Under the Mistletoe

by Mary Balogh

  “They are still children,” she said. “My parents’ second family, people have always called them. Philip and I were two years apart, and then there were eleven years before Andrew was born. And Megan came two years after that. They are only eleven and nine years old now. Just children.

  This is our last Christmas together. In two weeks’ time we will all be separated. Perhaps we will never be together again. I want it to be a memorable Christmas.” She was leaning forward in her chair. Her fingers were twining about one another.

  “And how am I to help create this memorable Christmas?” he asked. His mouth was definitely formed into a sneer now. “Host a grand party? Grand parties are not in my style.”

  “No,” she said, speaking quickly and distinctly. “I want a goose for Christmas dinner.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Papa was not a careful manager,” she continued. “There was very little money left when he died and now there is none left, or at least only enough to pay for our journeys in two weeks’ time. The people of the village would help, of course, but they were so used to finding that Papa would not accept charity in any form that they now do not even offer. And perhaps they are right.” Her chin rose again. “I have some of his pride.”

  “So,” he said, “instead of asking charity, you have found someone who is in your debt.”

  “Yes,” she said, and swallowed awkwardly again.

  “And you want a goose for Christmas,” he said. “Your needs are modest, ma’am. That is all?”

  “And a doll for Megan,” she said recklessly. “There is the most glorious one in Miss Pierce’s window-all porcelain and satin and lace. I want that for Megan. She has never had a doll, except the rag one Mama made for her when she was a baby. I want her to have something really lovely and valuable to take with her.”

  “And for your brother?” he asked softly.

  “Oh.” She gazed at him wistfully. “A watch.A silver watch. But there are none in the village, and I would not know how to go about purchasing one for him. But it does not matter. Andrew is eleven and almost not a child any longer. He will understand, and he will be happy with the scarf and gloves I am knitting for him. The cost of a goose and the doll will not exceed the cost of tuition for two summers, I don’t believe.

  Will it?”

  “And for yourself?” he asked even more softly.

  Lilias gazed down at her hands and reached out to twist the offending sleeve. “I don’t want anything that will cost money,” she said. “I want only the memory of one Christmas to take with me.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  She looked up at him. “Into Yorkshire,” she said. “I have a post as a governess with a family there.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And your brother and sister?”

  “I have persuaded my grandfather to take Andrew,” she said. “It took several letters, but finally he agreed to take him and send him to school. Sir Percy Angove, that is, Papa’s father. The two of them never communicated after Papa’s marriage.”

  The marquess nodded curtly.

  “And Megan is going to Great-aunt Hetty in Bath,” Lilias said. “I am afraid I pestered her with letters too. But it will be only until I can earn enough money to bring us all together again.”

  Bedford got to his feet and looked down at her from cold and cynical eyes. “Ah, yes,” he said. “A suitably affecting story, Miss Angove. I must congratulate you on the manner in which you have presented it.”

  Lilias looked up at him in some bewilderment.

  His bearing was military again, his manner curt, his eyes like chips of ice. “You will have your goose, ma’am,” he said, “and your sister her doll. Your brother will have his watch too-I shall see to it. You will have your Christmas and the memory of it to take into Yorkshire with you. I shall wish you good-day now.”

  Victory? Was it to be so easy? Was she to have more than a Christmas dinner to give the children? Was Megan to have her doll? And Andrew his watch? Andrew was going to have a watch! All without any struggle, any persuasion, any groveling?

  Was this victory?

  Lilias scrambled to her feet and looked up at the tall, austere figure of the Marquess of Bedford. She curtsied. “What can I say?” she said breathlessly. “Thank-you sounds so tame.”

  “You need not say even that,” he said. “I am merely repaying a debt, after all. You will wait here, ma’am, if you please. I shall have tea sent to you while you await the arrival of my carriage to take you home.

  I take it you walked here?”

  He would not take no for an answer, although there was no apparent kindness at all in his manner. Lilias found herself gazing once more into the fire a few minutes later, having been left to take her refreshments alone. And after drinking her tea, she was to have a warm and comfortable-and dry-ride home.

  She should be feeling elated. She was feeling elated. But uncomfortable and humiliated too. As if, after all, she were taking charity. She blinked back tears and stared defiantly into the flames.

  She was not taking charity. She was merely accepting what was hers by right.

  He seemed to be made of stone to the very heart. Not once had he smiled.

  Not once had he given any indication that theirs was no new acquaintance. And he had called her explanation an affecting story. He had said so with a sneer, as if he thought it contrived and untrue.

  It did not matter. She had got what she had set out to get. More. She had not even been sure she was going to ask for the doll. But as well as that, Andrew was to have a watch. It did not matter that he had not smiled at her or wished her a happy Christmas.

  It was at Christmastime he had first kissed her. It had been one of those magical and rare Christmases when it had snowed and there was ice on the lake. They had been sledding down a hill, he and she the last of a long line of young people, all of whom had been trekking back up again by the time they had had their turn. And she had overturned into the snow, shrieking and laughing, and giggling even harder when he had come over to help her up and brush the snow from her face and hair.

