A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh.” Amy clasped her hands to her bosom and looked across at Judith.

  “Ye-e-es!” Rupert cried.

  Kate looked fixedly up into the marquess’s face.

  “Ma’am?” Lord Denbigh looked at Judith, whose face had lost all color. “Perhaps I should have asked you privately? It looks as if your family will be disappointed if you say no and you would, very unfairly, seem to be the villain. But it will please me more than I can say if you accept.”

  “Oh, Judith,” Amy said, “it would be so wonderful.”

  “Lord Denbigh’s housekeeper will not be expecting four extra guests,” Judith said in a strangled voice.

  “My housekeeper is always ready for guests,” the marquess said. “She has learned from experience that they may descend upon her at any time and in any numbers.”

  “But it must be your decision,” Amy said. “I told you when I came to live with you, Judith, that I would go wherever you wished to go and do whatever you wished to do. I meant it.”

  Judith turned her eyes from the marquess’s to look first at her sister-in-law’s resigned expression and then at her son’s tensely excited one. And at Kate, who was looking at her with wide, solemn eyes.

  “Please, Mama?” Rupert said.

  “It is extremely kind of you to invite us, my lord,” she said. “We accept.”

  There was great jubilation in the room while she held the marquess’s eyes for longer than necessary. Yes, my lady, he told her silently. Now do you begin to understand?

  When he rose to take his leave five minutes later, she rose, too, and accompanied him from the room and down the stairs.

  “Why?” she asked him quietly as they descended the stairs side by side. “Have you not punished me enough?”

  “Punished?” He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Please do not pretend innocence. You have stalked me ever since that evening in Lady Clancy’s drawing room. You have done all in your power to make me uncomfortable, to make me the topic of gossip and speculation. And you have used my children against me. Today more than ever. Yes, of course you should have spoken with me about this invitation first. But you knew very well what your answer would have been. When is this punishment to end?”

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to frown down at her. “Punishment?” he said. “Is that how you see my attentions, Judith? Is that how you always saw them? I have used your children, yes, and your sister-in-law. That is somewhat dishonorable, I will confess. But I will use all the means at my disposal. I have waited almost eight years for my second chance with you. I do not wish to squander it as I did the first.”

  He held her amazed eyes with his own as he took her nerveless hand from her side and raised it to his lips.

  She was still standing at the foot of the stairs after he had donned his greatcoat and gathered up his hat and gloves. He looked at her once more before nodding to her father’s butler to open the outer door for him.

  And he stood for a moment on the steps outside, smiling grimly to himself.

  6

  THE MARQUESS OF DENBIGH LEFT TOWN TWO DAYS later. Fortunately, the snow had done no more than powder the fields and the hedgerows beside the highways. And the weather remained too cold, some said, for there to be danger of much snow.

  His guests were not due to arrive until three days before Christmas, but there was much he wished to do before then. He must make sure that invitations were sent out for the ball on Christmas Day. His neighbors would be expecting them, of course, since he had made it a regular occurrence since his assumption of the title. But still, the formalities must be observed.

  And then he must make sure that all satisfactory arrangements had been made for the children. Ever since bringing them to the village of Denbigh two years before, he had tried to make Christmas special for them—having them to stay at the house for two nights, providing a variety of activities for their entertainment, filling them with good foods, encouraging them to contribute to the life of the neighborhood by forming a caroling party, making sure that they felt wanted and loved.

  This year Cornwell and Mrs. Harrison had reported that the children were preparing a Christmas pageant. He would have to decide when would be the best time for its performance. The evening of Christmas Eve would seem to be the most suitable time, but that would interfere with the caroling and the church service.

  Perhaps the afternoon? he thought. Or the evening before? Or Christmas Day?

  He ran through his guest list in his mind. Sir William and Lady Tushingham would be there. They were a childless couple of late middle years, who boasted constantly and tediously about their numerous nephews and nieces but who seemed always to be excluded from invitations at Christmas. And Rockford, who was known—and avoided—at White’s as a bore with his lengthy stories that were of no interest to anyone but himself, and who had as few family members as he had friends. Nora and Clement had agreed to come this year as their only daughter was spending the holiday with her husband’s family. And his elderly aunts, Aunt Edith and Aunt Frieda, who had never refused an invitation to Denbigh Park since the death of his father, their brother, from whom they had been estranged.

  And the Eastons, of course. He wondered how high in the instep Judith Easton was and how well it would please her when she discovered who all the children he had spoken of were. He wondered if she would approve of her son and daughter mingling with the riffraff of the London slums. He smiled grimly at the thought.

  He had brought them to Denbigh a little more than two years before after sharing several bottles of port with his friend Spencer Cornwell one evening. Spence was impoverished, though of good family, and restless and disillusioned with life. He was a man with a social conscience and a longing to reform the world and the knowledge and experience to know that there was nothing one man could do to change anything. Cornwell had fast been becoming a cynic.

