Timeless Christmas Romance

by O’Donnell, Laurel

  “I do not!” Edward shouted, and the two siblings were off on their oft-repeated quarrels.

  Little Louisa used her tiny sticky hands to pull herself up by Antoinette’s skirt, adding her babble to the fray.

  Thus was the room full of chaos when the cottage door was pushed open and Cassandra Leighton, Countess of Royce, the children’s mother and Antoinette’s best friend, appeared. A heavy, fur-lined white wool cloak swathed about her so that she appeared a ghostly apparition. Everyone at Royce Castle knew a great deal about ghosts. One could not avoid them in one of the most haunted houses in Cornwall.

  The illusion faded, though, when Cassie pushed back her hood and stomped dew from her stout half boots. She took in the fray with one sweeping glance and laughed. “Ah! I see I have come just in time. My children are obviously being carried away by naughtiness.”

  “Mama!” Penelope cried imperiously, propping her tiny fists on her hips. “We were not doing anything naughty. We simply asked Antoinette to come to Bath with us for Christmas.”

  “Did I not tell you, before I let you come here, that you were not to bother your auntie?” Cassie scooped up Louisa into her arms, and leveled her steady, motherly gaze on her eldest daughter.

  Penelope’s pugnacious stare faltered. “Yes, Mama. But...”

  “No buts. You were quite clearly disturbing her. There is no time to discuss it now, though. The carriage is waiting, and if we do not hurry, your papa will vanish back into his library for another hour. So, kiss your auntie, and be on your way. Papa will settle you in the carriage with warm bricks and blankets.”

  Penelope turned back to Antoinette and dropped her a perfect little curtsy. “Good-bye, Aunt Antoinette. I will write to you every day and tell you what we are doing.” The image of impeccable young lady­hood was ruined, though, when Penelope threw her arms around Antoinette’s neck and kissed her once, twice, three times. “We’ll miss you! But we will have a party when we return home, right?”

  Antoinette kissed her back. “Of course, my dear. Be a good girl for your grandmama, and enjoy yourself.”

  “I love you, Aunt Antoinette.”

  “And so do I!” Edward piped up, kissing Antoinette’s other cheek.

  Louisa just gurgled, and thrust a silk tassel from her mother’s cloak into her little mouth.

  Antoinette’s throat tightened, and she blinked hard against the sudden rush of hot tears behind her eyes. “I love you too, mes petites.”

  With one last kiss, the children dashed past their mother and out the cottage door. Their shouts and laughter could be heard clearly on the crisp, cold air until they turned the corner on the pathway to the castle and were gone.

  Cassie leaned against the doorway, Louisa still propped on her hip. Her dark eyes were shrewd and all-seeing as she watched Antoinette. They had known each other for far too long for Antoinette to hide much from Cassie, or Cassie from her. It had been ever thus, since they were little girls running on the beach in Jamaica, neither caring that one was the daughter of an English landowner and one the child of a freed slave.

  Antoinette tried to give her friend a light smile. She pulled her Kashmir shawl closely about her shoulders, yet could not entirely rid herself of her chill.

  The chill that was always with her. It could not be banished by the crackling fire, and did not melt with the English snows in the spring. It was a chill in her very soul.

  “The children are not the only ones who would beseech you to come to Bath with us,” Cassie said. “There is still time, you know. Phillip would not mind waiting one jot while you packed a trunk. Christmas in Bath is so jolly!”

  “I know. Edward told me.” Antoinette stood from her chair, and took up the cast-iron poker to stir at the fire. Tiny orange-red embers crackled and fell out onto her stone hearth, almost catching the hem of her robe. “And I have been there with you every Christmas for the last five years.”

  “But not this year?”

  Antoinette smiled back over her shoulder at Cassie. “Not this year.”

  “Because you must work.”

  “Indeed. Because I must work. My last book on herbal soaps and lotions did so very well that my publisher is eager for a volume on growing herbs in winter. He is willing to pay me twice as much if I can send it to him next month. I would be too distracted to write in Bath.”

  Cassie shifted Louisa to her other hip, still frowning. “If it is a question of money...”