  He had kissed her swiftly and warmly and openmouthed, stilling both her laughter and his own until he had made some light remark and broken the tension of the moment. It had been Christmastime. Christmas Eve, to be exact. She had been fifteen, he one-and-twenty.

  It did not matter. That had been a long time ago, almost exactly seven years, in fact. He was not the same man, not by any means. But then, she was not the same, either. She had been a girl then, a foolish girl who had believed that Christmas and life were synonymous.

  She turned and smiled at Mrs. Morgan, who was carrying a tray into the salon.

  He had a daughter somewhere in the house, Lilias thought for the first time since her arrival.

  The child tugged at her father’s hand, trying to free her own.

  “The water is running down my arm, Papa,” she complained. A few minutes before she had told him that the rain was running down the back of her neck. “I want to go home now. Pick me up.”

  The Marquess of Bedford stooped down and took his daughter up in his arms. She circled his neck with her own arms and burrowed her head against the heavy capes of his coat.

  “We’ll be home in a twinkling, poppet,” he said, admitting to himself finally that he was not enjoying tramping around his own grounds any more than she, being buffeted by winds and a heavy drizzle that seemed to drip into one’s very bones. “The snow will come before Christmas, and we will build snowmen and skate on the lake and sled on the hill.”

  “Your coat is wet, Papa,” she said petulantly, moving her head about as if in the hope of finding a spot that the rain had not attacked. “I’m cold.”

  He was clearly fooling only himself, Bedford thought, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his coat so that his daughter might burrow her damp head inside. Christmas would not come. Not this year or ever again.

  December the twenty-fifth would come and go, of course
, this year and every year, but it would not be Christmas for all that.

  Christmas had come for the last time six years before, when his father had still been alive, and Claude too. When he had been a younger son.

  When Philip Angove had still been alive.Before Spain had taken Claude and Waterloo, Philip.When life had been full of hope and promise.

  Christmas in that year and in all the years preceding it had invariably been white. Always snow and skating and sledding and snowball fights.

  And Yule logs and holly and mistletoe.And family and laughter and the security of love.And food and company and song.

  Christmas had always been white and innocent. How could there ever be Christmas again?

  His brother-his great hero-had died at Badajoz. And his father less than a year later. And soon after that he had discovered that the world was not an innocent or a pleasant place in which to do one’s living.

  Suddenly he had had friends by the score. And suddenly women found him irresistibly attractive and enormously witty. And suddenly relatives he had hardly known he had, developed a deep fondness for him.

  In his innocence he had been flattered by it all. In his innocence he had fallen for the most beautiful and most sought-after beauty of the London Season. He had married her before the Season was out.

  Lorraine. Beautiful, charming, and witty. The only thing she had lacked-and she had lacked it utterly-was a heart. She had made no secret of her affairs right from the beginning of their marriage and had merely laughed at him and called him rustic when he had raged at her.

  “Papa, open another button so that I can get my arms in,” his child said, her voice muffled by the folds of his cravat.

  He kissed one wet curl as he complied with her demand. He was not even sure that she was his, though Lorraine had always insisted that she was.

  “Darling,” she had said to him once, when she was very pregnant and fretful at being confined to home, “do you think I would go through all this boredom and discomfort for any other reason than to give you your precious heir?”

  She had been very angry when Dora was born.

  Lorraine had drowned two years later in Italy, where she had been traveling with a group of friends, among whom was her latest lover.

  And the lures had been out for him again for almost all of the two years since. Women gazed at him with adoration in their eyes. Women cooed over a frequently petulant and rather plain-faced Dora.

  The Marquess of Bedford ran thankfully up the marble steps in front of his house and through the double doors, which a footman had opened for him.

  “Let’s see if there is a fire in the nursery, poppet, shall we?” he asked, setting his daughter’s feet on the tiled floor and removing her bonnet and cloak. “And buttered muffins and scones?”

  “Yes, if you please, Papa,” she said, raising a hand for his. But her tone was petulant again as they climbed the stairs side by side. “When will Christmas come? You said there would be lots of people here and lots to do. You said it would be fun.”

  “And so I did,” he said, his heart aching for her as he looked down at her wet and untidy head. “But Christmas is still five days away. It will be wonderful when it comes. It always is here. You will see.”

  But he was lying to her. The dolls and the frilled dresses and the bows would not make a happy Christmas for her. The only real gift he would be able to give her was his company. The choice had been between any of a number of house parties to which he had been invited alone, and Christmas spent, for the first time ever, with his child. He had chosen the latter. But he was not at all sure that that was not more a gift to himself than to her.

  Where was the snow? And the young people?And the laughter and song?

  “When will the rain end, Papa?” the child asked, echoing his own thoughts.

  “Soon,” he said. “Tomorrow, probably.”

  “But it has rained forever,” she said.

  Yes it had. For all of a week, at least.

  He should not have come. He had not been home for almost six years. Not since leaving in a hurry with his father when the news about Claude had come. He should have kept that memory of home intact, at least. That memory of something perfect.Something pure and innocent.Something beyond the dreariness and the corruption of real life.

