A Regency Christmas VI

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

  “They need parents, Ursula,” he heard himself say. “Not a mother. Not a father. Both. Parents. Plural.”

  “Yes,” she said softly from somewhere behind him.

  And he knew that he had stepped irrevocably into the unknown.

  “You and me,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  His hand opened and closed against the mantel. “Not for a few months with one and then a few with the other,” he said. “With both of us in one house all the time.”

  “Yes.”

  What the devil was he saying? What the devil was he doing? But whatever it was, it was too late now to go back. He could think of nothing more to say except the final words. The final question.

  But they hated each other, did they not?

  He turned his head and looked at her. She was standing in the middle of the room, her arms at her sides. Her face was pale. Her eyes looked haunted.

  “Ursula,” he asked her, “why did you marry him?”

  “I don’t know.” He watched her swallow. “There was scandal. There might well have been ostracism. You were gone. There was so much pain. And he asked me. It—it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Poor devil,” he said, though he could still feel nothing but intense dislike for her late husband.

  “I believe he used me too,” she said. “We deserved each other. It was not—well, not really a marriage. Not after the first few weeks. There were no children. There was not really”—she flushed—“not really the possibility.”

  In seven years Carlyle had bedded her for only the first few weeks? Why?

  “We rubbed along well enough together,” she said. “We both had what we wanted out of the marriage, I believe.”

  “What was it you wanted?” he asked her.

  “Peace,” she said. “I wanted to stop feeling. Feelings hurt. Love hurts.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Her eyes were filled with pain suddenly. “You said you would have come back,” she said. “Would you?”

  “Of course I would have come back,” he said. “I loved you. I suffered hell on your wedding night.”

  “Ah.” She covered her face with her hands.

  “Did you really believe it was all over?” he asked her.

  “Yes.” Her voice was dull and low against her hands.

  “What were your feelings?” He had picked up her agony.

  “I did not want to live,” she said. “I did not know how I was to drag myself through another fifty years or so of living.”

  There was a long silence, which he had no idea how to break. She stood where she was and kept her hands over her face.

  “Ursula,” he said at last and waited for her to look up at him with suffering eyes. He reached out his free arm. “Come here.”

  She came slowly and did not stop until her body rested against his own and her face was nestled in the folds of his neckcloth. He felt her draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly through her mouth. He closed his arms about her.

  “If we do what you suggest for the children,” she said, “it will be just for their sakes. Will it not?”

  He understood the uncertainty behind the question, the need for reassurance. The need for him to say the hardest three words in the language to string together. Though he had had no problem with them once.

  “The children are more important than you or I,” he said. “Their need for love and security and parents to lean on is almost a tangible thing. We can supply that need, and we must.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He lowered his head to rub his cheek across her hair. It was as soft and silky as he remembered it.

  “They will be our family,” she said. “Almost as we planned it. But—”

  “But?” he said when she did not continue.

  Her hands clutched the lapels of his coat. Tightly. “I wish I had waited for you to come,” she said. “I wish I had known that you would come. We might have loved and had a family of your own. It is too late now.”

  “Too late?” He took her by the upper arms and moved her back far enough that he could look down into her face. “How old are you, Ursula? Seven-and-twenty? Eight-and-twenty?”

  “Seven,” she said.

  “I was unaware,” he said, “that a woman’s fertile years are over so soon. And I have not noticed any tendency to impotence in myself even though I have passed my thirtieth birthday.”

  She blushed and her hands reached for the top button of his waistcoat. Just like Caroline. Her eyes watched her hands.

  He lowered his head close to hers. “Maybe we should try,” he murmured to her, “and find out if even at our advanced ages we can produce a child of our own. Shall we?”

  She bit her lower lip.

  “Or children,” he said. “Shall we be really clever and try to produce two? Or four? Boy, girl—”

  “—boy, girl,” she finished for him and laughed softly, though her eyes and her hands were still on his button.

  “Don’t twist too hard,” he said. “My valet will be inordinately cross if I take a waistcoat upstairs with me minus one button.”

  Her hands stilled and she set her forehead against them.

  “Timothy,” she said, “these two days have been the happiest of my life.”

  He listened to her in some surprise. But she was right. They had been the happiest of his too. And that included all of the three months between his first meeting with her and the breaking of their betrothal.

