by Carla Kelly
“That’s the price,” he said. “My older brother—you know, Roger—is on occupation duty in Belgium now and commanding his own regiment. We have to let them grow up.”
“I suppose we do,” Lucy agreed. She stood up and leaned across the desk to kiss her cousin on the top of his head. “Thanks, Miles.” Almost at the door, she looked back. “I still want to do something that Mother would have done for Christmas.”
“What?”
“I haven’t decided. You’ll be the first to know, when I do.” She opened the door and laughed. “Probably the only one. Everyone else is too busy with the wedding to keep Christmas.”
CHAPTER THREE
U
Lucy suffered considerable penance (for her) by hemming one of Clotilde’s new nightgowns and listening to her sister sniff a bit and cry gracefully into a handkerchief more lacey than substantial. Lucy thought of Mile’s efficient handkerchief in her pocket and wondered what Cleo would do if she whipped it out and offered the damp thing to her.
“This isn’t funny,” Clotilde declared. “Lucy, you try me.”
And you don’t try me? Lucy thought and had the wisdom not to say it. She thought about what her cousin would say, instead. She gazed for a moment at her beloved sister, who had turned into an ogre, and took a page from Miles’s book.
“I don’t mean to try you. I wish I knew how I could help you.” Lucy took a deep breath. “I wish Mama were here to give you a shoulder to cry on. Will I do?”
She did. With a sob, Clotilde was in her arms and crying prettily. Lucy wondered if her far lovelier sister had perfected that talent in a mirror. Tears slid delicately down her face, and her nose neither ran nor turned red.
Now that I have her, what shall I do with her? Lucy asked herself. Where are you when I need you, Miles? “Do you wish to talk to me about it?”
“Lord Masterton sent me a list of ways I can improve myself,” Clotilde said. She gave a little hiccup. “This is the worst part. I can quote it from memory. ‘Miss Danforth, you must remember that you are marrying into one of the first families in the nation, and not another commoner’s house in Tidwell.’”
Lucy gasped. “Have you mentioned this to Papa?”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Clotilde replied. “Think how it would hurt his feelings.”
A long silence followed. Lucy toyed with saying exactly what she thought, but didn’t think Miles would approve. Still, this was Clotilde, perhaps not the brightest mind in two or three shires, but certainly the kindest.
“Cleo, are you completely certain that you want to marry Lord Masterton?” she asked. “Papa is a gentleman and he is wealthy. We don’t need Lord Masterton to give us countenance. We don’t require a family title.”
“Yes, I am certain,” Clotilde said, too quickly to suit Lucy. “All the arrangements are made, my dress is finished, I have a wonderful new wardrobe, and we are bound for a month in Paris, now that Napoleon is gone. Wasn’t that the purpose of my London Season?” She sat up and blew her nose. “Besides, I love him.”
Do you? Lucy wanted to ask, but had the wisdom to remain silent. Clotilde was older and wiser in the ways of courtship. She had been through a successful London Season, flirted with any number of beaus, both foreign and domestic, and settled on Lord Masterton, a marquess with a Yorkshire estate and a London house. He was older, but Papa had been older than Mama, so that didn’t amount to much for an argument. Still …
“Cleo, do you call him by his first name? Is that allowed?”
Clotilde shook her head, and her face turned pink. “He says we will only do that in the privacy of my bedchamber.”
Lucy felt her face go red, and not in that adorable way that Clotilde pinked up, but bright red. The color would make her cousin Miles hoot and point if he saw her.
“What is his name?” she asked, determined to soldier on.
“It is Phillip,” Clotilde answered, with some dignity.
“I don’t suppose you would ever dare call him Phil.”
“I would never consider it.”
“So it is to be my lord and my lady?” Lucy asked. She had another question, one more personal. “You say your bedchamber. Aren’t you going to, well, you know, share a bed?”
How did Clotilde manage to rosy up so pink and look so ladylike? Lucy felt her own face go from mere red to really red.