  Except that somehow through the fog of liquor and gloom they had both agreed that one man could perhaps do something on a very small scale, something that would do nothing whatsoever to right all the world’s wrongs, but something that might make a difference to one other life, or perhaps two lives or a dozen lives or twenty.

  And so the idea for the project had been born. The Marquess of Denbigh had provided the capital and the moral support—and a good deal of time and love, too. He had been surprised by the latter. How could one love riffraff—and frequently foulmouthed and rebellious riffraff at that? But he did. Spence had gathered the children—abandoned orphans, thieving ruffians who had no other way by which to survive, gin addicts, one sweep’s boy, one girl who had already been hired out twice by her father for prostitution. And Mrs. Harrison had been employed to care for the girls.

  They lived in two separate houses in the village, the boys in one, the girls in the other, six of each at first, now ten, perhaps twenty with more houses and more staff in the coming year. Two years of heaven and hell all rolled into one, according to Spence’s cheerful report. In that time they had lost only one child, who had disappeared without trace for a long time. Word had it eventually that he was back at his old haunts in London.

  The marquess wondered how Judith would react to sharing a house with twenty slum children for Christmas. He should have warned her, he supposed, told her and her sister-in-law the full truth. Undoubtedly he should have. He always warned his other guests, gave them an opportunity to refuse his invitation if they so chose.

  He watched the scenery grow more familiar beyond the carriage windows. It would be good to be home again. He had been happy there for three years, since the death of his father. Or almost happy, at least. And almost not lonely. He had good neighbors and a few good friends. And he had the children.

  Watching the approach of home, the events of the past two weeks began to seem somewhat unreal. And he wondered if he had done the right thing, dashing up to London as soon as word reached him that she was there. And concoc
ting and putting into action his plan of revenge—a plan to hurt as he had been hurt.

  But of course it was not so much a question of right and wrong as one of compulsion. Should he have resisted the urge—need—to go? Could he have resisted?

  The old hatred had lived dormant in him for so long that he had been almost unaware of its existence until he heard of the death of her husband. Perhaps it would have died completely away with time if Easton had lived. But he had not, and the hatred had surfaced again.

  “When is this punishment to end?” she had asked him just two days before.

  He rested his head back against the cushions of his carriage and closed his eyes. Not yet, my lady. Not quite yet.

  But did he want her to suffer as he had suffered? He thought back to the pain, dulled by time but still bad enough to make his spirits plummet.

  Yes, he did want it. She deserved it. She should be made to know what her selfish and careless rejection had done to another human heart. She deserved to suffer. He wanted to see her suffer.

  He wanted to break her heart as she had broken his.

  He opened his eyes. Except that his hatred, his plans for revenge, seemed unreal in this setting. He had found happiness here in the past few years—or near happiness, anyway. And he had found it from companionship and friendship and love—and from giving. He had found peace here if not happiness.

  Would he be happy after he had completed his revenge on Judith Easton?

  He closed his eyes again and saw her as she had been eight years before: shy, wide-eyed, an alluring girl, someone with whom he had tumbled headlong in love from the first moment of meeting. Someone whom he had been so anxious to please and impress that he had found it even more impossible than usual to relax and converse easily with her. Someone who had set his heart on fire and his dreams in flight.

  And he remembered again that visit from her father putting an end to it all. Just the memory made the bottom fall out of his stomach again.

  Yes, he would be happy. Or satisfied, at least. Justice would have been done.

  KATE WAS ASLEEP on Amy’s lap, a fistful of Amy’s cloak clutched in one hand. Rupert should have been asleep but was not. He was fretful and had jumped to the window twenty times within the past hour demanding to know when they would be there.

  Judith did not know when they would be there. She had never been either to Denbigh Park or to that part of the country before. All she knew was that it would be an enormous relief to be at the end of the journey but that she wished she could be anywhere on earth but where she was going.

  Her anger had not abated since the afternoon during which she had been trapped into accepting this invitation. But she had been forced to keep it within herself. Amy was quite delighted by the prospect of spending Christmas in the country after all, part of a large group of people. And the children were wildly excited. Judith had voiced no objections, realizing how selfish she had been to have decided against spending the holiday with Andrew’s family that year.

  Amy of course was delighted not only by the invitation but also by what she considered the motive behind it.

  “Can you truly say,” she had asked after the marquess had left the house, “that you no longer believe he has a tendre for you, Judith? Do you still refuse to recognize that he is trying to fix his interest with you?”

  “I do not know why he has asked us,” Judith had said, “but certainly not for that reason, Amy.”

  Her sister-in-law had clucked her tongue.

  But Judith had lain awake for a long time that night. He had said that he had waited eight years for a second chance with her. He had called her by her given name. He had kissed her hand, something he had done several times during their betrothal.

  She could not believe him. She would not believe him. And yet her breath had caught in her throat at the sound of her name on his lips and she had felt the old churning of revulsion in her stomach when he had kissed her hand.

  Except that it was not revulsion. She had been very young and inexperienced when they were betrothed. She had called it revulsion then—that breathless awareness, that urge to run and run in order to find air to breathe, that terror of something she had not understood.