  “And of mine,” he said. There was a short pause. “Shall I say it first?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “I will feel foolish if I say it first and it turns out that you were not about to say that at all.”

  “But it is all right for me to make an idiot of myself,” he said. He rubbed his chin across the top of her head. “I love you, Ursula.”

  “I love you, Timothy,” she said so quickly that they finished almost together.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Do you want it on one knee?”

  “No,” she said. “How foolish. And yes. No for the bended knee, that is, and yes for marrying you. Will we regret it, do you suppose? When Christmas is over and we are back home and all this is a memory?”

  “The children will not be gone when Christmas is over,” he said. “And my love will not be gone. Or yours. It never did die, did it, just as mine did not.”

  “No.” She sighed and lifted her face at last to look at him. Oh, so close. “It never did. The only way I could deal with it was to kill all feeling in myself. And convince myself that what I felt—or did not feel—was peace and contentment. I never stopped loving you. I never will.”

  He swallowed. If this was unreality, he never wanted the real world back. He closed the gap of a few inches between their mouths.

  They moaned in unison and then had to pull back in order to laugh together. And to gaze into each other’s eyes.

  And to return to the serious business of embracing.

  A long time later he raised his head and sighed. “I believe we had better go up to bed,” he said. “Separately, though doing so may well kill me and you too if I am reading the signs correctly. But it would be in bad taste to take to the floor here—a notion that has crossed both our minds during the past several minutes. And in bad taste to share the same bed in our nephew and nieces’ house. Can you wait until our wedding night?”

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Approximately twenty-four hours after the soonest moment we can return to London,” he said.

  “Will you spring your horses?” she asked.

  “Actually,” he said, “I am going to get them to spread their wings.”

  He touched noses with her and they both laughed at the absurdity.

  “We will make love for the first time on our wedding night,” he said. “Sleep now and for the next few nights while you can. I shall be keeping you busy once we are married.”

  “Will you?” She buried her face against his neckcloth briefly onc
e more. “How wonderful that sounds. Promise?”

  He chuckled and hugged her tightly to him before releasing her and offering his arm.

  “Propriety, my lady,” he said. “Propriety.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said meekly, laying her arm along the top of his.

  They walked upstairs in silence. He kissed her outside the door to her room and reluctantly stepped away from her. Her eyes were shining so with love that for a moment he felt weak-kneed.

  “Happy Christmas, Timothy,” she said.

  “Happy Christmas, Ursula,” he said, making her a half bow. “The mistletoe works quite superbly, by the way.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “My love.”

  They laughed quietly. Their laughter sounded little different from the children’s giggles earlier in the day. They were being childish. It felt wonderful. He blew her a kiss. She blew one right back.

  He opened his own door and stepped inside.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “Agreed.”

  She closed her door before he did.

  Nurse had helped them dress and had brushed her curls and was combing Patricia’s hair more carefully.

  She was telling Patricia not to squirm, but she was saying it in her kind voice. Patricia was too excited to sit still. Caroline was excited too, but she could keep excitement deep inside herself so that people would not call her silly.

  And then Rupert came into their room. He was dressed and washed and combed and he was bursting with excitement too. He was usually not allowed to come into the girls’ room. It was not proper, Nurse always said. But nothing was said today. Nurse even smiled at him as she bade him good morning.

  “Do you think, Rupert?” Patricia asked him, her eyes meeting his in the mirror. “Do you think?”

  “I am not sure,” Rupert said. He switched to his man’s voice. “I do not care as long as Caroline gets at least one. And I hope there is one for you too, Patricia.”

  “Oh, but I do not want one unless there is one for you,” she said. “Caroline is the important one. She is only four.”

  Caroline knew they were talking about presents. But she did not really care if there were none. It was not her birthday, after all, but the baby’s. And they had decorated the drawing room downstairs for him as a surprise. They were going to take him down there afterward and they were all going to wish him a happy birthday. And they were all going to kiss him and coo over him. She was going to spin the Christmas star for him to look up at. And Mama and Papa were going to be there, and he was going to feel safe.

  She was going to feel safe. She already did. Papa had said he would keep her safe forever and ever. But the baby had not heard him.

