside, “do accept my humble apologies.”

  She tackled the veal course with as much appetite as if she had already eaten twelve hearty courses.

  “They have to wear black,” he said, “for parents they rarely saw. And they must behave as if they are in deepest mourning.” He sounded faintly angry.

  “They will not be allowed to play in the snow tomorrow,” she said, “though there will undoubtedly be plenty of it out there to tempt them. No snowmen and no snow angels. Or snowball fights. Or sliding on the paths. Or shrieking for the mere fun of it.”

  “And no Christmas,” he said. “No decorations, no presents, no goose or any of the trimmings, no caroling. Just perhaps a sedate attendance at a Christmas church service.”

  “The little one asked if there is such a thing as Christmas,” she said. “She is four years old. Surely she can remember Christmas from last year, even if not from the year before.” She had been disturbed by the question. She faced its full implications now. She looked up at him, her eyes troubled. “Have they never had a proper Christmas, Timothy? Were Marjorie and Adrian never here with them? Not even at Christmas?”

  She realized too late that she had used his name and hoped he had not noticed.

  “Christmas is a time adults are often most reluctant to give to anyone but themselves,” he said.

  His words stung as she remembered her own peevish irritation in the carriage earlier.

  “Myself included, my lady,” he said, with such emphasis on the last words that she knew he had noticed her slip of the tongue.

  “It is criminal,” she said at last. “If you and I miss Christmas, we merely miss a few parties. If children miss Christmas, they miss one of the magic elements of childhood. Have Marjorie and Adrian deprived these children of it in the past? Are they to deprive them again this year because they have died? Is it fair to make children mourn?”

  “For two people they scarcely knew?” He was not eating his pudding. He was leaning back in his chair and turning his spoon over and over on the cloth with one hand. “Is the making of snowmen and snow angels disrespectful to the dead?”

  “Who makes the rules by which these children live?” she asked.

  “Their nurse?” he said. “A competent, affectionate, unimaginative woman, by my judgment.”

  “In charge of at least one child of superb imagination,” she said, thinking with unexpected fondness of the snow snakes and the snake prince and the dragon and princess. “Should it not be you or I making the rules?”

  He pursed his lips and looked at her from those maddeningly drooping lids. “You want to give them Christmas?” he asked. “Do you know how, Urs—, my lady?”

  She thought. “It has been a long time,” she said. “But I can remember. I can remember the magic and perhaps what caused it. And you?”

  He too thought for a while. “Yule logs,” he said. “Holly, ivy, mistletoe. Stirring the pudding. Wrapping gifts. Unwrapping them. Singing carols.”

  “And the Christmas story,” she said.

  “Ah, yes.” He laughed softly. “Sometimes one almost forgets. So we are to break all the rules and sacrifice our own comfort and time in order to give our nephew and nieces a Christmas to remember—before they are incarcerated on one of my country estates. Snow is always an extra bonus at Christmas, of course. Are you prepared to acquire red and tingling fingers and toes—and nose, my lady, in the cause of entertaining three children neither of us really cares a damn about?”

  “Mind your language,” she said sharply, glaring at him. “And it is not true.” Her eyes wavered from his when she remembered that it was perfectly true, as she would realize when she had got past this madness of wanting to give them something they had never had. “It is not true. I felt something in the nursery earlier. Rupert is trying to be the man of the family. He is trying to be brave. And Patricia is trying to be worthy of him. The little one is simply adorable. Patricia has my red hair. Rupert has your blue eyes. Caroline is quite herself. They might almost be—”

  “Ours?” His eyebrows had shot up and his eyes had opened wide to reveal the full extent of their blueness. “Hardly, my dear ma’am. We have never bedded down together, even once, though we came close on that one occasion in Vauxhall when your mama allowed us to slip free of her chaperonage for almost a whole blissful hour.”

  He had kissed her hotly, with opened mouth and probing tongue. His hands had wandered all over her—on top of her clothing—as had hers over him. She had been pressed, and had pressed herself, hard enough against him and had known enough about life even then to realize how aroused he was and how easy and pleasurable it would be to couple there on the darkened path beyond the main thoroughfare. She was still not sure which of them had ensured that it had not happened.

  It was a memory she did not care to take out of the recesses of her brain with any great regularity.

  “It is just like you,” she said, “to have the vulgarity to remind me of that indiscretion.”

  “Is it?” he said. “Am I vulgar, ma’am? I suppose that to a bluestocking like yourself most activities that are not of the intellect appear vulgar.”

  “Touché!” she exclaimed, slapping down her napkin on the table and rising to her feet. “I shall leave you to your port, my lord.”

  “On the contrary, ma’am,” he said, getting up too and coming toward her in order to offer his arm. “We will adjourn to the drawing room in order to plan the Christmas we are going to give the children who could not possibly be of our own bodies. Do you suppose we can remain civil to each other long enough to make it happen?”

  “I always know how to be civil, my lord,” she said.

  “Except,” he said, “when you are ending a betrothal.”

  “I believe your memory is at fault, my lord,” she said. “I believe the ending of our betrothal was at least mutually agreed upon. I believe I was accused of being mercenary and conniving. Not quite the words of a man who valued his betrothal.”

  “And I was cold and tightfisted and hard-hearted,” he said. “Not quite the type of accolade a man expects of his betrothed.”

  “You were quite right,” she said. “This is a damnable situation we find ourselves in. I cannot imagine anyone in whose company I would less like to spend a few days. Even the devil himself would be preferable.” It was his nearness, the firmness of his arm muscles beneath her hand, the heat of his body, the smell of him, all so strangely familiar, t
hat was doing it. She hated his nearness. She hated the thought that they must live in the same house for an indeterminate number of days, and sleep in the same house.

  Perhaps, she thought, one could hate so intensely only someone one had once loved with an equal intensity. It was not a comforting thought.

  “The question is,” he said, seating her in the drawing room and standing before her, his hands clasped at his back, “can we put aside this mutual antipathy for each other, my lady, in order to bring a little happiness into the lives of innocent children. I can. Can you?”

  “Yes,” she snapped at him. “Yes, I can. But we must find something a little less personal on which to converse, my lord. Shall we begin with the weather?”

  “It seems a topic on which there is much to be said at the moment,” he said, seating himself opposite her, taking a snuffbox out of his pocket, and flicking it open with his thumb in a well-remembered gesture. This was certainly not going to be easy.

  He stood at the window of his bedchamber, drumming his fingers on the sill and staring outward. It was as he had expected, only perhaps worse. The light of morning hurt his eyes, though the sky was still full of heavy clouds and there was not the glimmering of a sign of the sun. It was still snowing, in fact. His eyes hurt because there was nothing outside except whiteness. Nothing. Even the fence posts were laden with snow, and the branches of the trees. It was impossible to know where the lawn ended and the path began or where the road began and ended. The gate was hardly visible. It would be next to impossible to open it. At a guess he would say that at least a foot of snow had fallen during the night.

  Wonderful! All his predictions had come true. They were well and truly marooned in this house for days. For Christmas. He and Lady Carlyle and the three children. And he would not even have the dubious comfort of shutting himself in his room or in the bookless library downstairs with the few books he had brought with him and a decanter of brandy. Just last evening he had agreed to break all the rules of decency and propriety in order to allow the children to enjoy Christmas. He had not changed his mind, but he was realizing this morning that giving three young children a Christmas was going to involve some considerable exertion on his part.