Chase Family Collection: Limited Christmas Edition

by Lauren Royal

  “Look.” For once, Arabel wore a frown. She motioned out the window. “Soldiers. Parliamentarian soldiers.”

  Hearing hoofbeats approach down Grosmont Grange’s long, icy, hard-packed drive, Chrystabel dragged her thoughts from her mother to follow her sister’s gaze. Sure enough, the horsemen wore breastplates over buff leather coats, with lobster-tailed pot helmets on their heads. Oliver Cromwell’s Dragoons.

  They couldn’t be bringing good news to a Royalist family.

  Since the war had ended in September, the formerly fighting Dragoons were now roaming the countryside, enforcing Cromwell’s strict Puritanical laws: no music, no dancing, no theater, no sports, no swearing, no drinking, no gaming…no Christmas.

  No Christmas!

  “They mean to catch us preparing for Christmas!” Chrystabel ran from the chamber and down the corridor to her brother’s study. “Matthew, open up!” Without waiting, she pushed open the door and burst inside. “Dragoons! Here to catch us celebrating Christmas!”

  Arabel had already scooped up as much greenery as she could carry and was racing past the open door. “Where should we put it?” she called.

  “Under your bed, then go back for more—we’ll put it under mine!” Chrystabel turned back to Matthew. “We’ll hide everything. You answer the door when they arrive.”

  It took three trips to and from the drawing room to hide all the Christmas evidence beneath their two beds. Once the sisters were finished, they shut the door to Chrystabel’s room and plopped onto the mattress side by side, pretending to be reading books.

  “Surely they won’t look under our beds,” Arabel whispered in her usual cheerful manner.

  “We can hope not,” Chrystabel muttered back.

  Time passed while she listened to her own heartbeat and reread the same paragraph thirteen times.

  “I don’t hear anyone searching the house,” Arabel said. “And they were wearing heavy boots.”

  Chrystabel shrugged. “As you recently pointed out, it’s a big house. They’ll get here.”

  They both jumped when a sharp knock came at the door.

  Chrystabel steeled herself. “Enter if you must.”

  “I must,” their brother said as the door swung open.

  “Matthew! Are they gone?”

  “They are.” He suddenly looked older than his twenty-five years. His handsome face appeared ashen. For the first time, he looked like the Earl of Grosmont to her, not just her big brother who unfortunately had inherited early.

  “Why did they not search my chamber?”

  “They didn’t search anything.” He held up a letter with a big, broken red seal hanging from it. A very official-looking letter. “They brought this.”

  “What does it say?” Arabel breathed.

  Leaning against the doorpost as though he couldn’t quite hold himself up, Matthew cleared his throat and read. “‘I thought fit to send this trumpet to you, to let you know that, if you please to walk away with your family and staff, and deliver your estate to such as I shall send to receive it, you shall have liberty to take one day to gather and carry off your goods, and such other necessaries as you have. You have failed to pay the fine assessed by the Committee for Compounding; if you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you may expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with. I await your present answer, and rest your servant, O. Cromwell.’”

  “Oh, my God.” Arabel’s big brown eyes had never looked wider. “Did you give the soldiers your answer?”

  “I had to. They wouldn’t leave without it.”

  “And what was your answer?” Chrystabel asked impatiently. “What did you say?”

  “That we’ll leave, of course. Tomorrow, as he ordered. What else could I say?” Matthew straightened up. Some color had returned to his face. “The fine is a third of the value of this estate. I don’t have that much money—Father spent all our savings on the war.”

  “The heartless bastards!” Chrystabel would be fined herself if the Dragoons heard her using that kind of language, but right now she didn’t care. “How dare they!”

  Matthew shrugged. “Our family dared to fight against them. Now they’ll confiscate our estate for their own gain. They need funds to run the new government—if the king had won, he’d have robbed the other side just the same. We are but the spoils of war.”

  Matthew was a very levelheaded fellow, always good in a crisis. Unlike Chrystabel, who couldn’t seem to think straight. “But what will we do? Where will we go?”

