by Mary Balogh
It seemed that the only time they had nodded off to sleep had been just before his valet had come into his room from the dressing room, as he always did, to pull back the curtains from the windows. It was fortunate that the time of year was such that the earl had covered Estelle up to the neck with blankets, because she did not have a stitch on beneath the covers any more than he did.
Poor Higgins had frozen to the spot when he had glanced to the bed and seen his master only barely conscious, his cheek resting on a riot of tumbled dark curls. The poor man had literally backed out of the room.
Estelle, fortunately, had slept through the encounter until he woke her with his kisses a few minutes later. And he had gazed in amusement and wonder at the blush that had colored her face and neck-after two years of marriage.
Estelle had just given Nicky his present and, child that he was, he had to open it right there. She sat down close to where he stood, one arm about his thin waist, heedless of the presence of all her guests and many of the other servants. She looked into his face with a smile and watched his look of wide-eyed wonder and his dropped jaw as he saw his watch for the first time.
She laughed with delight. “It is a watch for you, Nicky,” she said, “so that you will always know what time of day it is. Do you know how to tell time?”
“No, missus,” he said in his treble voice, his eyes on his new treasure.
“Then I shall teach you,” she said, hugging him and kissing his cheek.
“And when you move to the country with your mama and your sister, you will know when it is time to come to the stables to groom the horses, and when it is time to go home from school. Happy Christmas, sweetheart.”
He traced the silver frame of the watch with one finger, as if he were not quite sure that it was real.
“His lordship and I will be going into the country after Christmas too,” she said. “We will meet your mama and your sister. What is her name?”
“Elsie,” he said, and then added hastily, “missus.”
“You will want to run along,” she said, kissing his cheek again. “I hear that one of the footmen is to accompany you and carry a basket of food to your mama and then go back for you tonight. Do have a lovely day.”
“But he don’t need to come for me,” the child said with some spirit, “I know the way.”
Estelle smiled, and the earl held out his hand gravely. “Happy Christmas, Nicky,” he said. “Her ladyship and I are very happy that you have come to us.”
The child forced his eyes up to the dreaded ones of his master, but he saw nothing but a twinkling kindness there. He turned to leave, but at the last moment whisked a crumpled rag out from the band of his breeches and almost shoved it into Estelle’s hands.
“For you,” he said, and was gone from the room before she could react at all.
“Oh, Allan, he has given me his seashell,” she said to her husband in some distress before being caught up again in the noise and bustle of the morning.
An hour passed before there was a lull enough that the Earl of Lisle could take his wife by the hand and suggest into her ear that they disappear for half an hour. She picked up the half-forgotten rag as they were leaving the room.
“I wished you a happy Christmas very early this morning under the mistletoe,” he said with a smile when the study door was safely closed behind them, “and early this morning after I had quite finished waking you. But I feel the need to say it again. Happy Christmas, Estelle.” He lifted her hands one at a time to his lips, kissing first the ring he had given her, and then the one she had given him. “We have established an undying reputation for eccentricity, I believe, with two almost identical rings, one on each of your hands.”
“They are identical in meaning too,” she said, gripping his hands and stretching up to kiss him on the lips. “Allan, what am I to do with this seashell? He has treasured it so much.”
“He really wanted to give it to you,” he said. “Let’s have a look at it, shall we?”
They both stood speechless a few moments later, their foreheads almost touching as they gazed down at the Star of Bethlehem nestled on her palm inside the rag. And then their foreheads did touch and Estelle closed her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, after a lengthy silence during which neither of them seemed able to find quite the right words to say, “was there ever such a Christmas, Allan?”
“What I am wondering,” he said in a voice that sounded surprisingly normal considering the emotion that had held them speechless, “is where we are to find another finger to put it on.”
“I see how it is,” she said, clasping ring and rag in one hand and lifting both arms up about his neck. She made no attempt to suggest a solution to the problem he had posed. “The Wise Men lost the star too for a while, but when they found it again, it was over Bethlehem, and they found also everything they had ever been looking for. Oh, Allan, that has happened to us too. It has, hasn’t it? What would we have ever done if Nicky had not come into our lives?”
He did not answer her. He kissed her instead.
She giggled suddenly after he had lifted his head. “I have just had a thought,” she said. “A thoroughly silly thought. Nicky came down a chimney and brought us a Christmas happier than any our dreams could have devised.”
He laughed with her. “But I don’t think even our wildest dreams could convey sainthood on Nicky,” he said. “I don’t think he can possibly be the real Saint Nicholas, Estelle. Would a real saint steal both a diamond and a ring, as Nicky of the sharp eyes obviously did, be smitten by a pretty lady who smells pretty, and have the ring mended by some devious means? I think it will be entirely better for my digestion if I don’t investigate that last point too closely, though doubtless I will feel obliged to do just that tomorrow. The little imp. Perhaps he is Saint Nicholas after all. Now, do you suppose we should go back upstairs to our guests?”
She hesitated and brushed at an imaginary speck of lint on his shoulder and passed a nervous tongue over her lips.