  “Aunt Ursula said she was almost sure there would be,” Rupert said. His voice was his own again, and it was trembling so that Caroline knew that he very badly wanted for there to be presents.

  “For all of us.”

  “Oh,” Patricia said on a sigh. “Do you think, Rupert? Do you think she is always right?”

  “I think maybe she always is,” Rupert said carefully. And then the door opened again and Aunt Ursula and Uncle Timothy were there, hand in hand and smiling. Nurse left the room quietly.

  “I think,” Aunt Ursula said after they had all exchanged greetings, “you had better all come down to the drawing room. There are some strange parcels down there. And each of your names seems to be on more than one.”

  Patricia shrieked.

  Rupert jumped up and down three times on the spot. “Of course, if no one is interested...” Uncle Timothy said. He was grinning.

  Rupert and Patricia collided in the doorway and disappeared from sight. Aunt Ursula laughed.

  “Come, sweetheart,” she said and reached out a hand to Caroline.

  But Caroline hung back. “I have to go to the nursery,” she said. “You go on and I will come after.” Both Aunt Ursula and Uncle Timothy looked closely at her. They were still holding hands, Caroline noticed.

  It looked nice.

  “Very well,” Uncle Timothy said. “We will hold back the troops downstairs until you come.”

  And so Caroline went to the nursery and tiptoed inside and leaned over the cot. The baby was looking up at her, his little fists waving in the air. She smiled at him and lifted him carefully into her arms. She carried him all the way downstairs, her arms held out carefully in front of her. She took the stairs slowly, one at a time, so that she would not trip and fall. They had left the door of the drawing room open for her.

  “Here she is,” Uncle Timothy said. He was standing by the fire, under the mistletoe. Aunt Ursula was beside him.

  “Caroline. Look.” Patricia’s voice was still almost a shriek.

  “Presents,” Rupert cried in his dearest boy’s voice. “For all of us, Caroline.”

  But Caroline stepped carefully into the room and looked neither to the right nor to the left.

  “What is it?” Aunt Ursula asked gently.

  “You have hurt your hands?” Uncle Timothy asked, a look of concern on his face.

  “I have brought the baby,” Caroline said.

  “The baby.” Aunt Ursula looked as if she did not understand. She glanced at Uncle Timothy and he glanced at her.

  “It is his birthday party,” Caroline said. “We decorated the room for him. Look, he is awake. He wants Mama.”

  “Mama?” Uncle Timothy looked puzzled for a moment longer, but only for a moment. Caroline could see that he understood then as she had known he would. And Aunt Ursula too. She leaned down and stretched out her arms.

  “You had better hand him to me, then,” she said. “My, what a beautiful baby.” She took the baby carefully into her own arms and smiled down at him and rocked him. “Look at him, Timothy.”

  “He does not know that he has a mama and papa and that he will be kept safe forever and ever,” Caroline explained. “But now he will know.”

  She was surprised when she saw that Aunt Ursula was crying and that Uncle Timothy was blinking his eyes. But they were not sad tears. She could feel that.

  “Yes, now he will know,” Uncle Timothy said. “He will know that he has a mama and papa and a home where they will always be with him until he is a man. And that they will love him every day of his life. And his brother and his sisters too. His mama and papa are going to be married and live together always so that his family can always be together.”

  “We are really going to live with you?” Rupert said. “Always? There is really to be no orphanage?”

  “We are going to be with you and play with you every day?” Patricia asked.

  Aunt Ursula nodded and smiled. She would have wiped her tears away, Caroline knew, if she had not been holding the baby.

  “What is the baby’s name?” Patricia asked politely.

  “Why, Jesus, of course,” Aunt Ursula said before Caroline could open her mouth to speak.

  “Under the Bethlehem star,” Uncle Timothy said, glancing up, “where one would expect to find him.”

  “Caroline has such an imagination,” Rupert said fondly but apologetically.

  “She will grow out of it.” “I hope not,” Aunt Ursula said with a smile.

  “And since this baby is too small to open presents or even appreciate them,” Uncle Timothy said, “how about you children opening your parcels instead?”

  Rupert and Patricia darted over to the window ledge and the parcels with whoops of delight. Caroline waited a few moments to watch Uncle Timothy smile into Aunt Ursula’s eyes and lean carefully across the baby to kiss her on the lips.

 

 

 
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