Clotilde’s sigh was heartfelt. “I suppose that is how people in great houses live.”
Lucy thought of the mornings that she and Clotilde had bounded into their parents’ bedroom and snuggled down between the two people who loved them best in the world. I want more than solitary residence in a bed when I marry, she thought. If that was how great people lived, it was a wonder any of them reproduced.
There wasn’t anything else to say. Lucy finished hemming the nightgown after Clotilde left the room for a consultation with Honoré about dinner. She hemmed mostly for penance, because she really wanted to give her sister a good shake, stare at her nose to nose, and order her to find a different fellow.
Even more, she wanted to back out of her own upcoming season—provided for her, like Clotilde’s, at the invitation of Papa’s sister Willa, who had married an earl with pots of money and had access to a London Season.
“My dratted Season is three months away,” she told herself, after looking around to make sure no one was listening. “Perhaps something will happen before then.”
Lucy chose the time-honored, familiar path her father would take and decided not to think about it. She started down the stairs, but changed her mind when she heard an awful wailing from the kitchen far below. Aunt Aurelia and Clotilde must have made yet another unreasonable demand to set off Honoré. She chose discretion over valor and retreated upstairs to her bedchamber.
As much as she adored her father, inviting Aunt Aurelia to preside in his late wife’s place had been a tactical blunder. She still blushed to think about yesterday’s drill in the sitting room, when Aunt Aurelia made her march up and down with a book on her head, simply because she had found Lucy slouched in the library, her legs over the arm of a chair, reading Emma.
“How will you ever nab a husband of your own?” Aurelia had scolded, which made Lucy want to scream. The contrast of militant Aunt Aurelia with her own gentle mother was too great. Mama would have scolded her, to be sure, but then she would have sat down with a book of her own, the matter concluded.
And that only led to a bittersweet memory of Mama supervising a parade of dresses for Lucy’s spring come out. The modiste from nearby Winchester had been kind enough to bring the dresses to Tidwell, since Mama was unable to travel by early spring.
Even then, the exertion of approving this sleeve, or that shade of yellow, or any number of tiny details had worn Mama to a nub.
“You don’t need to supervise so many details, Mama,” Lucy pleaded with her that evening, when Mama could barely breathe.
Mama took her hand—such a delicate touch now—and looked deep into Lucy’s eyes. “I intend to savor every moment with you, my dearest,” she replied. She closed her eyes then. Lucy sat there, sorrowing, until Mama opened her eyes. “I doubt I will live to your wedding. Sh, sh, Lucy! I will oversee your London Season wardrobe. Don’t deny me this pleasure.”
And so Lucy put a bright face on the dread London Season proceedings, an event that only struck terror in her heart. Mama was putting so much store by the come out. Lucy would have shaved her head bald before she would have denied her mother this last simple pleasure.
She knew she should rescue their chef Honoré from Aunt Aurelia, but she hadn’t the heart just then. A faint glow still flickered from her fireplace, so she pulled her favorite chair closer and huddled there, wanting her mother, but grateful at the same time that Mama no longer suffered. Papa had been firm about forbidding deepest mourning after six months, or even semi-mourning, reminding his daughters of one of Mama’s final injunctions.
You said we were not to mope about in black, Mama, Lucy thought,
pulling her legs close to her chest. In a way, Mama had been right. Black was depressing and a constant reminder of her passing. On the other hand, everyday clothes made Lucy wonder if she would forget Mama faster, when there was no visible sign of their great loss.
Not that she could forget Mama. She thought of Miles’s kind encouragement for her to cry, and wished she could return to the bookroom just to sit in silence and know that someone cared. She had already cried all over him once that day; even someone as good-natured as her cousin would probably draw the line at more.
Besides, Miles was busy straightening out Papa’s tangled accounts and moving the whole wedding forward. She could sit by herself and think through Christmas.
