Under the Mistletoe

by Mary Balogh

  He strode on, knowing that he was walking too fast for her, but doing nothing to slacken his pace.

  “Stephen,” she said. She sounded close to tears. “Why do you hate me?”

  Stephen. No one had called him by his given name for years, it seemed.

  Lorraine had never called him anything but Bedford. He slackened his pace so that she was no longer forced almost to run at his side.

  It was clever. Very clever. It almost unnerved him. It was too clever.

  She had overplayed her hand.

  “I do not hate you, ma’am,” he said, thankful to see the house close by.

  The children must be inside already. “What possible reason would I have to hate you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He gritted his teeth against the trembling of her voice. It was too overdone. Too contrived.

  Lilias, he thought, and remembered the oak trees. And remembered Lorraine and dozens of admiring female eyes and more dozens of obsequious hangers-on.All with their various wiles and arts, and not a few of them with their sad stories and their outstretched hands.

  Life might have been so different if only Claude had not died, he thought bitterly, standing aside so that Lilias might precede him up the steps and through the doors into the hallway of his home.

  Lilias was putting the final stitches in a strip of faded blue cloth for Mary’s robe while Megan was painstakingly lining the manger with straw.

  Andrew was whittling away at a sheep that insisted on looking more like a fox, he complained, a deep frown between his eyes.

  “But Joseph is quite splendid, Drew,” Megan said loyally. “He looks quite like a real man.”

  “And how lovely it will be,” Lilias said, “to have our own Nativity scene when everyone else has to go to church to see one. What shall we sing?”

  “ ‘Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,’ ” Megan began to sing, and Lilias joined her, while Andrew held his sheep at arm’s length and regarded it with half-closed eyes.

  They all stopped what they were doing when there was a knock at the door. Lilias rose to answer it.

  Lady Dora West was dressed in dark blue velvet this time, in a small but dashing riding outfit. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed with color. She was clutching her father’s hand as she had two days before.

  “We rode here on Pegasus,” she announced as soon as the door was opened, and Lilias could see beyond her a magnificent black stallion tethered to the fence. “Papa said we might call and see your decorations and see Joseph if he is finished.”

  “I do beg your pardon if you are busy.” The Marquess of Bedford was looking at her with hooded and wary eyes, Lilias saw when she lifted her own reluctantly to his face.

  Why had he come? The afternoon before had been unspeakably embarrassing, especially after her outburst, when she had called him by his given name and asked him such a foolish question. Instead of sitting in the drawing room after tea while the children ran excitedly about first that room and then the nursery, placing the holly, and giggling over where to hang the mistletoe, they had trailed almost silently after. Afraid to be alone together.

  She had not expected to see him again.

  “Dora has quite taken to your brother and sister,” he said. “She can derive no excitement from her nurse’s company or from mine. She will be satisfied with ten minutes, I believe.”

  But by the time he entered the cottage, Dora had already thrown aside her hat and riding jacket and had run into the kitchen to lift from a hook behind the door the pinafore she had worn the last time.

  “Oh, the holly,” she cried. “It looks so lovely in here because the room is small. And the mistletoe is right in the center.” She stood beneath it and chuckled. “Kiss me, Papa.”

  He did so, bending from his great height to take the upturned face between his hands and kiss the puckered mouth. Lilias turned away, a curious churning in her stomach.

  “But that is supposed to be just for Christmas,” he said. “Not for another two days, poppet.”

  Listening to his voice as he spoke to the child, not seeing him, she thought he sounded like Stephen. But no, she would not think that. It was not true.

  Dora was soon exclaiming over Joseph and laughing delightedly over the sheep when Andrew told her that it looked like a fox. She noticed Mary, who was already dressed in her blue robe.

  “Oh, pretty,” she said, fingering it.

  Bedford seated himself, uninvited, his eyes on his daughter.