  But he had been fool enough to come back, only to discover that there was no such place. And perhaps there never had been. Only a young and innocent fool who had not yet had his eyes opened.

  The rain was bad enough when he had been expecting the magic of his childhood Christmases. Worse by far had been that visit two days before.

  Even Lilias.

  She had been his first real love. Oh, he had lost his virginity at university and had competed quite lustily with his fellow students for the favors of all the prettiest barmaids of Oxford. But Lilias had been his first love.

  A sweet and innocent love. Begun that Christmas when he had first become aware of her as a woman and not just as the fun-loving and rather pretty sister of his friend, Philip Angove. And continued through the following summer and the Christmas after that.

  It had been an innocent love. They had never shared more than kisses.

  Sweet and brief and chaste kisses. He had been very aware of her youth-only sixteen even during that second Christmas. But they had talked and shared confidences and dreamed together.

  A sweet and uncomplicated love.

  He wished he had kept that memory untainted. But the world had come to her too. He had wondered about her when he had decided to come home, wondered if he would see her, wondered what it would be like to see her again. He had been amazed to be told on his second day home that she was waiting downstairs in the salon for him. And he had hoped with every stair he took that it would not be as he suspected it would.

  It had been worse.

  The wet and muddy hem of her gown; the darned patches on the hem and sleeve-the second brought to his attention by the artful design to conceal it; the damp and untidy hair; the thin, pale face; the sad, brave story; the modest appeal for assistance; the ridiculous mention of a debt unpaid. He had seen worse actresses at Drury Lane.

  He had been furious enough to do her physical harm. She had come to his home to arouse his pity and his chivalry, and in the process she had destroyed one of his few remaining dreams.

  Could she find no more honest way of finding herself a husband? Did she really imagine he was so naive? She had not even had the decency to wait awhile. She had been the first to come.

  “Papa,” Dora was saying. She had climbed unnoticed onto his lap beside the fire in the nursery and was playing with the chain of his watch, “it is so dull here. I want to go somewhere.”

  “Tomorrow, poppet,” he said. “Mr. Crawford has two little boys, who will surely be pleased to see you. And the rector has a family of five. Maybe there are some little ones among them. We will call on them tomorrow, shall we?”

  “Yes, please, Papa,” she said.

  “And I have another errand to run in the village,” he said, staring down at his watch, which she had pulled from his pocket. “To see a little boy and girl, though they are not quite as little as you, Dora.”

  “Tomorrow?” she said. “Promise, Papa?”

  “I promise,” he said, kissing her cheek. “Now, Nurse wants to dry and comb your hair again. And I need to change my clothes and dry my own hair.”

  Lilias set three pairs of mud-caked boots down outside the door of her cottage and looked down at them ruefully. Would it be better to tackle the job of cleaning them now, when the mud was still fresh and wet, or later, when it had dried? She glanced up at the sky. The clouds hung heavy and promised that the rain was not yet at an end, but for the moment it had stopped. The boots would not get wet inside just yet.

  She was closing the door when her eye was caught by the approach of a carriage along the village street. The very one she had ridden in just three days before. She closed the door hastily. She did not want to be caug
ht peeping out at him as he rode past. But she could not prevent herself from crossing to the window and standing back from it so that she could see without being seen.

  “Ugh,” Megan said from the small kitchen beyond the parlor. “It is all soaking wet, Lilias.”

  “Ouch,” Andrew said. “Is there any way to pick up holly, Lilias, without pricking oneself to death?”

  “Oh, mercy on us,” Lilias said, one hand straying to her throat, “he is stopping here. And descending too. One of the postilions is putting down the steps.”

  The dripping bundles of holly, which they had all just been gathering at great cost to fingers and boots, were abandoned. Megan and Andrew flew across the room to watch the splendid drama unfolding outside their window.

  “The marquess?” Megan asked, big-eyed. “And is that his daughter, Lilias? What a very splendid velvet bonnet and cloak she is wearing.”

  Andrew whistled, an accomplishment he had perfected in the past few months. “Look at those horses,” he said. “What prime goers!”

  Lilias licked her lips and passed her hands over hair that was hopelessly flattened and untidy from her recent excursion outdoors. The watch? Had he come to bring the watch in person? The doll had been delivered by a footman the day before, fortunately at a time when the children had gone over to the rectory to play with the children there.

  It had been carefully hidden away after she had smoothed wondering fingers over the lace and the soft golden hair. And the butcher had informed her that she might pick up a goose on Christmas Eve.

  She wished she were wearing her best day dress again. She crossed to the door and opened it before anyone had time to knock. And she saw with some dismay the row of muddy boots standing to one side of the doorstep.

  She curtsied.

  “How do you do, ma’am?” the Marquess of Bedford said. He looked even larger and more formidable than he had looked three mornings before, clad as he was in a many-caped greatcoat. He held a beaver hat in one hand. “I have been taking my daughter about to meet some of the children of the neighborhood.”