  She had called it revulsion now, too, for a couple of weeks, from mere force of habit. But it was not that. She had recognized it for what it was at the foot of the stairs when he had kissed her hand. And the realization of the truth terrified her far more than the revulsion ever had.

  It was a raw sexual awareness of him that she felt. A sort of horrified attraction. A purely physical thing, for she did not like him at all—and that was a gross understatement. She disliked him and was convinced, despite his words and actions, that he disliked her, too. She distrusted him.

  And yet she wanted him in a way she had never wanted any man, or expected to do. She wanted him in a way she had never wanted Andrew, even during those weeks when she had been falling in love with him and contemplating breaking a formally contracted betrothal. In a way she had never wanted him even after their marriage during that first year when she had been in love—the only good year.

  And so if the Marquess of Denbigh was trying to punish her—and it had to be that—then he was succeeding. She was a puppet to his puppeteer. For the wanting him brought with it no pleasure, no longing to be in his company, but only a distress and a horror. Almost a fear.

  Amy closed her arm more tightly about Kate and reached up for the strap by her shoulder. Rupert let out a whoop and bounced in his seat. The carriage was turning from the roadway onto a driveway and stopping outside a solid square lodge house for directions. But the coachman’s guess appeared to have been right. The carriage continued on its way along a dark, tree-lined driveway that seemed to go on forever.

  “Oh,” Amy said, peering from her window eventually. “How very splendid indeed. This is no manor, Judith. This is a mansion. But then I suppose we might have expected it of a marquess. And then, Denbigh Park is always mentioned whenever the great showpieces of England are listed. Is that a temple among the trees? It looks ruined.”

  “I daresay it is a folly,” Judith said.

  The house—the mansion—must have been built within the past century, she thought. Or rebuilt, perhaps. It was a classical structure of perfect symmetry, built of gray stone. Even the gardens and grounds must be of recent design. There were no formal gardens, no parterres, but only rolling lawns and shrubberies, showing by their apparent artlessness the hand of a master landscaper.

  Their approach had been noted. The front doors opened as the carriage rumbled over the cobbles before them, and two footmen ran down the steps. The marquess himself stood for a moment at the top of the steps and then descended them.

  And if she had had any doubt, Judith thought, tying the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her chin and drawing on her gloves and cautioning Rupert to stay back from the door, then surely she must have realized the truth at this very moment. Something inside her—her heart, her stomach, perhaps both—turned completely over, leaving her breathless and discomposed.

  And angry. Very angry. With both him and herself. He looked as if he had just stepped out of his tailor’s shop on Bond Street, and there was that dark hair, those harsh features, those thin lips, the piercing eyes and indolent eyelids. And she was feeling travel-weary and rumpled. She was feeling at a decided disadvantage.

  The carriage door was opened and the steps set down and the marquess stepped forward. Rupert launched himself into his arms—just as if he were a long-lost uncle, Judith thought—and launched into speech, too. The marquess set the boy’s feet down on the ground, rumpled his hair, and told him to hurry inside where it was warm. And he reached up a hand to help Judith down.

  “Ma’am?” he said. “Welcome to Denbigh Park. I hope your journey has not been too chill a one.”

  She was more travel-weary than she thought, she realized in utter dismay and mortification a moment later. She stepped on the hem of her cloak as she descended t
he steps so that she fell heavily and clumsily into his hastily outstretched arms.

  A footman made a choking sound and turned quickly away to lift down some baggage.

  “I do beg your pardon,” Judith said. “How very clumsy of me.” There was probably not one square inch on her body that was not poppy red, or that was not tingling with awareness, she thought, pushing away from his strongly muscled chest.

  “No harm done,” he said quietly, “except perhaps to your pride. Is the little one sleeping?” He turned tactfully away to look up at Amy, who was still inside the carriage. “Hand her down to me, ma’am, if you will.”

  Judith watched as he took Kate into his arms and looked down at her. The child was fussing, half asleep, half awake.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” the marquess said, “there will be warm milk waiting for you in the nursery upstairs, not to mention a roaring fire and a rocking horse. But I daresay you are not interested.”

  Kate opened her eyes and stared blankly at him for a few moments. Then she smiled slowly and broadly up at him while Judith felt her teeth clamping together. A long-lost uncle again. How did he do it?

  “Do let me take her, my lord,” she said, and felt his eyes steady on her as she relieved him of his burden.

  He turned to help Amy down to the cobbles.

  “What a very splendid home you have, my lord,” Amy said. “It has taken our breath quite away, has it not, Judith? Are we not all fortunate that there has been no more snow in the past week? Though of course it is cold enough to keep the ice on the lakes and rivers. I do declare, it must be the coldest winter in living memory. And it is only December yet.”

  “I have snow on order for tomorrow or Christmas Eve,” Lord Denbigh said. “And plenty of it, too. It cannot fail, ma’am, now that all my guests have arrived. And it has been trying so hard for the past two weeks or more that it surely will succeed soon.”