  “It is not!” Antoinette cried, a sharp pain pricking behind her eyes. She whirled back to face the fire, pressing her fingers to her temples. She loved Cassie as her own sister, she truly did. But she was seized with such a need to be alone, a desperation for silence. She could not bear to talk about money, or Christmas, any longer, to try to explain yet again.

  And, really, how could she explain something to her friend that she did not understand herself? If she tried to voice these strange feelings she had been having of late, it would only worry Cassie, and to no good end. Her friend could not help Antoinette; no one really could. And Cassie deserved a joyous holiday with her husband and children, enjoying all the delights Bath could offer.

  And Antoinette needed this time alone.

  She felt a soft touch on her sleeve, and turned to see that Cassie had drawn nearer, reaching out to Antoinette with her gloved hand. Her pale, heart-shaped face was creased in worry-which was the last thing Antoinette wanted to cause.

  She forced herself to give another merry smile and a light laugh, and reached up to press Cassie’s hand with her own. “Don’t look so melancholy, my friend. I will be fine here, truly. I will work, and rest, and finish a new batch of lotions for Mrs. Greeley’s store in the village.”

  Cassie still did not appear happy, but something shifted behind her eyes. Some sort of surrender, some kind of giving-in, which was quite amazing. Though Cassie was a full foot shorter than Antoinette’s own towering six feet-and a full year younger, to boot-she still tried to be the arranger, the overseer.

  “If you are certain this is what you want...”

  “It is,” Antoinette answered firmly.

  “Then we will honor your wishes.” As if she had any choice.

  “Thank you, Cassie. I will write to you often and assure you that all is well here.”

  “If you get too lonely, at least go up to the castle. Cook will be delighted to ply you with her cinnamon cakes, and your guest suite is always prepared.”

  “I shall probably avail myself of the cakes, but I cannot stay there. The eternal Quarrels of Lady Lettice and Jean-Pierre would be too great a distraction.”

  Cassie had to laugh at the reminder of the noisy antics of Royce Castle’s resident ghosts, an Elizabethan lady and her faithless French swain. “Indeed they are a distraction. I sometimes wonder when they will move on, but Lady Lettice is so good with the children.”

  “Yes. And I know someone else who must ‘move on’ now,” Antoinette said. “Your journey is a long one, and if you do not leave soon you will never make it to your first stop by nightfall.”

  Antoinette reached for one of the small willow baskets arrayed on her sitting room shelves, and took out a little black muslin bag stuffed with fragrant herbs and tied with a pink ribbon.

  She pressed it into Cassie’s hand. “Take this. The black is for protection, and it is filled with rose for friendship, lavender for even more protection, and marjoram for happiness. I know this will be the happiest of holidays for you.”

  Cassie stood on tiptoe, much as her daughter had, and kissed Antoinette’s cheek, holding the precious bag out of Louisa’s grasping reach. “I will keep it close by me. Happy Christmas, Antoinette.”

  “Happy Christmas, Cassie.” Antoinette kissed Cassie’s cheek in return, and urged her out the door and back into the wet morning.

  She leaned against the wooden frame, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her silk robe for warmth as she watched her friend hurry along the narrow path leading from Antoinette’s cottage to the
castle. Cassie turned just before disappearing at the bend and waved, along with little Louisa. For just an instant, the baby’s chortles could be heard. Then they turned away and were gone.

  The only sound was the wind in the bare trees around the cottage, the winter’s whispers on the faintly salty Cornwall air.

  Antoinette was alone.

  She hugged her arms closer about her waist and moved to the edge of her small front garden. The herbs and flowers were mostly sleeping for the winter, but a few things flourished still, including a tough clump of rosemary beside the low stone wall. Antoinette picked a stem, toying with it between her fingers as she leaned against the cold wall. The wind caught at her loosely tied-back hair, tossing the dark, coarse strands about.

  Antoinette pushed them back impatiently and studied the scene spread out before her. She could not see the cliffs or the sea from her cottage; they were hidden by thick stands of trees, precious trees that gave her solitude and camouflage. But she could hear the song of the waves, chill gray and pale blue water crashing against the rocky shore.

