Under the Mistletoe

by Mary Balogh

  He was going to forget something, he thought as he pushed upward on the girl’s knees. He would forget something and either she or the child was going to bleed to death. Or there was going to be a complication, as there had not been with the Spanish peasant girl. This girl was already weak from a long and hard labor. Soon-perhaps after the next contraction-he was going to have to take a look and pray fervently that it was the child’s head he would see. He could recall the surgeon’s talking about breech births, though he had given no details.

  And then between contractions, as he was about to draw the sheet back, there was a quiet voice from the doorway. It almost did not register on his mind, but he looked over his shoulder. He had not been mistaken. The quiet gentleman was standing there.

  “I am a physician,” he repeated. “I will be happy to deliver the child and tend the mother.”

  Anger was the Marquess of Lytton’s first reaction. “You are a physician,” he said. “Why the hell have you waited this long to admit the fact? Do you realize what terrors your silence has caused Lady Birkin and Miss Wilder in the course of the day?”

  “And you, too, my lord?” The quiet gentleman was smiling. He had strolled into the room and taken one of Lisa’s limp hands in his. He spoke very gently. “It will soon be over, my dear, I promise. Then the joy you will have in your child will make you forget all this.”

  She looked calmly back at him. There was even a suggestion of a smile in her eyes.

  But the marquess was not mollified. Relief-overwhelming, knee-weakening relief-was whipping his anger into fury. “What the hell do you mean,” he said, “putting us through all this?” He remembered too late the presence in the room of three women, two of them gently born.

  The quiet gentleman smiled and touched a cool hand to Lisa’s brow as she began to gasp again. “How could I spoil a Christmas that had promised to be so dismal for everyone?” he asked, and he moved to draw the sheet down over the girl’s knees. “The blood will probably return to your head faster, my lord, if you remove yourself. The ladies will assist me. Have some hot water brought up to us, if you will be so good.”

  Lord Lytton removed himself, frowning over the physician’s strange answer to his question. Lady Birkin and Pamela, moving back to their posts, puzzled over it, too. What had he meant? Christmas might have been dismal but was not? Because of what was happening?

  “Set an arm each about her back to support her as you lift her,” the quiet gentleman said. “Your labors, too, will soon be at an end, ladies, and you will experience all the wonder of being present at a birth. Ah.

  I can see the head, my dear. With plenty of dark hair.”

  “Ohhh!” Lisa was almost crying with excitement and exhaustion and pain.

  But all sense of panic had gone from the room. Both Lady Birkin and Pamela were aware of that as the physician went quietly and efficiently about his work and Lisa responded to his gentleness. Her son was born, large and healthy and perfect-and crying lustily-early in the evening.

  They were all crying, in fact. All except the doctor, who smiled sweetly at each of them in turn and made them feel as if it were not at all the most foolish thing in the world to cry just because one more mouth to be fed had been born into it.

  Lisa was exhausted and could scarcely raise her arms to Tom when he came into the room several minutes later, wide-eyed and awed, while Lady Birkin was washing the baby and Pamela was disposing of bloodstained rags. Lisa accepted the baby from Lady Birkin and looked up with shining eyes into Tom’s face while he reached out one trembling finger to touch his son. But she had no energy left.

  “I’ll take him,” Lady Birkin said, “while you get some sleep, Lisa. You have earned it.”

  “Thank you, mum.” Lisa looked up at her wearily. “I’ll always remember you, mum, and the other lady.” Her eyes found Pamela and smiled. “Thank you, miss.”

  And so Lady Birkin found herself holding the child and feeling a welling of happiness and tenderness and… and longing. Ah, how wonderful, she thought. How very wonderful. She acted from instinct. She must find Henry. She must show him. Oh, if only the child were hers. Theirs.

  Word had spread. Everyone was hovering in the hallway outside Lisa’s room. The birth of a little bastard baby was the focus of attention on this Christmas Eve. The ladies oohed and aahed at the mere sight of the bright stripes of the shawl in which it was wrapped. But Lady Birkin had eyes for no one except her husband, standing at the top of the stairs close to the Marquess of Lytton and gazing anxiously at her.