  “We were singing when you came,” Megan said, and began singing the same carol that had been interrupted by the arrival of their guests. Dora smiled and stroked Mary’s robe. “You sing too, Lilias.”

  Lilias flushed. “Later, Megan,” she said, and glanced in some embarrassment at the marquess, whose eyes had shifted to her. His expression was unfathomable.

  “You used to sing,” he said. “All the time.”

  She smiled fleetingly and wished she still had Mary’s robe to stitch at.

  She had not yet started Joseph’s.

  “You used to go caroling,” he said, frowning as if the memory had only just come back to him. “On Christmas Eve. We all used to go-Claude, Philip, Susan and Henrietta Price, the Hendays. But you used to lead the singing.”

  Lilias bit her lip. “We still go,” she said. “Some of the villagers and I. The children too. We go around the village before church at eleven, and out to some of the cottages too if we know that someone is too unwell to come to church.”

  “Tomorrow night,” Andrew said, looking up briefly from his work. “We had great fun last year. Mr. Campbell gave us all hot cider before he realized that some of us were children and ought not to be drinking it.”

  Megan giggled. Then she looked up, arrested by some bright thought. “You ought to come too this year,” she said. “Dora can come. I will hold her hand. And you too, sir,” she added magnanimously.

  “May I, Papa?” Dora had leaped to her feet. She looked definitely pretty, Lilias thought, untidy hair and faded pinafore notwithstanding.

  “May we?” She danced up and down on the spot in an agony when he did not answer immediately. “Oh, please, please, Papa, may we?”

  “You do not know any of the carols, poppet,” he said. “And it will be too late for you. It will be past your bedtime.”

  “But Megan will teach me,” she said. “Won’t you, Megan? And Miss Angove.

  Won’t you, Miss Angove? And I will go to sleep tomorrow afternoon, Papa, and sleep all afternoon and be very good. Oh, may we go too? Please.”

  “We will have to talk about it further,” he said stiffly. He looked almost angry, Lilias saw at a glance. “Right now we are interrupting work, Dora. And I have some errands to run in the village.”

  “But I don’t want to go,” she said. “You will stop to talk to people, Papa, and I will be dull. You go and do your errands and I will stay here. Miss Angove will teach me the carols.”

  The marquess stood up resolutely. “Put your pinafore away where you found it, now,” he said, “and I shall help you on with your coat.”

  She stared at him, her lower lip protruding beyond the upper.

  “We will be very happy to have her stay, if you will agree,” Lilias said softly. “It is good to have children here at Christmastime.”

  His eyes turned on her, hooded, inscrutable. He inclined his head. “Very well, then, ma’am,” he said. He turned back to his daughter. “You may stay for an hour, Dora,” he said. “But you must come without protest when I return.”

  Megan and Dora clapped their hands. Even Andrew looked pleased.

  Lilias, standing at the door a minute later, watching the marquess swing himself into the saddle of his horse and proceed along the village street, was not sure if she had done the right thing or not, interfering between a father and his daughter. He had paused in the doorway and looked down at her.

  “Another debt to call in?” he had said softly and icily.

>   She had not comprehended his meaning until he was riding down the pathway to the gate, and even then she was not sure he had meant what she thought he had meant. She hoped he had not. And she wondered again, though she wished with all her heart that she had not asked it, why he hated her.

  They sang for almost the whole hour, sometimes the same carol over and over, while Andrew tackled the final feature of the Nativity scene, the baby Jesus, and Megan arranged and rearranged the items already completed. Dora first helped and then stood at Lilias’s elbow, staring fascinated at the tiny robe for Joseph that she was making.

  Lilias smiled at her after a few minutes, when they were between carols.

  “Why don’t you pull up that stool?” she said.

  “Papa told me the story,” Dora said when she was seated. “About the baby and the stable and the manger and the smothering clothes.”

  “The swaddling clothes,” Lilias said with a smile. “That is what I will be making next.”