  A shore so very different from that of her birthplace, Jamaica. As different as if they were on another planet. The sea in Jamaica was turquoise and emerald green, always shifting, sparkling under a warm golden sun. She and Cassie had often run across the sand, that white sand as soft as a baby’s breath under their feet. The thick breezes had borne the scents of jasmine and plumeria to them, as. well as the rich spices from the kitchens. From the open doors there, they could hear the cook and her assistants singing the old Trinidadian song “The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy.”

  Antoinette thought she heard an echo of their song on the cold breeze now. It was a song her mother used to sing at this time of year as her nimble needle created her exquisite gowns and shawls. “Ah, Antoinette, ma belle, one day you will find your own destiny,” she would say, when Antoinette expressed a desire to sew like her. “Greater things await you than stitchery. One day, you will see. One day they will find you.”

  Well, it had not found her yet. Nothing she would call destiny, anyway. Yet a part of her mother’s prophecy had come true. She did not make her way by the needle. She made it by her pen, by the herbs she grew in this garden and in the small conservatory behind her cottage. Her books about the uses of herbs sold well in London bookshops. Many women swore by her lotions and tinctures, vowed they made their skins younger and softer. She was glad of that. Glad that her knowledge made her the money to buy this cottage, to be independent.

  She did not share all of her knowledge of herbs, of course. That would be foolish in a place where her acceptance was so very precarious anyway. She could not share it with the white English who, in their ignorance, would call her a witch. Only Cassie and her family knew the true power to be found in an ancient, secret book hidden beneath Antoinette’s bed.

  It was the greatest gift of Marie-Claire Duvall to her daughter. The secrets of the Yaumumi priestesses were safe in Antoinette’s hands. And they had served her well in many ways.

  Antoinette tipped her head back to stare into the empty, slate-gray sky.

  “Oh, Maman,” she whispered. “Why could you not have taught me to cure an unsure heart, as well? How to fill an emptiness, when I do not even know where the wound lies?”

  There was no answer, of course. Antoinette had not expected any, yet there was always a half-hidden hope. A hope for a reply, a sign that she was doing the right thing in her life.

  She did not regret leaving Jamaica to accompany Cassie to England when Cassie’s father died and his plantation was sold. Antoinette’s mother had died many years ago, and she had no other family. Only Cassie, who was like her sister. And Cassie’s family, which was likely the only one Antoinette would ever know—there were not very many suitors in southern England for women such as her!

  Antoinette could have stayed in Jamaica, of course, could have purveyed her herbs and spells to people of her own sort. But she knew she would have been just as alone there, in a hut on the beautiful beach, as she was here. Just less cold.

  Antoinette shook her head hard and laughed, trying to push away her sudden rush of self-pity. She was usually far too busy to wallow in maudlin thoughts. Indeed, she ought to be busy now, tending her conservatory, writing, brewing a new batch of lavender-rose lotion. She had no time to loll about, moaning like some hapless heroine in one of the horrid novels Cassie loved so much.

  She pushed back from the wall and strode down the pathway to her cottage door, brushing off her dew-dusted sleeves. It was only Christmas making her feel so sad, she thought. Christmas was a time for families, for children, for evergreen boughs and holly wreaths and red-ribbon bows. Not for strangers in strange lands.

  It was chilly in the sitting room again, the fire died down to mere embers in the grate. Antoinette grabbed the poker and stirred them back to life, while she shivered under her robe.

  Why was this blasted country always so cold?

  Chapter Two

  Cold. Freezing cold, like ice or snow. Or death. The nightmare was the same as it always was, the full horror of those moments rushing back onto him as if eleven years had not passed. As if it were happening again and again. He always knew it was a nightmare, yet he could never pull himself out of it, pull himself back into the reality of his life now. He just had to watch it once more, until the bitter ending. The explosion that tore half his ship away and hurled him into the churning waves. At first, he welcomed the chill of the water, the freezing bite of its depths. The entire left side of his body burned with a frigid, heavy flame, his uniform torn away, the gold braid cutting into his raw flesh. But then the full force of the cold salt water slapped against him, bringing new agony.