  “Grosmont Castle.” On his walk from the front door to her room, he’d obviously thought this through. “My seat. It’s supported us ever since Father died. And it’s the only place we can go, isn’t it?” he added reasonably.

  “We’re to live in Wales?” Chrystabel shrieked, her volume not reasonable at all.

  “My, that is far away,” Arabel murmured.

  “Yes, and what about all our friends?” Being a sociable sort, Chrystabel had many friends. “We won’t make new ones—Wales is nothing but wilderness! And we don’t even know their language! Their words have all those L’s!”

  “I’d wager there are no Dragoons there,” Arabel pointed out, looking on the bright side as always. “We won’t need to worry about Cromwell coming after that drafty old castle.”

  “We can be thankful for that,” Matthew agreed. “I imagine we should instruct the servants to begin packing our things.”

  Chrystabel shook her head, amazed that her brother could be so calm and practical. She remained silent a moment, struggling to resign herself to this dire fate.

  Wales.

  Wales!

  She slipped a hand into her pocket and played with the silver pendant she kept there, which always made her feel better. Father had given it to her right before he left to go fight in the war, when she’d been inconsolable. It was a family heirloom, a rendering of the Grosmont crest with its lion, passed down the generations from father to son…and now to Chrystabel. Tradition said the lion pendant ought to be Matthew’s, but Chrystabel only paid heed to traditions that suited her. And losing her dearest keepsake of the man she’d loved most in all the world would not suit her one bit.

  Her heart constricted at the thought of everything else she was about to lose. Her ancient tester bed, where she’d spent most every night of her nineteen years. The harpsichord her mother used to play when they had company to supper. The little rose garden her father had planted for her…

  “I’m taking my roses,” she said suddenly, surprising even herself.

  Matthew’s dark brows knitted together. “What?”

  “I’m taking my roses. I need them for essential oils to make perfume, and I haven’t any idea whether there will be roses in Wales at all, let alone my roses.”

  Arabel shook her head. “They’re planted, Chrystabel. You cannot take roses.”

  “What did Cromwell say?” Chrystabel marched over to snatch the letter from Matthew’s hand and quote from it. “‘You shall have liberty to take one day to gather and carry off your goods, and such other necessaries as you have.’” She looked up. “I’m a perfumer. I consider my roses necessary.”

  “You cannot take them,” Arabel repeated. “There’s no point. They’ll die.”

  “It’s winter. They’re dormant.” Chrystabel hoped that meant they wouldn’t die.

  “You cannot take them,” Arabel insisted.

  “You think not?” The look Chrystabel sent her sister was a challenge. “Watch me.”

  Two

  Tremayne Castle

  December 22

  JOSEPH ASHCROFT, the Viscount Tremayne, was puttering around in his—well, he liked to call it his conservatory, even though it really wasn’t one—when he heard the old wooden door rattling, making quite a racket.

  A shout forced its way through the cracks. “Please, let me in!”

  “You cannot go in there, Mistress,” one of Tremayne’s groundsmen hollered as the door rattled some more—to no avail, sinc
e it was barred from the inside. “This wing is unfinished and uninhabited. You must go around the castle and through the gatehouse.”

  “I cannot—it’s urgent!”

  “That door won’t open from out here. You really must go around, Mistress…?”

  “Creath Moore—my name is Creath Moore.” The groundsman must have looked confused, because she added, “Creath—it rhymes with breath. And I must get inside now!”

  Joseph was already unbolting the door. When he lifted the bar and pulled it open, Creath fell into his arms.

  And immediately began sobbing on his shoulder.

  “I’ve got her, thanks,” Joseph told the groundsman, who was standing there looking astonished to find anyone in the roofless building.

  A new hire. Otherwise he would have known that Joseph used this half-built wing of the castle for his winter gardening—and the man would also have known Creath. She lived on the nearest estate, and she and Joseph had been friends for nearly ten years, ever since his family had moved here to Tremayne to wait out the Civil War in relative safety. He and Creath had grown up together. All of the old retainers knew her.

