Regency Christmas Box Set: Risking it all

by Regina Darcy

  The bed made its conquest, as it had for others before her who had sought refuge from their trials, and she slept.

  When she woke the next morning, it did not matter that the clouds in the sky outside her window foretold more snow. The maid came in to bring wood for the fire and hot water for Cassandra to wash with. She donned the dress she had worn when she’d left her home, trusting that Mr Dalton would be as good as his word and provide her with a minimal wardrobe while she was a guest at the inn. She had no books, no pen or paper, nothing to occupy her time, but freedom was sufficient for now.

  She asked if the maid could bring her any knitting or mending to do, and when the innkeeper’s sister heard this, her estimation of the mysterious guest rose even more. She was already sympathetic to a young woman who found herself trapped in an engagement and prospective marriage not of her choosing. That the young lady, Miss Sarah Leeson—the name Cassandra had given her—should be capable of doing such mundane household tasks as knitting and sewing was to her credit, and Cassandra spent the rest of the morning happily ensconced by the fire with knitting needles, yarn, and a sewing basket.

  For those brief hours, Cassandra was able to forget about the Duke and his roguish behaviour. Sitting by the fire, engaged in domestic chores as snow blanketed the city, Cassandra felt the first stirring of anticipation for Christmas.

  At lunchtime, the maid knocked on the door to tell her that Mr Dalton had arrived and would meet her for lunch in the private dining room which was downstairs by the stairway leading to the upstairs rooms.

  Mindful of the need to retain her anonymity should any guests arrive who were acquainted with her, Cassandra donned her travelling cloak and veil and followed the maid down the stairs.

  Mr Dalton was waiting in the room. Candles had been lit and the flickering flames danced across the plates of food which had been served. Cassandra realised that she really was hungry, and the freshly baked bread, plate of cheeses, slices of ham, and baked apple were looking particularly delicious. The maid poured tea into their cups and left them.

  “Good news,” Mr Dalton said. He pointed to a valise by his feet. “I’ve found two dresses for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes at this information.

  “Come now,” he said. “You have made me a partner in your disappearance; you cannot quibble because I have obtained garments that you wear.”

  “I suppose it is rather ridiculous of me,” she said, looking up at him. “You must think me dreadfully silly.”

  “I think you were brought up properly,” he said, “and for parents who have five daughters, I should guess that observing the proprieties is of paramount concern. As I am not a parent,” he smiled, “I need not fret over the impropriety of bringing female attire to a young, unmarried woman.”

  “Do you have a family?” she asked.

  His mouth tightened. He began to cut pieces of his ham, his knife and fork smoothly cutting into the pink meat. “I have a half-brother,” he said finally, “who has married and is now the father of a son.”

  “So, you are an uncle,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Will you spend Christmas with them?”

  “No.”

  The brevity of his responses indicated to her his reluctance to speak of the matter. She wondered what it was about his family that inspired such reticence, when he had addressed all other subjects with frankness. It seemed to her that such a kind man as Mr Dalton ought to have a loving family, particularly at the season of Christmas. Then, she thought of her own Christmas. How would it be, she wondered? How could she explain to her parents that, regardless of what they viewed as the benefits of an advantageous marriage to a duke, she felt as if such a marriage would be more like a form of execution?

  To change the subject to one more palatable, she began to speak of making cheese, complimenting the inn on its offering. Immediately, Mr Dalton was once again his engaging self.

  “And you have added cheesemaking to your list of accomplishments?” he asked. “I have been told that you are also knitting and sewing.”

  “It is what I am used to,” she said. “We live in the country, and taking care of the cows, the chickens, the animals, that is all part of our daily work. We make butter, of course. We live simply.”

  “And you prefer to do so,” he said.

  “It is not that I am so countrified that I cannot find merit in a life without tending to livestock,” she said good-humouredly, “but it is a life of purpose. Here in London, with all the members of the ton pursuing their dalliances and only caring about their fashions and such, there seems to be no purpose. I realise that living in the city is vastly different from living in the country and I do not think that there is no value to the city or in those who dwell here. But all I have seen of the ton is its artifice and its excesses. I cannot credit such things with merit.”

  “Your views would put you at odds with the aristocracy,” he said.

  “Are you not of the aristocracy?” she inquired. “Your brother is a Marquess.”

  “Yes, well… I am not a Marquess and hold no other titles. Michael is my half-brother; we had different mothers and mine… only became my father’s wife because she was pregnant with me when he married her. He married my mother to avoid a scandal—clearly a forlorn ambition since she managed to create an even greater scandal by running off with her lover when I was six years old—but I don’t believe he wanted to marry her. My father… I was not welcomed into the family.”

  “But your brother, the Marquess,” she said, “does he hold your birth against you?”

  He did not answer right away. The chasm between the brothers was not of Michael’s doing. James knew that, even if he preferred not to acknowledge the fact. Michael had been exasperated by James’s frequent transgressions and missteps, but he had never sought division. It was James who was avoiding his brother and ignoring the invitations to come to Dennington for the Christmas holiday.