“What is it?” he asked.
She flushed and kept her eyes on his shoulder. “I have another gift for you,” she said. “At least, I am not sure about it, though I am almost sure. And I suppose I should not offer it as a gift until I am certain.
But by that time Christmas will be over. And it is such a very special Christmas that I have become greedy and want to make it even more so.”
He laughed softly. “Suppose you give it to me,” he said, “and let me decide if it a worthy offering or not.”
She raised her eyes to his and flushed a deeper shade. “I can’t actually give it to you for a little more than seven months,” she said. “That is, if I am right about it, anyway. But I think I must be, Allan, because it has been almost a whole month now.”
“Estelle?” He was whispering.
“I think it must be right,” she said, wrapping her arms about his neck again, “because I am never late except perhaps by a day or two. And I think I have felt a little dizzy and nauseated some mornings when getting out of bed, though that could, of course, be wishful thinking. I think I am with child, Allan. I think so. After almost two years. Can it be true, do you think?”
He did not even attempt to answer her question. He caught her up in a hug that seemed designed to crush every bone in her body, and in the body of their child too. He pressed his face to her neck. Hers was hidden against his shoulder.
For the next several minutes it was doubtful that Estelle was the only one without dry eyes. It seemed that men did sometimes cry-in very exceptional circumstances.
The Best Gift
“Christmas is an unutterable bore,” Lady Enid Penn said with an affected sigh. “There is positively no one with whom to amuse oneself except parents and aunts and uncles and cousins by the score and nothing to do except feast and make merry-with one’s own family!”
There was a murmur of sympathetic agreement from several other young ladies.
“I shall simply die,” the Honora
ble Miss Elspeth Lynch informed her listeners, “if the Worsleys remain in town for the holiday, as they did last year, instead of returning home. Patricia Worsley is my dearest bosom friend, and Howard Worsley is… well, he is interesting.” She looked around archly at her companions, who tittered on cue.
“If one were only sixteen instead of fifteen,” the Honorable Miss Deborah Latimer said, adding her sigh to everyone else’s. “One’s parents and aunts and uncles and all their friends have a wonderful time dancing and partaking of the wassail bowl and staying up almost until dawn while one is banished to the nursery and to bed with the children.”
“And what about you, Craggs?” Lady Enid turned her head to look at the lady who had sat silently writing at her desk while they talked. “Do you find Christmas a bore, too? Or do you have wonderfully exciting plans?
You are older than sixteen, after all.”
The other young ladies tittered again, though there was an edge of cruelty to their laughter this time.
“Do you have dozens of beaux, Craggs? Do tell,” Miss Lynch said, widening her eyes.
Miss Jane Craggs looked up from the journal in which she was writing.
Although it was homework hour and school rules stated quite categorically that it was to be a silent hour, she was not enforcing the rule this evening. It was the last day of school before Christmas.
Tomorrow all the girls would be going home, most of them with their parents or with liveried servants in sumptuous carriages.
“I believe it would be something of an exaggeration, Elspeth, to count my beaux in the dozens,” she said. “Besides, a lady never does tell, you know.”
“But you are not a lady, Craggs,” one of the younger girls said.
But she won only frowns for her witticism. Everyone knew that Jane Craggs was not a lady, that she had spent most of her life at Miss Phillpotts’s school for young ladies, her board and education paid for by an unknown benefactor-undoubtedly her father-until she was seventeen, that she had stayed on afterward as a teacher, though Miss Phillpotts treated her more as a servant than as an instructor. All the girls took their cue from the headmistress. The names of all their teachers were preceded by “Miss” except for Craggs. They treated her with a condescension bordering sometimes on insolence. But there was an undefined borderline beyond which they would not go. It was unladylike to remind Craggs in words that she was no lady.
“I believe,” Jane Craggs said, closing her journal and getting to her feet, “we will make a concession to the approaching holiday and end homework hour five minutes early. Would anyone care to argue the point?”
There was relieved laughter and some enthusiastic cheering from the young ladies, who jumped to their feet and made for the door.
“Happy Christmas, Craggs,” Deborah Latimer said as she was leaving the room.
Jane Craggs smiled at her and returned the greeting.
She sat down again when she was alone and began deliberately to clean and mend the pen she had been using. And she tried to ignore the knowledge that Christmas was approaching-an impossibility, of course.
No one with whom to amuse oneself except aunts and uncles and cousins and parents.Nothing to do but feast and make merry with one’s family members. Such a Christmas was unutterably boring? Jane felt rather like crying, and ruthlessly suppressed the feeling. If only she could once-just once in her life-experience such a Christmas.
She had always hated Christmas. As a child and as a young girl she had also dreaded it. Dreaded the aloneness, with which she had always lived every day of the year but that always assaulted her most cruelly at Christmas. Dreaded the emptiness. Dreaded the excitement of the other girls as they prepared to go home and waited for family members or servants to come and fetch them. Dreaded the departure of Miss Phillpotts and the teachers until she was quite alone in the school with the few servants who were kept on for the holidays-always, it seemed, the most humorless of the servants.