  “He is going to tell me again tonight,” Dora said. “I like that story. I am going to learn to sew next year when I am five.”

  “Are you?” Lilias smiled again. “Will you like that?”

  “Nurse is to teach me,” Dora said. “But I am going to ask Papa if you can teach me instead. It would be fun with you.”

  Megan began singing another carol.

  The caroling was not the only part of Christmas he had forgotten, Bedford discovered the following morning. And he really had forgotten that. He had always remembered Christmas as a white and outdoor affair.

  Everything else had become hazy in memory.

  But there had always been the caroling and the lanterns and the rosy cheeks and laughter, and the glasses of cider and wassail until not one of them had been quite sober by the time they got to church. None of them had ever been precisely drunk-just smiling and warm and happy. How could he have forgotten? And how everyone had wanted to stand next to Lilias because she had such a sweet voice and such perfect pitch. He had won almost all of those battles.

  Dora, restless in the morning because it seemed such a long wait until the evening-he had promised her the night before, much against his better judgment, that they would join the carolers-wandered down to the kitchen to watch the cook roll the pastry for the mince pies. And she fell into conversation with Mrs. Morgan, who was delighted to have a child in the house again.

  And that encounter led, unknown to Bedford until later, to a visit to the attic to find the relics of Christmases past.

  “Papa!” Dora burst into the library, where Bedford was trying to read, though it was hard to bring his thoughts to bear on the book opened before him. She was moving at a run past the footman who held the door open for her, and her face was flushed and pretty with an excitement that she could barely contain. “Papa, come to the attic with me. We have been looking at Christmas. The dearest bells. And the star! May we have an evergreen bough, Papa? Mrs. Morgan says there were always evergreens.

  May we? Do put down the silly book and come.”

  He put down the silly book and came. Or rather was dragged by an insistent little hand and a voice brimming with an excitement he had thought her incapable of.

  And of course, he thought as soon as he looked into the opened boxes in the attic and dismissed a rather uncomfortable and apologetic Mrs.

  Morgan… Of course. How could he have forgotten? The evergreen boughs, decorated with crystal balls and bells that tinkled and twinkled every time a door was opened or a draft blew down a chimney. The evergreen boughs that had brought the smell of Christmas right inside the house.

  And one year the candles on the boughs, until they had been forbidden forever after… after the great fire, when the branch had been singed black and a whole circle of carpet ruined, for he had collided with the bough during blindman’s buff and tipped it over… They must be only thankful that he had not burned too, his mother had said, hugging him while his father had scolded. And someone had been smothering hysterical giggles through it all. Lilias.

  “May we have an evergreen bough, Papa? May we?” Dora’s voice was almost a wail, there was so much anxiety in her tone.

  “There are enough decorations here for a whole forest of boughs,” he said with a laugh. “There used to be some in the nursery and dining room as well as a whole great tree in the drawing room.”

  “A tree, Papa. Just one whole tree in the nursery,” she said, and reached up her arms to be picked up when he smiled down at her.

  “Just one, then,” he said. “We will go out and find one ourselves and cut it down, shall we? I think the rain stopped about an hour ago.”

  “Yes,” she said, hugging his neck and kissing his cheek.

  It was only when they were outside and she was tripping along at his side, her gloved hand firmly clasped in his, that she had her great idea. Though to her it seemed quite natural.

  “We will take one for Megan and Andrew and Miss Angove as well,” she announced. “Just a little one because they have such a small room. But there are so many bells and balls. We will take them before luncheon, Papa, so that I may still have my sleep ready for tonight. They will be happy, won’t they?”

  “I think they have enough, poppet,” he said. “They are making their own Christmas. They will not want our offerings.”

  “Oh, yes, they will,” she said happily. “You said Christmas is for giving, Papa. They will be happy if we give them a whole evergreen tree.

  Besides, I want to see the baby Jesus. He was not finished yesterday.

  Such a dear little manger, Papa. Miss Angove was going to make the smoth-the swathering clothes.”