  “No,” James said. “Michael is not my enemy.”

  It seemed an odd way to phrase the situation, Cassandra thought. Did Mr Dalton really believe that he had enemies in his family who had caused a breach? Cassandra looked at him enquiringly, and he went on, his voice a little strained.

  “My brother… is very happy now,” James said. “As I cannot add to his happiness at this time, it is better that I stay away.”

  “At this time?” she repeated.

  “At Christmas. My mother… I told you that she ran off with her lover when I was six years old. She did so on Christmas. It was… I cannot say that Christmas was a particularly joyous time at Dennington, but I looked forward to the day with a child’s unquestioning glee. That morning, I awoke early, eager to open my presents. I went downstairs, but I could not understand why there was no one in the drawing-room or why the presents were there but unopened. I ran to Michael’s bedroom—he was not often at home, you understand, but he had returned for the holiday—and asked him where everyone was. I could see that something was terribly wrong. Where was my mother?”

  James recalled that terrible day as if it were still fresh in his memory, which, in fact, it was. But somehow, he found himself still speaking, telling Miss Bennet of it.

  “He was a youth, uncertain of what to say. He told me that my mother had been called away, and that was why Christmas was not being observed this year. I asked where she had gone, and he said—truthfully—that he didn’t know. When would she return? He could not say. It was unfair, I know that now, of our father to put the burden of telling me on Michael. He was terribly bothered by it. I could not understand. Later, I learned, as a child does, from bits and pieces of things said by servants when they believe that children are not paying attention, that my mother was a false wife and that she’d had a lover for over a year. She and this man, whose identity I did not and do not know, ran off on Christmas Eve, while I and the family were in our beds.”

  He looked up at her. “I am not,” he
said with a wan smile, “a devotee of Christmas festivities.”

  SEVEN

  To Cassandra’s mind, it was a tragic story. To think of a young boy recalling Christmas only as the date when his mother left his life forever, abandoning him to a father who was distant and a brother who was ill-equipped to understand how such an event might mar a child’s formative years wrenched her heart.

  Mr Dalton left soon after divulging that information. He’d explained that, because of his hours, he would most likely visit her at lunchtime when the Imperial was not open for business and he could leave. She thought it kind of him to visit her at all; he gave her a crooked, quizzical smile when she said that but did not respond.

  As she continued knitting for the rest of the day, enjoying the comfort of the room and the warmth of the fire, she thought back upon what he had said. She thought of her own upbringing in the country vicarage, with her parents and her four sisters. They were not among the gentry of the county, but the vicar had a certain status in a small community, and she and her sisters had been prominent in their own way.

  The grand patterns of life among the aristocrats of the county, of which Jeffrey Ogden, the duke, had been one, were far from the orbit of the Bennets, whose social schedule was entirely dominated by the church and its activities.

  That is until the Duke had happened to be riding through the county in the autumn, and had spotted Cassandra with her sisters picking apples in the orchard. Her parents had been startled, then flattered. But Cassandra, from the first, had been wary. Why would a duke want her to be his wife? she had wondered, and when she was alone with Sarah, she had posed the question.

  She could always count on Sarah to be honest.

  “Well, iss,” Sarah had said, “you’re prettier, I reckon, than many a London belle, and he can’t help but see that. And might be that he’s the sort of man who wants to shape a wife into his notion of what she ought to be, instead of leaving her to decide for herself how she shall form.”

  Sarah was very wise, for that was exactly what Jeffrey wanted. And Cassandra, despite being an obedient and docile daughter, was not a lump of clay to be manipulated into a shape which suited the sculptor.

  The following day, when Mr Dalton arrived at the inn, she was already in the private room downstairs, and lunch, an aromatic mutton stew brimming with potatoes and carrots in a rich broth, had been served, along with another loaf of fresh bread, generously sliced, with sweet butter on the platter.

  “I see that the clothing fits,” Mr Dalton said after he greeted her.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, blushing at the realisation that in order for the garments to fit properly, Mr Dalton had to have mentally measured her anatomical contours.

  “You do it great justice,” he said as he sat down and placed his linen napkin on his lap. “Ah, stew. An excellent offering for a winter day. I see that there is not much custom here at the inn.”

  “Mrs Althrop says that December will be slow, with the weather. She said that by the week of Christmas, there isn’t likely to be anybody here.”

  “Just as well,” Mr Dalton said. “The fewer people who take lodgings, the less likely it is that your presence will be noted.”

  He sounded brisk and cheerful as if the melancholy conversation of the previous day had not taken place. Cassandra decided to respect his apparent desire for privacy, and when he asked her how her day had gone yesterday, she proudly told him that she had gotten quite a bit of knitting done.

  “I am impressed by your fortitude,” he said. “Not all young ladies would be content to turn their leisure time into work.”

