Mistletoe Moment
by Blair Bancroft
Published by Kone Enterprises
at Smashwords
Copyright 2016 by Grace Ann Kone
For other books by Blair Bancroft,
please see http://www.blairbancroft.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Chapter One
Hampshire, December, 1811
Dazzling! Miss Pamela Ashburton, eyes alight with the wonder of her very first dance, gazed down the length of the Trentham’s elegant ballroom. Her blood bubbled like champagne. Yes, dazzling was the only word to describe the scene before her. Beautifully gowned ladies, their jewels sparkling under three crystal chandeliers with a hundred candles each. Finely turned-out gentlemen handing the ladies through the steps of a stately quadrille. The lilting notes of the orchestra mixed with the hum of conversation. Swaths of Christmas garlands and wreaths, brightened with sprigs of holly, mistletoe, and red velvet bows. Ah, but it was glorious!
Yet tonight was merely the first step toward her spring season in London, where the Trentham’s ball would be as nothing compared to—
No! No matter what delights London hostesses offered, nothing could be finer than this, her very first venture into Hampshire society.
The intricate figures of the quadrille slowed to a close. The gentlemen bowed, the ladies curtsied. Lovely. She would be just like them, Pamela vowed. Graceful and charming, pleasant-faced. Unlike her sister Arabella, whose sharp tongue sent gentlemen fleeing to kinder partners. She would play society’s game, because at the end of this stylized, if sparkling, charade she would find the man of her dreams. She would marry, have her own household, children—
“Playing statue, little minx?” Her brother Chauncey’s teasing words broke through Pamela’s euphoria. Oh, drat. Mama and Bella were already seating themselves in chairs on the far side of the spacious room. Her sister, unsympathetic with Pamela’s flights of fancy over what Bella described as a “mere country ball,” was bound to add mocking words about her younger sister’s inability to find her way across the ballroom. Or about gaping like a country bumpkin.
Pamela sighed, lifting an anxious gaze to her brother. “You will stand up with me, Chauncey, will you not?”
He offered a sympathetic smile, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “You look fine as a fivepence, Pammie. You’ll have a whole slew of young men wishing to dance with you, but if you need a partner, I’ll be there. Agreed?”
“Oh, thank you,” she cried on a breath that whooshed with relief. “You are the best of brothers.” If only Chauncey were not home so seldom, leaving her to Bella’s unkind tongue, her mother’s obsession with readying her for a grand London come-out, and her father’s indifference to anything domestic, including his two daughters.
“Come, laggard,” Chauncey said, taking her arm. “You must join Mama and Bella before their tongues turn to knives. Chin up. Smile.”
Dutifully, Pamela allowed Chauncey to steer her to a seat beside her mother and sister, where he immediately proffered a bow and took himself off to wherever young gentlemen went at a country ball. Probably seeking out old friends, Pamela thought, or surreptitiously ogling the young women. Lucky Chauncey, heir to a barony, who could spend most of his year frivoling about London—
No, no, no! She had no right to be jealous. He was male; she, female. He could do as he pleased. She could not. That was the way of the world, and a female questioning the order of things at age seventeen was, well . . . laughable.
No, it wasn’t, Pamela corrected stubbornly. Having no say in her life was sad. Sad, indeed.
“May I have this dance?”
Oh, thank goodness. Pamela wiped the frown from her face. Standing tall before her was Tom, the squire’s eldest. She’d known him all her life.
Though Tom proved to be more good-hearted than adept at dancing, he was but the first of a swarm of young men seemingly happy to dance with Baron Ashburton’s younger daughter. Before the evening was half over, Pamela’s euphoria had returned in full measure. Lady Ashburton was smiling in triumph, and the only thing Bella could find to criticize, Pamela noted with glee, was her younger sister so obviously having a good time.
“Hoyden!” Bella declared behind the cover of her fan. “Ladies dance with grace and elegance. They are never boisterous.” Pamela returned what was possibly an overly smug smile, plus a wave of her fingers, as she accepted a young gentleman’s outstretched hand for a set of country dances.
The tempos were the liveliest of the night. Pamela suspected the members of the orchestra had been sampling the punch during their breaks. Stately lines devolved into undulating clusters as the dancers struggled to execute the figures at a tempo that was fast turning the dance into a ragged romp. Touch hands, turn, curtsey. Touch hands, back to the line. Follow left . . . no, right. Pamela gasped, running to catch up. Two hands together, side-step down the middle . . .
And then she was on her backside. On the hard wooden floor. With a line of dancers on each side of her, stumbling to a stop. Staring.
Stunned, Pamela fixed her gaze on her blue satin slippers sticking out from beneath her rumpled skirt, at a glimpse of lace-trimmed chemise. The world stopped. Brain numb, she could not take it in. In spite of hands reaching out to her, urgent voices in her ear, she could not, would not, look up. She could not bear to see the shocked faces, the amusement . . . the laughter. Oh, yes, laughter. The world was crashing back, and she could hear it clearly as the music died away—the giggles, the stifled guffaws intruding into the all too short stunned silence.
Chauncey! Where was Chauncey?