  In ten years, Joseph couldn’t remember Creath ever sobbing this hard. Not even when her parents and little brother all died of smallpox last year. She wasn’t a short girl, but he was tall, and she felt slight and fragile shuddering against him. He couldn’t imagine what was so wrong, but his heart went out to her.

  “Close the door,” she managed through her sobs. “And bar it. Please.”

  Joseph disentangled himself from her to do that, shutting the door in the groundsman’s surprised face.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked Creath once they were free from prying eyes.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Choking back more tears, she staggered over to his potting bench and dropped to one of the stools he kept nearby. Her gaze darted around the huge open space to all the glassless windows, which Joseph had covered in oiled parchment that let in light but blocked any view. “Will you look outside and see if anyone is approaching?”

  Joseph blinked. “You just asked me to bar the door. Now you want me to unbar it? No one is there other than the groundsman—who else would be out in this freeze? The way the wind is gusting off the icy Severn, I fear we’re in for a storm—”

  “I need to know if Sir Leonard followed me—just look!”

  At twenty, Joseph already knew that he’d never understand females. But he could tell that this one was on the edge of hysteria. “Very well.” Hands held up in surrender, he backed away until he hit the door, then turned, opened it, and quickly shut and barred it again. “There’s no one. It’s so damned cold—” He broke off as he turned back to peer at her. “And yet, you wear no cloak. Did you walk here from Moore Manor with no cloak? Over a mile in the freezing cold?”

  “There was no time to fetch a cloak. And I didn’t walk here, I ran, which warmed me some.” Although all four fireplaces were lit, and the oiled canvas overhead held in the heat to keep his plants alive, she shivered. “I feel cold now, though. I cannot go through with it, Joseph. I cannot marry Sir Leonard. I just cannot.”

  Sir Leonard Moore, the rather distant cousin who had recently inherited her father’s baronetcy, expected to wed her on the second of January, the day before she turned eighteen. He coveted her holdings—acres of valuable land that weren’t included in the baronetcy’s entail, as they’d come from her mother’s family and now belonged to Creath. Unfortunately for her, Cromwell had seen fit to appoint Sir Leonard her guardian, which meant she couldn’t refuse to marry him. As long as she was underage, her marriage rights were his to bestow.

  But up until now, she hadn’t objected to the match. When Joseph had questioned her, Creath had claimed she didn’t mind wedding a man more than twice her age. She’d always been destined to be a lady of the manor, and her mother had trained her well. Though she wished Moore Manor weren’t Sir Leonard’s manor, at least it was home. She’d told Joseph she would be content loving her children and caring for her tenants and ancestral lands. And one day, her son would be the next baronet, bringing the title back to her branch of the family where it belonged.

  He’d believed her. He’d believed she’d make the best of her passionless marriage and take pleasure in the tasks expected of a lady. Because Creath was the kind of woman who would compromise her very soul in order to avoid conflict. The kind of woman who would square her shoulders, lift her chin, and get on with her life no matter what happened.

  Clearly something had changed.

  “What on earth happened?” Joseph reached to smooth the straight reddish-blond hairs that had escaped her usually neat bun.

  Creath flinched from him, her arms wrapping around her middle. “He tried to bed me,” she stated bluntly. The girl could be honest to a fault. “He said he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t change my mind, make sure no other man would want me if I did change my mind.” Her lower lip quivered. “If you’d seen the look in his eyes, Joseph—I believe he is insane.”

  “Holy Hades.” Something had changed, all right: The man had proved himself an animal. “He…he didn’t succeed, though?”

  She shook her head, biting her lip to stop the quivering. “I begged, and then I fought, and he was hurting me. I grabbed one of Father’s heavy bronze statues and brought it down on his head. He dropped like a sack of flour…and I ran.”

  It wrenched at his guts, watching her struggle for control. She clearly wanted to act like her normal, levelheaded self. But she didn’t seem to know how.