  “Was she?” he said, his heart sinking. Christmas was for giving, he had told her, and she had just thrown it back in his teeth. How could he refuse to give his daughter happiness?

  “Just a little tree, then,” he said. “Papa has only two hands, you know.”

  She chuckled. “But they are big hands, Papa,” she said. “Miss Angove is going to teach me to sew when I am five.”

  “Is she?” he said, his lips tightening.

  “Yes,” she said. “It will be more fun with her than with Nurse.”

  And so they found themselves little more than an hour later yet again knocking on the door of the cottage, Bedford found, Dora at his side, jumping up and down.

  “I want to tell, Papa,” she told him. The evergreen and the box of decorations, including the great star, were still inside the carriage.

  And she did tell, rushing through the door, tearing at her cloak, and whisking herself behind the kitchen door for the pinafore just as if she had lived there all her life. And soon Megan was squealing and giggling and Andrew was exclaiming in delight and offering to accompany the marquess into the garden to fetch a pail of earth to set the tree in-a whole tree, and not just a bough!-and Lilias was clearing a small table and covering it with a worn lace cloth close to the window.

  And there he was, Bedford discovered half an hour later, his coat discarded, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his neckcloth askew, balanced on a kitchen chair and pounding a nail into the ceiling. For the great star, it seemed, had not been brought for the Christmas tree at all-“How silly, Papa,” Dora had said with a giggle. “It would be too big”-but to hang over the Nativity scene.

  “Just look at the darling baby Jesus,” Dora was saying in a voice of wonder while everyone else was gazing upward at the star Bedford was suspending from the nail.

  And then they were all standing in the room, gazing about them at all the splendor and wonder of Christmas, just as if it had come already: the holly boughs and the tree hung with bells and crystal balls, all catching the light from the outdoors and from the fire and the rudely carved Nativity scene with its bright and outsize star and its minute baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.

  “Lilias is standing beneath the mistletoe,” Megan said suddenly and in great delight.

  Dora clapped her hands and laughed.

  And he met her eyes from th
ree feet away and saw the dismay in them and the flush of color that rose to her cheeks, and he was no longer sure that it was all artifice. It was a thin and large-eyed face. It was beautiful.

  “Then I had better kiss her,” Andrew said in a tone of some resignation.

  “Again.” He pecked her noisily on the cheek and she moved swiftly to the window to still a bell that was swaying and tinkling.

  “Time to go, poppet,” the Marquess of Bedford said.

  There was a chorus of protests.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Dora may stay for another half hour. But no caroling and no church tonight.”

  Five minutes later he sank thankfully back against the velvet upholstery of his carriage. He had thought himself hardened to all feeling. He had thought that he could never be deceived again, never caught out in trusting where he should not trust. He would never be caught because he would never trust anyone ever again. It was safer that way.

  His saner, more rational, more cautious, more hardened self told him that it was all a ruse, that she was an opportunist who was using all her feminine wiles to trap him and save herself and her brother and sister from a dreary and impoverished future.

  His madder, more irrational, more incautious, more gullible self saw a mental image of her eyes lighting up when she saw the tree and the ornaments and their effect on the two children in her charge. And saw her below him as he stood on the chair, her arms half raised as if she expected to be able to catch him if he fell. And saw the look of Christmas in her eyes as she stood in the middle of her living room looking about her. And the flustered look of pure beauty when she realized that she was standing beneath the mistletoe.

  Had she known that she stood there? It was impossible to tell. And it made all the difference in the world. Had she known or had she not?

  Even more important, did he care either way? Did he still regret that it had been her brother who had stepped forward to kiss her?

  No, he must not, he thought, closing his eyes. He must not. He must not.

  “Must I sleep all afternoon?” Dora asked him. “May we decorate our evergreen first, Papa?”

  “We will do it immediately after luncheon,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at her sternly. “And then you are going to sleep all afternoon.”