Insistent hands reached for her. She was on her feet, being led toward her mama. Was her face scarlet or deathly pale? She had no idea. But she singled out Bella’s voice from all the others. Bella, stalking at her side. Pamela longed to run and keep running all the way home to Ashburton Place, but her legs had barely the strength to put one before the other. Oh, dear God, the humiliation was too much to bear.
And then she saw her mama’s face, just as Bella hissed in her ear. “Fool! You’ve ruined us all. How could you be so gauche?”
With a brisk nod and cold words of thanks, Lady Ashburton dismissed Pamela’s apologetic and anxiously solicitous dance partner. Fastening her claw-like fingers on her daughter’s arm, she dragged her through the gaping crowd to a dark corner behind a Corinthian column. “The disgrace!” Malvinia Ashburton’s voice shook with anger. “No London for you, missy. Imagine my palpitations as I sat there each night, waiting for you to humiliate the family by repeating such a shocking display. No, indeed no. You shall stay home until . . .”
Lady Ashburton’s voice trailed away as she considered the problem. “I am not sure we can ever trust you again, Pamela. Perhaps it’s best if you stay in the country. In due course you may be aunt to your sister’s children and companion to me in my waning days.”
“Nonsense!” Pamela’s heart quickened with hope as Chauncey joined them. “You are exaggerating a simple accident, mama, into the gre
atest faux pas of the century. One tiny slip, and you are ringing down the curtain on Pammie’s life. ’Tis absurd, and well you know it. It’s like falling off a horse. She must get back on and ride. Immediately.”
Lady Ashburton drew herself up to her full five feet three inches, somehow managing to look down her nose at her considerably taller son. “You may be the heir, Chauncey, but I am your mother, and there are certain matters on which you may not express yourself. And until you assume the barony, God forbid, the fate of your sister is one of them.”
“Mama! You cannot condemn her for one tiny mistake.”
“Tiny!” Bella snorted. “She fell on her backside, displaying her petticoat, her ankles, in front of everyone of note in the entire county.” Arabella crossed her arms over her minuscule bodice. “The story will follow her to London, our entire family becoming the laughingstock of the ton.”
Throughout her family’s argument, Pamela stood with her head down, one slender hand braced against the column for support as her body continued to quiver with shock. The odd thing was, all three of them were right. She should be brave and stoic, participating in the final sets, even if she danced only with Chauncey. Reality was, a team of draft horses could not get her onto a dance floor again. She was humiliated, disgraced. Mortified. She would never again set foot in a ballroom.
The thought of a come-out in London brought bile to her throat. Perhaps she could affect a limp . . . participate only in activities that did not require dancing.
No, a thousand times no. Tonight’s incident would follow her forever. Everyone would know. Whispers, titters, mocking speculation would haunt her through the streets, parks, drawing rooms, and ballrooms of the city.
An even more icy horror assailed her. She would be the subject of bets at gentlemen’s clubs. Would Miss Ashburton once again land on her derrière before the end of the Season?
Bella was right. She was utterly ruined.
“Chauncey?” she whispered, blindly holding out her hand toward the tallest shape visible through her misted eyes.
With a small huff of breath that acknowledged his defeat, Chauncey took his younger sister’s arm and led her from the ballroom.
Chapter Two
Worcestershire, October 1815
Pamela paused, savoring the heady scent of apples being pressed into pulp inside the barn known as the Cider House. Somewhere in Appledown Farm’s vast kitchen, Cook was using part of this year’s crop to make and preserve enough applesauce until fruit once again ripened in her Aunt Honoria Whitehurst’s groves.
Though Worcestershire was too close to the industrial heartland of England to be fashionable, Pamela had loved it on first sight. Its primary attraction, of course—it did not contain her mother or her sister.
Unkind! She should be ashamed of herself. And she was . . . a wee bit, now and then. Until she recalled that Bella had received an offer from the younger son of a duke only after Papa had doubled her dowry, using Pamela’s portion. And that she had not been allowed to attend Bella at her wedding—for heaven’s sake, child, you might stumble going down the aisle. After that debacle, some eight months after her fateful fall in the Trentham’s ballroom, Pamela sat down and penned a letter to her father’s widowed sister, begging a position as her companion.
Dear Aunt Honoria had replied by return post. Come immediately, not as a paid companion, but as a treasured guest. Pamela’s tears of relief mixed with the ink on her aunt’s letter until the words became illegible. No matter. She held them in her heart. To Worcestershire she would go.
And now, three years later, she could not imagine living anywhere else. With the beautiful Severn Valley on one side and the charm of the Cotswolds on the other; with softly rolling hills, unexpected ravines, meandering streams, and prosperous farmland, punctuated by clusters of woodland, this part of Worcestershire remained remote from the noise, stench, and smoke of the Midlands. An oasis of tradition, with only the heavy traffic on the Worcester and Birmingham canal hinting at the industrial cities to the north.
Appledown Farm was her home now. And because of Aunt Honoria’s enlightened beliefs, Pamela was free to control her own life. A condition devoutly to be wished, and which few women—and even fewer ladies—achieved.