She knew there would be greenery, because Clotilde had decreed it. The Christmas wreath was already in place. There wasn’t Christmas pudding to stir and wish on, because the kitchen staff had to cook and store food for the wedding. Maybe next year.
Caroling was out, as well, because Lord Masterton thought it childish, according to Clotilde. He had specifically stated in a recent letter to his beloved that nothing set his teeth on edge faster than off-key singing, and he wouldn’t have it. Presents for each other were a trifling matter and could likely be eliminated. The formal dining room was quickly filling up with presents for the happy couple. Who had time to think of the little gifts of Christmas?
“I do,” Lucy said softly.
She couldn’t force her London Season far enough away from her mind. The nasty thing kept resurfacing like the bloated carcass of a feral cat she had seen last summer in the fishpond. She wondered if Mama would have forced her to stand still for fittings and practice for too many hours with a dancing master who spent most of his time ogling Clotilde’s extravagant beauty.
She glanced at the pier glass in the corner of her room. There was nothing wrong with her looks. She had even received a badly spelled sonnet last summer from a neighboring landowner’s son, extolling her general, all-purpose loveliness by rhyming “beauty fair” with “curly hair,” and “dulcet tones” with “sturdy bones.” She and Miles had laughed about it until she had to slap the side of his head for delivering her a box in person, wrapped in white paper tied with gold filigree string. When she removed the lid, a soup bone labeled “Now this is a sturdy bone,” lay there, cushioned with more exquisite paper.
Even now, she laughed to think of it, grateful to her cousin for brightening a particularly gloomy day two weeks after Mama’s funeral when she was failing miserably to send notes to distant friends because Papa couldn’t. Together she and Miles had finished the lot of them, once the bone was returned to the kitchen.
She saw no need to peacock about London in the hopes of finding someone to marry her. She knew her marriage portion was healthy enough to sweeten any proposal, yet not so huge as to make her a target for vulgar Captain Sharps and swindlers. There were enough young men in the district to choose from. Only next door were the two eligible, if shy, sons of Lawrence and Adabell Petry—one a physician and the other a solicitor.
Clotilde had been a different case altogether, so beautiful and even tempered that Papa agreed with his sister Aurelia—for once—and his more sensible sister Willa that only an earl, a marquess or perhaps a duke would suffice. To her way of thinking, Lucy didn’t have that problem. Why go to the bother and expense?
Eyes closed, she thought through the rest of Mama’s Christmas duties. After a lengthy time considering the matter, she realized what she should do. She knew she needed an ally, and Miles was the only one.
CHAPTER FOUR
U
Miles recognized the knock immediately—two knocks, pause, two knocks. He put down his pen and closed the ledger, grateful for diversion and even more grateful that Lucy was the source of it. She was far more fun than Aunt Aurelia and pathetic Clotilde, who probably should have her brains removed and scrubbed clean for agreeing to marry Lord Masterton. But no one had asked his opinion.
“You again?” he called out. “Have you laundered my handkerchief yet?”
She opened the door and gave him that squinty-eyed look that always made the soreness in his neck go away, or the ache in his head, caused by staring overlong at ledgers and receipts. Funny how a visit from his cousin could make him smile inside. She used to drive him to distraction when she was five and he was twelve.
She held out a dry cloth. “I purloined it from Papa’s drawer. He will never miss it.”
He pocketed the handkerchief and gestured to a chair. To his amusement, she perched on the edge of the desk instead, her foot swinging. What can it hurt, he thought, as he sat on the desk next to her. To his delight, she leaned toward him until their shoulders touched.
“We are too late for a Christmas pudding,” she began, counting off on her fingers. “Greenery will do, as long as there are no bugs peeking out.” She made a face. “That is Lord Masterton’s stipulation.”
“No bugs, on my honor as a … a third son.” He tugged the curly hair that rhymed so handily with beauty fair to get her attention. “Do you know what is nice about being the third son? Matthew must set a good example for us and manage Father’s estates; Roger gets to bivouac in the rain and fight.”
“And you?”