  He began to sink, dragged to Davy Jones’ locker by an inexorable force. He welcomed it, welcomed the dark, sweet oblivion that he knew waited for him there, promising to soothe away the unbearable pain. He was a sailor; had been since he was a boy of fifteen. It was a fate he was familiar with and had always half-expected.

  Then, as the waves closed over his head and he shut his eyes against the waning of the light, he saw her face. Elizabeth. His fiancée, his love. Her golden curls glowed with all the brilliance of the sun. Her violet blue eyes beckoned to him, begged him to stay with her, to not leave her, not lose their love. She reached out to him, as if to pull him back to the land of the living.

  Her eyes were stronger than the force of the sea. He reached out for her beckoning fingers—and his hand brushed the hard, splintering wood of a piece of flotsam. A plank from his ship. He grasped it and, with every bit of strength left in him, every ounce of willpower, pulled himself up into the air.

  Into a new hell.

  His ship was dying, sinking fast, but all around him the battle still raged. Cannon fire turned the air foggy and rancid, the black clouds mingling with flames and blood. Shouts and cries swirled above him, while all about him was the detritus of the ship he had been entrusted with. Burning wood, guns, bits of steel—the bodies of his men.

  He recognized Lieutenant Bridgers as the young man’s body floated past him, eyes wide open yet unseeing. He stared down at his own arm that wouldn’t seem to move, and blinked in disbelief at the sight of raw, red flesh where his blue wool sleeve was tom away.

  Bits of burning sail landed on that arm even as he watched, bringing fresh waves of agony. He gasped, and fell back onto his lifesaving plank. The battle around him, the cacophonous noise, the light fading left him with only one thought.

  Elizabeth.

  Mark Payne sat straight up in his bed, a shout strangled in his throat. Of course. A nightmare. That was all it was, all it ever was. It was not real.

  But once it had been. It had been a real hell, fresh and hot around him, burning his nose with its stink. Eleven years. Eleven years he had been haunted by that day. Would the memory of it, of his failing, never leave him?

  Mark longed for it to be gone, yet he knew it never would be. Not until he could lose the ache of guilt that gnawed
at his belly.

  At least here, in his isolated little house in Cornwall, there was no one to be disturbed by his nighttime shouts. Or the endless pacing on the nights when he could not sleep at all. Here, he could hurt no one.

  He knew that the villagers speculated about him, made up tales, as they had ever since he came here seven years ago. He knew they asked endless questions of the old woman who came in to cook and clean for him, questions she could not answer, though she certainly tried to with fantastical speculation. Perhaps he was a werewolf? A devil, cursed and cast out of hell? An exiled prince from a faraway land?

  Mark laughed now to think of those stories-and they were only the ones that had come to his own ears. He could not even begin to imagine the ones he had not heard. The Cornish were ever fond of wild tales. Perhaps that was why he had come here, and not to one of his family’s estates in Kent or Devon. Here, he was only one more haunt among many.

  Even his nearest neighbor, the grand and ancient Royce Castle, was said to be haunted. Full of ghosts and spirits and devils of all sorts—even an island witch. Though Royce Castle was above two miles away from Mark’s small abode, on clear days he could glimpse the turrets and speculate about those creatures, speculate about what an island witch could possibly want with such a cold and desolate land.

  Such speculations were one of his life’s few amusements.

  Mark threw back the heavy bedclothes. He knew he would find no more sleep this night. The fuel in the grate had died away, leaving the small bedchamber chill and dark. He lit the candle on the bedside table, casting a small circle of light in the gloom, and reached for his dressing gown. The fur-lined velvet slid over his nakedness, caressing his damaged flesh with its softness. As he tied the corded sash, he turned to the window, pushing back the draperies to let the night in. And such a night it was, as different from the landscape in his nightmare as it could possibly be. He might have suddenly landed on the moon. The same moon that peeked from behind thick clouds to cast a brief, silvery glow over the night.