And yet sometimes . . .
Idiot! Be grateful for what you have.
Setting her steps firmly toward her aunt’s red brick manor house, Pamela strode up the pebbled path through the kitchen garden, the scent of herbs momentarily overpowering the wafting odor of cooking apples. “M’lady’s looking for you, miss,” the kitchen maid said the moment Pamela stepped through the door. “Said you wuz t’go to the drawing room soon’s you come in.”
“Thank you, Nan.” Pamela waved to Cook, who was stirring applesauce, and to a helper, who was overseeing a large boiling pot filled with canning jars, before mounting two flights of servants’ stairs to the drawing room.
“Well?” her aunt demanded the moment Pamela entered the room. “Did you find any?”
“What, no offer of tea and biscuits after I rode up and down every row of apple trees for acre after acre after acre, searching for a glimpse of mistletoe?”
“Do not be foolish, child. Do you not see tea straight in front of you? But surely you can take the time to tell me if you found any?”
Her Aunt Honoria, Pamela hoped, was what she herself would be like some thirty years in the future. Golden brown hair, beginning to show a few streaks of gray, clear blue-green eyes, sharp with intelligence, set in a face more distinguished than conventionally attractive. Happily, her figure was more than fine, another trait Pamela shared as the years added delightful padding in all the right places to a figure that had once been as awkward and angular as it was that awful night when . . .
Pamela thrust the incident that still haunted her from her mind. Her love and respect for Aunt Honoria, that’s where her mind should be. On the certainty she did not at all mind being a butter print of her aunt. Kind-hearted trumped beauty every time.
With teasing laughter animating a face some called plain until they saw her smile, Pamela seated herself on a delicate lyre-back chair across from her aunt and reached for a lemon biscuit. Aunt Honoria, as strong-minded as she was kind-hearted, promptly leaned forward and swatted her fingers. “Tell me now, my dear, or I shall send you back to your mama.”
Pamela gasped and dropped the biscuit, which split, sliding off the table to dash itself to pieces on her aunt’s richly patterned Aubusson carpet.
“Oh, my dear child,” Honoria cried, “surely you know I was funning. I would never send you back to that woman.”
Her heart beating wildly, Pamela clasped her hands in her lap, gulping for breath. “My apologies, aunt. I, too, was teasing and doing it badly. Yes, I believe I saw some, though it’s still difficult to see through the leaves, even after the apples are gone.”
Honoria Whitehurst beamed, clapping her hands in glee. “That decides it, then. This year we shall have a Twelfth Night ball.”
Pamela blanched. “A ball?”
For a moment, her aunt considered her question, a slight frown wrinkling her forehead. She waved a hand, indicating that Pamela should pour a cup of tea and help herself to the biscuits. “I have not had a ball since my Edward’s death,” Honoria continued, “but five years have passed, and I have reached an age where I feel I may entertain without the support of a man at my side. And, I might add, I consider it a sign of approbation that you have found mistletoe growing on our apple trees. Together, you and I shall manage the thing!”
“But a ball, aunt . . . surely an entertainment with wassail, mummers, and games, as we did last year, is sufficient. No one expects more.”
“Pah! I have made up my mind. A grand ball, it is.”
Oblivious to Pamela’s agony, her aunt nattered on about household decorations for the party, which would include strategically placed kissing balls made from that strange parasitic plant known as mistletoe. Poisonous, that’s what it was, Pamela tho
ught darkly. The Druids likely used it for far murkier purposes than making kissing balls. Yet it sounded as if her aunt wished to cover every lintel in mistletoe, dangle it from each chandelier.
A ball. How could she?
Was this her aunt’s way of saying her niece had hidden long enough? That it was time to put the past behind her and rejoin the world? Well, it wasn’t. It never would be. She was going to remain a spinster. No balls, kissing or otherwise. The little white berries could just hang there until they shriveled and the leaves dried to gray. She was not going to dance. And she most certainly wasn’t going to kiss anybody.
“It’s time.”
Pamela, scowling, looked up, only to be caught by her aunt’s piercing gaze. “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
Honoria Whitehurst pursed her lips, her eyes revealing uncharacteristic unease. “My dear . . . please grant me a moment to listen to something I am aware you do not care to hear. But I must tell you that my conscience and I have conducted a sharp debate in recent weeks. On the one hand, I have encouraged you to be independent. To be competent to take charge of your life, to take over—”
Mrs. Whitehurst broke off, her gaze moving to the well-scythed parkland visible through the drawing room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. For a moment she steepled her hands before her face, drawing in a shuddering breath before beginning again. “As I believe you know,” she said, “I plan to leave Appledown Farm to you, for I know it will be in good hands.”
“Many, many years from now,” Pamela cried.
Honoria smiled. “Indeed, child, no cause to fret. However,” she emphasized, “in recent months I have become aware of doing you a disservice. No, no, hear me out! Though not every marriage is a good one, I was blessed by mine, and devastated when Edward left this world far too soon. For all that I’ve managed on my own, fashioning a satisfactory life, I cannot approve of your wish to remain unwed.”
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