“I have no idea what I want to be yet, except not a nuisance, and no one is pushing me about it. Well, you know I am considering the diplomatic corps.” He laughed. “Whitehall doesn’t even know that yet. What do you think I should be?”
He loved the way the tip her tongue came out as she thought. She had done that since she was a baby.
“You’re not devious enough to be a diplomatist,” she said, “but you do have excellent manners and vast skill in calming troubled waters. Only consider how well you convinced Aunt Aurelia to let Clotilde make green rosettes for each pew in the church, instead of the white ones she wanted.”
Since she sat next to him on the desk, she gave his shoulder a nudge. “You even convinced my aunt that green was her idea all along. I withdraw my assessment. You are devious enough to be an ambassador.”
“Thank you, I think,” he teased, nudging her in return.
She sighed then. “I wish I were a man.”
Not I, Miles thought. “Now why would you say that?”
“No one is pitchforking you into a London Season. You get to suit yourself.”
“I rather think I do,” he said. “Don’t tell Matthew. Number two brother and I are both receiving a healthy inheritance, with none of the headaches of brother number one. No one seems particularly concerned with what I end up doing.”
“Now that you mention it, being a second daughter has roughly the same advantage: a nice marriage portion, and no one clamoring for me to marry a title.”
They looked at each other in complete harmony. “What can I do for you, Lucinda?” he asked.
“I have decided to give myself a Christmas gift,” his cousin announced. He saw the tenderness in her blue eyes, and wondered, not for the first time, why everyone thought Clotilde was the Danforth beauty.
“And what will that be, scamp?”
“I want to do what Mama would have done for Christmas.”
She said the words in a rush, as though lingering over them would be too painful. Miles understood. Marrying gentle Penelope Brewster had been the smartest thing Cousin Roscoe ever did.
“Which is …”
“Mama always did something kind for a poor family at Christmas. Usually that amounted to a basket for Christmas dinner, some toys and clothes for the children, and perhaps some money. Let us go to the village school.”
“Why not to the vicarage and ask Mr. Portneuf? He will know the charitable cases,” Miles asked.
She shook her head. “The vicar is always urging me to read improving tracts and commentaries.”
“And you would rather not?”
She gave him a shy look, as if what she was about to say might make him laugh or tease her. “What?” he asked.
“You’ll laugh. Clotilde did.
”
“I am not Clotilde.”
She stood up and sat down properly in the chair closest to his desk, so close that he could touch her, if he wanted to. He realized with a little start that he did want to, so he tapped her arm. “Now when have I laughed at you?”
“Any number of times,” she replied, “but I am serious. When things are too much to bear, I read the Bible. That’s it. Just the Bible. No one’s commentary required except my own.”
The matter-of-fact way she said it touched his heart. “I should think that would be better than old sermons and improving works,” he told her. “The vicar doesn’t like that?”
“I heard Mr. Portneuf preach from St. Paul’s writings about women not speaking in church,” she told him, which impressed him mightily. He couldn’t think of the last time he had actually listened to a sermon. Mostly they were to be suffered through. “I don’t believe he likes ladies to think.”
“Then he is an idiot.” He wanted to see her smile, so he leaned closer. “Does your father have any idea what an idiot his vicar is?”
There, she laughed. “You mustn’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Miles!”
“That Mr. Portneuf is an idiot?”
“Cousin, you are trying me mightily. That ladies shouldn’t think!”
“Ah, that is nonsense. Do you have favorite passages?”
“Oh yes,” she said.
Her obvious enthusiasm made his heart do a little flip. You’re growing up, he thought, and felt an odd sort of pleasure at the notion. “Care to share them?” he asked, intrigued with this side of his cousin he had never seen before.
She looked away. “After Mama died, I took her Bible from her nightstand. At first I just put it on my pillow and rested my head on it, because it smelled a little of rose cologne.”
“Cousin Pen did enjoy rose cologne,” he said, imagining Lucinda finding solace that way, and wishing he had known.