  “Henry,” she said. “Oh, look at him. Have you ever seen anything so perfect?” She could hear herself laughing and yet his face had blurred before her vision. “Look at him, Henry.”

  He looked and smiled back up at her. “Sally,” he whispered.

  “He weighs nothing at all,” she said. “How could any human being be so small and so light and so perfect and still live and breathe? What a miracle life is. Hold him, Henry.”

  She gave him no choice. She laid the bundle in his arms and watched the fear in his eyes soften to wonder as he smiled down at the baby. The child was not quite sleeping. He was looking quietly about him with unfocused eyes.

  Lord Birkin smiled. What would it be like, he wondered, to look down like this at his own child? To have the baby placed in his arms by its mother? By his wife?

  “Sally,” he said, “you must be so tired.” She was pale and disheveled.

  He had a sudden image of how she should be looking now, early in the evening of Christmas Eve, immaculate and fashionable and sparkling with jewels and excitement and ready to mingle with their friends far into the night. And yet he saw happiness now in her tired eyes-and breathtaking beauty.

  The ladies wanted to hold the baby. And so he was passed from one to another, quiet and unprotesting. He was cooed over and clucked over and even sung to, by Miss Amelia Horn. The occasion had made even the Palmers magnanimous.

  “Well,” Mr. Palmer said, rubbing his hands together and looking not unpleased. “I never did in all my born days.”

  “I mean to tell Mr. Suffield,” Mrs. Palmer said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “that we are not even going to charge ’im for the room.”

  No one saw fit to comment on this outpouring of incredible generosity.

  The Marquess of Lytton reached out both hands to Pamela when she came from the room. She set her own in them without thought and smiled at him. “Have you seen him?” she asked. “Is he not the most beautiful child you have ever set eyes on?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her, squeezing her hands until they hurt. “I ripped up at the physician for keeping quiet so long, and yet that is exactly what I had been doing all day. You and Lady Birkin were wonderfully brave. I am sorry my own cowardice made me hide a fact that might have made your day less anxious.”

  “I don’t think,” she said, gazing up into his eyes, her own filling with sudden tears, “that I would change one detail of this day even if I could. How glad I am that it rained!”

  His eyes searched hers. “And so am I,” he said, raising both hands to his lips and continuing to regard her over them. “More glad than I have been of anything else in my life.”

  “Anyway,” Colonel Forbes’s voice was declaring gruffly over the babble of voices in the hallway; it seemed that Mrs. Forbes had been trying to force him to hold the baby. “Anyway, this was a damned inconvenient thing to happen. What would have been the outcome if one of our number had not turned out to be a doctor, eh? Whoever heard of any woman having a baby at Christmas?”

  The babble of voices stopped entirely.

  The Marquess of Lytton’s eyes smiled slowly into Pamela’s. “Good Lord,” he said, and everyone kept quiet to listen to his words, “a crowd of marvelous Christians we all are. Did any of us realize before this moment, I wonder? We have, in fact, been presented with the perfect Christmas, have we not? Almost a reenactment of the original.”

  “ ‘How could I spoil a Christmas th
at had promised to be so dismal for everyone?’ ” Pamela said quietly. “I think someone realized, my lord.”

  “The child was very nearly born in a stable,” Lady Birkin said.

  “It is uncanny enough to send shivers up one’s spine,” Miss Eugenia Horn said.

  “I hope you have not caught a chill from the damp sheets, Eugenia,” Miss Amelia Horn said.

  “I wonder,” Lord Birkin said, “if above the heavy rain clouds a star is shining brightly.”

  “Fanciful nonsense,” Colonel Forbes said. “I am ready for my dinner.

  When will it be ready, landlord, eh? Don’t just stand there, man. I would like to eat before midnight-if it is all the same to you, of course.”

  Lady Birkin took the baby from Mrs. Forbes’s arms. “I’ll take him back to his mother,” she said, tenderness and wistfulness mingled in her voice.

  “Back to his manger,” Lord Birkin said, laughing softly.