Now she was three-and-twenty years old. The dread had gone. But the aloneness, the loneliness, the emptiness had not. She had heard and read so much about Christmas. For her there had never been family-she understood that she had spent her early years in an orphanage, a rather expensive one. She believed, though she did not know for sure, that her mother had been a nobody, perhaps a whore, while her father had been a wealthy man who had agreed to support her until she was old enough to support herself. And so there had never been family for her and never Christmas gifts or Christmas parties.
Sometimes she had to remind herself that her name was Jane. A rather plain name, it was true, but her own. She heard it so rarely on anyone’s lips that she could not remember the last time. It seemed singularly unfortunate to her that someone-her mother, she supposed-had blessed her with the surname of Craggs.
As a child she had dreamed of Christmas, and the dream had lingered even though she had passed the age of dreams. But did one ever pass the age of dreams? Would life be supportable if one could not dream?
She had dreamed of a large house with three stories in which every window blazed with light. It was always twilight and there was snow outside blanketing the ground and making of the trees and their branches magical creations. Inside there was a large hall, three stories high, with two large fireplaces crackling with log fires, the hall decked out in greenery and bows for the season. It was a house filled with people.
Happy, beautiful people. All of whom loved her. All of whom she loved.
As a child she had even given names and faces and personalities to all those people. And in her imagination she had bought or made special gifts for each of them and had received gifts in return.
In her dream there was always a carved Nativity scene in the window of the drawing room, and it was always the focal point of family celebrations. The family always went to church on Christmas Eve, trudging through the snow to get there, filling a number of the pews.
They always ran and laughed and ambushed one another with snowballs and rolled one another in the snow on the way home.
The contrast between dream and reality had been almost unbearable when she was a child. Now it was bearable. Jane tidied the already tidy teacher’s desk, picked up her journal, her best friend, and clasped it with both hands against her bosom as she left the study room to climb the stairs to her small attic room. Now she was old enough to know that Christmas Day was just a day on the calendar like all others, that it would pass, that before she knew it the teachers and girls would be returning for the spring term. She had learned to be sensible.
She lit a candle in her room, shivered, and began to undress. Oh, no, she had not-she had not learned to be sensible. And it had not become bearable. It had not, it had not.
But she had learned to pretend to be sensible. And she had learned to pretend that it was bearable. She had learned to hold on to her childish dreams.
To say that he was feeling annoyed was to understate the case. He disliked Christmas. He had disliked it for most of his adult years. It was all just a parcel of nonsense as far as he was concerned. He liked to remove himself from town and all other centers of merriment well before the collective madness set in and take himself off to Cosway, his country seat, where he could wait out the season in quietness and sanity.
The trouble was that his family knew it and saw him as being available to care for unwanted relatives. Not that it had ever happened before, it was true, but it was happening this year, and he knew that it would happen again, that he was setting a trend this year that he would regret forever after. His sister and brother-in-law had decided entirely on the spur of the moment to spend Christmas with friends in Italy and had disposed of the minor inconvenience of a fifteen-year-old daughter by informing him-yes, Susannah had told him, not asked him-that she would spend Christmas with him at Cosway.
What, in the name of all that was wonderful, was he going to do with a fifteen-year-old niece for a few weeks? And at Christmas, of all times?
What he would do, he had de
cided at once, having neglected the obvious solution of telling his elder sister that she must change her plans, that he just would not do it-what he would do was enlist the help of someone else. Some female who had no other plans for Christmas.Someone who would be pleased enough to spend it at Cosway, keeping Deborah out of mischief. And out of his way.
Agatha, in fact. But Agatha, his maiden aunt, had been invited to spend the week of Christmas with her dear friends, the Skinners, in Bath, and while she hated to inconvenience her dear nephew and great-niece, she really could not disappoint the Skinners this close to Christmas.
When Viscount Buckley descended from his carriage outside Miss Phillpotts’s school and had himself announced to speak with the headmistress herself, he was scowling. And his mood matched his expression exactly.
“Deborah will be very delighted to learn that her uncle, the viscount, has come in person to convey her home for the holidays, my lord,” Miss Phillpotts said to him, smiling graciously.
His lordship sincerely doubted it. Especially when the child discovered that her parents had taken themselves off to Italy without a word to her. He felt sorry for the girl, if the truth were known. But he felt sorrier for himself.
“I suppose, ma’am,” he said, without allowing himself to feel even the faintest glimmering of hope, “that there is not another young lady at the school who has nowhere to go for the holiday? Someone who could come with my niece and be company for her over Christmas?”
“I am afraid not, my lord,” the headmistress said. “All our girls will be leaving today.”
The viscount sighed. “It was a faint hope,” he said. “I am not much in practice as far as entertaining very young ladies is concerned, ma’am.”
Or as far as celebrating Christmas was concerned. And Deborah would doubtless want to celebrate it. Damn!
“It is indeed kind of you to be willing to extend your hospitality to another young lady,” Miss Phillpotts said. “But the only person who will be remaining at the school apart from three servants is Miss Craggs.”