  The bastard had really shaken her. Joseph wasn’t a violent man, but right then, he’d never felt more capable of murder.

  “May I hide here?” she asked.

  “Of course you can,” he told her, though he knew that was his father’s decision to make.

  Joseph’s title was just a courtesy title. Someday he’d be the Earl of Trentingham, but until then his father was the lord and head of the family. Still, he knew his parents would agree to give Creath safe harbor. They loved her like a daughter.

  “We’ll keep you safe,” he promised, hoping they could. “I think we can assume Sir Leonard didn’t follow you, since he would have arrived by now.”

  “I hope he’s still knocked out,” she said darkly.

  “Do you think he’ll guess where you’ve gone?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. He doesn’t know me very well.” It had taken quite some time for the authorities to trace the Moore lineage back far enough to find and verify her father’s heir—Sir Leonard had arrived only last month. “I’m hoping he doesn’t know which neighbors are my friends. If I can hide for ten days, I’ll turn eighteen, and he won’t be my guardian anymore. He won’t be able to make me marry him then.”

  “I’m not so sure, Creath. He’s a Justice of the Peace.” That appointment was another reward from Cromwell—Sir Leonard claimed to have fought beside him in the war. “Marriage is a civil matter now, no longer any business of God’s. If a Justice of the Peace can marry others, who’s to say he can’t also marry himself? He just has to write your two names in his register. The old ways are gone…”

  “Oh, God, they’re all corrupt, aren’t they?”

  “Not all. But certainly some.” Probably most. And he strongly suspected Sir Leonard was among the corrupt ones.

  “I cannot marry him. I cannot.” Creath had always been a lovely pale English beauty, but now she looked positively white. “I’ve seen his true colors. He came from nothing, and he’s not a nice man. He’s a baronet now and has a government post, a solid position in society. But he wants more. He’ll always want more. He thinks marrying me will satisfy him, but it won’t, because he will never be satisfied with anything. He will grow to hate me and torment me till the end of my days.”

  By the end of her speech, her pretty green eyes were leaking steadily.

  Joseph plopped onto the stool beside her, and they both sat silent for a long time. The wind howled outside, making the canvas bil
low overhead. The weather was kicking up. Grasping for a solution that seemed just out of his mental reach, Joseph heaved a frustrated sigh.

  “Well, there’s nothing for it,” he said lightly. “You’ll just have to spend the rest of your days in hiding.” If he couldn’t solve her problems, perhaps he could at least revive her good humor. “Remember the priest hole?”

  It was hidden beneath the false bottom of a wardrobe cabinet—they’d played in it as children. She gave him a wan smile. “Alas, I’m not sure I could last even one day in there, let alone the rest of my days.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t have that many,” he quipped. “You’d die of starvation quick enough.” In Queen Elizabeth’s time, more than one priest had starved to death in a priest hole. The secret rooms were originally built to hide fugitive Catholics, who’d sometimes languished in them for days or weeks when the priest-hunters came around.

  Creath’s little smile turned lopsided. “I’d wager I’d succumb to madness first. It’s pitch-black in there, and I loathe the dark.”

  “I’ll take that wager—and see you well supplied with candles.”

  He thought she almost chuckled. “You’re too—” Her smile faltered.

  He waited. “Creath?”

  “I’m sorry.” Her red-rimmed eyes seemed to focus on something far away. “Thanks for trying,” she whispered.

  They fell into another silence. The canvas continued flapping, and a few snowflakes found their way inside. Joseph rose and took his time adding another log to each of the four fires, considering all the aspects of her dreadful dilemma. Examining the problem from every angle. Wracking his brain for any possible way out.

  At last, it was Creath’s turn to heave a sigh. “Maybe he’s not as corrupt as we fear. Maybe he’ll give up once I’m eighteen.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” he said, returning to her. “If your name ends up in his marriage register?”

  “I don’t know what I’d do.” Her lip was trembling again, her face paler than a ghost’s. “I cannot be bound to a man who tried to rape me. I…I think I’d rather not live at all.”