  “Well, anyway,” Mrs. Palmer said to the gathered company as she cleared away the plates after dinner, “we didn’t keep ’em in the stable like them innkeepers did in the Bible. We gave ’em one of our best rooms and aren’t charging ’em for it neither.”

  “For which deeds you will surely find a place awaiting you in heaven,” the Marquess of Lytton said.

  “And yet it give me quite a turn, it did, when the colonel said what ’e did and we all thought of that other babe what was born at Christmas,”

  Mr. Palmer said. He was standing in the doorway of the dining room, busy about nothing in particular. “I was all over shivers for a minute.”

  “I am sure in Bethlehem there was not all this infernal rain,” Colonel Forbes commented.

  “The kings would have arrived in horribly soggy robes and dripping crowns,” the marquess said. “And the heavenly host would have had drooping wings.”

  “I am quite sure their wings were more sturdy than to be weakened by rain, my lord,” Miss Amelia Horn said. “They were angels, after all.”

  Mrs. Forbes nodded her agreement.

  “I think it would be altogether fitting to the occasion,” Miss Eugenia Horn said, “if we read the Bible story together this evening.”

  “And perhaps sang some carols afterward,” Lady Birkin said. “Does everyone feel Christmas as strongly as I do tonight despite all the usual trappings being absent?”

  There were murmurings of assent. Mrs. Forbes nodded. The quiet gentleman smiled.

  “Does anyone have a Bible?” Lord Birkin asked.

  There was a lengthy pause. No one, it seemed, was in the habit of traveling about with a Bible in a trunk.

  “I do,” the quiet gentleman said at last, and he got to his feet to fetch it from his room.

  And so they all spent a further hour in the dining room, far away from friends and families and parties, far from any church, far away from Christmas as any of them had ever known it. There were no decorations, no fruit cake or mince pies, no cider or punch or wassail. Nothing except a plain and shabby inn and the company of strangers become acquaintances. Nothing except a newborn baby and his mother asleep upstairs, cozy and warm because they had been taken from the stable and given a room and showered with care and with gifts.

  The quiet gentleman himself read the story of the birth of another baby in Bethlehem, and they all listened to words they had heard so many times before that the wonder of it all had ceased to mean a great deal.

  They listened with a new understanding, with a new recognition of the joy of birth. Even the one man who rarely entered a church, Lord Lytton, was touched by the story and realized that perhaps Christmas had not been meant to be an orgy of personal gratification.

  Singing that might have been self-conscious, since there was no instrument to provide accompaniment, was, in fact, not self-conscious at all. Lady Birkin, Pamela Wilder, Colonel Forbes and, surprisingly, Miss Amelia Horn all had good voices and could hold a tune. Everyone else joined in lustily, even the tone-deaf Mrs. Forbes.

  Lord Birkin left the room after a while. He found Tom Suffield in the kitchen, where he had been eating with the guests’ coachmen. Lisa and the baby were asleep, Tom explained, scrambling to his feet, and he did not want to disturb them. Lord Birkin took Tom through into the taproom.

  “I don’t know what you are good at, Tom,” he said. “I can’t offer much in the way of employment, I’m afraid, but I can send you to my estate in Kent and instruct my housekeeper to find you work in the stables or in the gardens. I doubt there will be an empty cottage, but we will find somewhere where you and Lisa can stay for a while, at least.”

  Tom shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “That be awf’ly good of ye, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Cornwallis needs a cook and a handyman and have offered the jobs to me and Lisa.”

  “Mr. Cornwallis?” Lord Birkin raised his eyebrows.

  “The doctor, sir,” Tom said.

  “Ah.” It was strange, Lord Birkin thought, that even though they had all introduced themselves the evening before, he had thought of Mr.

  Cornwallis ever since only as the quiet gentleman. “I am glad, Tom. I hated to think of your taking Lisa and your baby to one of the industrial towns with no job waiting for you there.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tom said. “Everyone is right kind. Thanks again for the money, sir. We will buy new clothes for the baby with it.”

  Lord Birkin nodded and returned to the dining room.