  “We are used to working, my sisters and I. There are so many in the village who are older or ailing, so Mother likes us to visit them and see to their needs. We bring them different things in season; in the winter, of course, there is nothing growing, so we knit stockings and scarves. The rest of the year, we bring jams, applesauce… We have quite a productive orchard at the vicarage, and our garden always does well. We have two cows, a pig, sheep, and goats, and chickens of course, and that is where we get our eggs, butter, milk, and cheese. We share that as well with the parishioners who are unable to make their own.”

  “It sounds very unlike the sort of life you would expect to live as a duchess,” he commented, his expression attentive.

  The Duke, she thought, had never shown the slightest interest in her daily activities at the vicarage.

  Perhaps he had no idea that most people spent their hours busy with the sort of labour that dukes dispensed to the servants. Perhaps he regarded such work as mundane and ordinary and entirely beneath his notice. But as Cassandra recalled the chores that she and her sisters had done at the vicarage, she recalled the sense of accomplishment which they had felt with freshly churned butter and neatly darned socks. Butter and stockings…

  “Why are you smiling?” Mr Dalton asked her, fascinated by the expression on her face. That impassivity which had been in play when he’d first met her was gone, replaced by a countenance so alive with the thoughts in her head that he felt as if he could watch her for hours and do nothing else. It was absurd, certainly; she was a woman, not a painting, not something to be gawked at. But never had he seen a human face so remarkably evocative of the thoughts within.

  “It’s very silly, Mr Dalton. Just… butter and stockings.” she began.

  “Could you perhaps call me James?” he asked. “Mr Dalton is very off-putting. I find myself looking over my shoulder to notice to whom you must be speaking.”

  It was not at all proper for her to refer to him by his Christian name. He was not a relative. He was not her betrothed. First names were a form of intimacy not readily shared. Whilst she might have thought of the Duke as Jeffrey, she had certainly never spoken to him as such!

  “I will try,” she conceded.

  “Please do. Now, then, tell me why you smile at the thought of butter and stockings.”

  “Only because they are such humble tasks, and yet, the results are rather magnificent, are they not?” She pointed to her slice of bread, generously laden with the homemade butter which was the result of the innkeeper’s sister’s diligent work and skill. “Bread with butter on it is food which satisfies our hunger. Stockings keep our feet warm. We are the accumulation of such ordinary needs, are we not, and yet when they are denied to us, we feel their loss keenly. Even an aristocrat, feeling the pangs of hunger or the sting of the cold on his feet, would appreciate such unremarkable items as butter and stockings.”

  “You are quite a philosopher,” he commented.

  She looked at him in confusion, but then realised that he was not teasing her. Jeffrey would have made such an observation in a mocking manner, but one could not speak of churning butter and knitting stockings to a duke.

  “Do your sisters share your views?”

  “I don’t know… it has simply been our lives, until this autumn, when Father rented the house in London and we came here.”

  “Because Ogden made it obvious that he was courting you, and he wanted to do so in London, not in the country.”

  “I suppose so,” she acknowledged.

  “Do your sisters assume that, if you are able to marry a duke and rid yourself of the housewifely tasks which are their lot in the country, they will also be freed and will have an advantageous marriage and servants to do these things?”

  “We have not spoken of it,” she replied. “My family supports the marriage, and I have not explained to them why I do not wish to marry him. It would seem very frivolous of me to do so. How can I tell them that I want to marry a man with whom I can have a conversation on matters other than the presents my husband has bought me or the notables who have been invited to a ball? They have never attended balls until now, at least not balls of this sort. Our country festivities are very different.”

  “Would you marry Ogden to please your family and buttress your sisters’ prospects for a rich marriage of the sort you would enjoy with the Duke?”

&n
bsp; “At first, I thought that I could. But then… I… I have seen a level of pettiness among the members of the peerage that I do not see in the humble farmer or the innkeeper,” she answered. “The expressions on the faces of the women when they saw that I was escorted to the balls and parties by the Duke... it was quite daunting at first. They resented me, without any concept of what I was thinking or what I wanted, or whether I even returned the Duke’s affections. No,” she corrected herself. “I cannot claim that the Duke has affection for me. I do not believe that he does.”

  “Does that trouble you?”

  “No,” she answered, and as she did so, she felt a sense of freedom. There was no emotion welding the Duke to her side, nor her to his.

  “In other words, your allegiance is to your sisters and your parents, not to His Grace.”

  She marvelled at his succinct synopsis of her tumbled emotions.

  “Yes,” she said, “that is it exactly. My sisters love me, and they want me to have the finest things that life can offer a woman who marries well. My parents want the same for all of us; they are happy with their lives and have no wish to exchange their country dwelling for a grand estate. It is of us that they think.”

  Their gazes locked.

  “Your parents have raised a remarkable daughter,” James said softly. “Now, you must decide whether you wish to sacrifice yourself for what you think will please your parents or whether you wish to risk your parents’ aspirations and free yourself from the prospect of a marriage which displeases you.”

  As he spoke, he leaned closer to her. She, mesmerised by his words, unconsciously did the same to him. Neither one could tell how it happened, but their lips met in a soft, gentle kiss that was, in its own way, as humble in its manner as the butter and stockings of which she had spoken earlier.