  The Marquess of Lytton found Tom just ten minutes later. “Having a woman and child and no home or employment is a burdensome situation to find yourself in, Tom,” he said.

  “Aye, that it is, sir,” Tom said. “But I feels like a wealthy man, sir, with all the gifts. And with your gold ring, sir. And a home and a job from Mr. Cornwallis.” He told his tale again.

  “Ah,” the marquess said. “I am glad to hear it, Tom. I was prepared to give you a letter of introduction to a friend of mine, but now I see you will not need it. I would like to give you a small sum of money, though.

  Call it a Christmas gift to you personally, if you will. It is the price of a license. You must marry her, Tom. Such things are important to women, you know. And you would not wish to hear anyone calling your son a bastard.”

  “Bless you, sir,” Tom said, flushing, “but Mr. Cornwallis is to marry us, sir, as soon as we gets to his home.”

  “The physician?” the marquess raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s a clergyman, sir,” Tom said.

  “Ah.” The marquess nodded pleasantly to him and returned to the dining room. The quiet gentleman, he thought, was becoming more intriguing by the moment. Was he a physician or a clergyman? Or both?Or neither?

  Lord Lytton seated himself beside the quiet gentleman and spoke to him while everyone else was singing. “You are a clergyman, sir?” he asked.

  The quiet gentleman smiled. “I am, my lord,” he said.

  “And a physician, too?” The marquess frowned.

  “It is possible to be both,” the quiet gentleman said. “I am a clergyman, but not of a large and fashionable parish, you see. My time is not taken up by the sometimes tedious and meaningless duties I would have if I belonged to a large parish, and certainly not by the social commitments I would have if I had a wealthy patron. I am fortunate. My time is free to be devoted to the service of others. I am not distracted by the trappings of the established faith.” He chuckled. “I have learned to deliver babies. It is the greatest delight and the greatest privilege a man could experience. You discovered that once upon a time, I believe.”

  “And the greatest terror,” the marquess said fervently. “I dreaded facing it again today. There was the terror of becoming the instrument of death rather than of life.”

  “Ah,” the quiet gentleman said, “but we must learn to accept our limitations as part of the human condition. It is our Lord who controls life and death.”

  The marquess was quiet for a while. “Yes,” he said. “We are all of us too busy, aren’t we? Especial
ly at Christmastime. Too busy enjoying ourselves and surrounding ourselves with the perfect atmosphere to remember what it is all about. This unexpected rainstorm has forced us to remember. And you have helped too, sir, by sitting back and allowing us to face all the terror of imminent birth.”

  “Without suffering there can never be the fullness of joy,” the quiet gentleman said.

  The Misses Horn were rising to retire for the night, and everyone else followed suit. But they did not part to go to their separate rooms without a great deal of handshaking and hugging first.

  “Happy Christmas,” they each said a dozen times to one another. But the words were not the automatic greeting they had all uttered during all their previous Christmases, but heartfelt wishes for one another’s joy.

  Suddenly this Christmas-this dull, rainy disaster of a Christmas-seemed very happy indeed. Perhaps the happiest any of them had ever known.

  And so Christmas Eve drew to an end. A baby had been born.

  It was a little different when they were alone together in their room.

  Some of the magic went from the evening. It was all right for her, Lady Birkin thought. She had been busy all day and directly involved in the wonder of the baby’s birth. Men were not so concerned about such matters. It must have been a dreadfully dull day for him.

  “Henry,” she said, looking at him apologetically, as if everything were her fault, “I am so sorry that this is such a dull Christmas for you.”

  “Dull?” He looked at her intently and took a step toward her so that he was very close. “I don’t think I have ever celebrated Christmas until this year, Sally. I am very proud of you, you know.”

  Her eyes widened. “You are?” He so rarely paid her compliments.

  “You worked tirelessly all day to help that girl,” he said. “You and Miss Wilder. I don’t know how Lisa would have managed without you.”

  “But there was a physician in the house, after all,” she said. “What we did was nothing.”

  He framed her face with his hands. “What you did was everything,” he said. “The doctor gave his skills. You gave yourself, Sally, despite being frightened and inexperienced.”