ONCE UPON A REGENCY CHRISTMAS

by Various

  Which reflection brought her back down to earth. She might be mooning over the Captain, but he would certainly never do more than tease her. Her fist closed over the handkerchief in her apron pocket as she tore herself away from him and made her way back to the kitchen. It reminded her that though it was no longer running, after two weeks of constant sneezing and coughing, her nose was red and raw.

  Besides which it was utterly ridiculous to think of the Captain as a prospective husband. Even if he wasn’t already married. She’d long ago accepted the fact that with or without a red nose, she had nothing to attract a man. No money, no beauty and no charm. She shrank into the background like a little mouse whenever she went into company. And it wasn’t only because Aunt Minnie had warned her there would be dire consequences if she tried to push herself forward. She hadn’t specified what the dire consequences would be, but anyway, Alice hadn’t ever really been tempted to ‘push herself forward’. Because she’d known what the outcome would be. If she’d ever started fluttering her eyelashes, or twirling her hair round her fingers, or simpering whenever an eligible male came near, they would think she was desperate and rather ridiculous and they’d either pity her or sneer. The one thing they wouldn’t do would be to propose. Not to a girl without a dowry.

  She paused with her hand on the kitchen door-latch, unwilling to enter the kitchen and face the others until she’d calmed down. She might have no dowry, but she did know how she should behave. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Despite propriety, how could she help admiring the Captain’s physique? She had eyes, didn’t she? And they told her that he was a magnificent specimen of manhood.

  He was also the most decent man she’d ever met, as far as she could tell in the half-hour she’d known him. And she didn’t meet many men. So it wasn’t surprising he set her heart fluttering a little, was it? There was nothing wrong with that, as long as she didn’t start getting silly ideas.

  Having delivered that little lecture, she opened the kitchen door and marched in.

  ‘Susan,’ she said, ‘would you please take a couple of clothes maidens into the parlour, so the Captain can air his fresh clothes, then dry out his wet ones when he takes them off? I need to go upstairs and raid the linen closet.’

  ‘I’m doing the custard,’ Susan retorted. ‘Can’t stir custard and go fetching and carrying.’

  ‘Oh, of course, well, get on with that then. Where’s Billy?’

  ‘Sergeant Hopkins told him to clean the muck off his and the Captain’s boots, and stuff them with paper to get them drying,’ said Susan with a tight smile. ‘And to hop to it. So Billy hopped to it.’

  ‘Goodness. Billy hopped?’

  ‘Like a little rabbit. All shiny eyes and twitching whiskers. Just coz the Sergeant has a musket and a fancy uniform. Men,’ she finished on a sniff.

  ‘Well, I’ll just...’ She waved her hands in the direction of the scullery, where the maidens were kept, along with all sorts of other items of cleaning equipment.

  As Alice struggled to disentangle one maiden from another, she realised that spending all that time in bed, eating only the few meals Mrs Hughes had the time to bring her, had seriously depleted her strength. It didn’t help that the contraption she managed to wrestle into the hall kept on unfolding itself as she dragged it to the parlour.

  She paused to push a strand of hair from her sticky forehead. If carrying one wooden clothes maiden had made her break into a sweat, how on earth was she going to fare hauling mattresses down the stairs?

  She’d have to ask the Captain if either he or Sergeant Hopkins would help her. Even though it went against the grain to treat guests like beasts of burden, he had said she should regard them as an extra pair of hands. And she could certainly do with them.

  Having come to that decision, she started the tricky job of manoeuvring the maiden into the parlour whilst holding open the door. She ended up propping the door open with one hip and swivelling backwards into the room.

  Sergeant Hopkins said a rather rude word, which naturally made her look in his direction. Just in time to see him dart behind one of the wing-backed chairs, from where he scowled at her.

  She clucked her tongue. He must have heard her coming along the hallway. She’d been half dragging the maiden, to the accompaniment of a lot of clattering and banging. He’d had plenty of time to get behind cover.

  And so had the Captain.

  Yet he was standing on the hearthrug, glaring at her.

  Totally naked.

  Chapter Four

  Alice gasped.

  Good Lord, but if he’d been easy on the eye in his uniform, then without it he was simply stunning. All rippling muscles and long lean limbs.

  ‘Like what you see, do you?’

  Her eyes flicked up to his face. He was still glaring at her. And no wonder. She was still standing there, transfixed, when by rights she should have lowered her gaze and scurried away, blushing.

  She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t done just that. What on earth had come over her?

  ‘Clearly, you are not repulsed by my scars,’ he said drily. ‘I suppose I should be flattered.’

  ‘Sc...scars?’ She only just about managed to squeak the word. Heavens, but she was going to remember this moment for the rest of her life. Her first, and probably only, sight of a naked man. And what a man. She sighed. And kept on looking. Because this was something, she suddenly realised, she wanted to be able to remember throughout the long lonely years of spinsterhood that doubtless awaited her.

  He had his hands over his private parts, thankfully, or she really would have had to scuttle away. It was one thing to indulge in a few moments of virginal curiosity, but there were limits.

  ‘Or my goose flesh,’ he added.

  Lord, he must be freezing!

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, coming to herself with a jerk. And dropping the maiden on the floor. ‘I will just...’ She bent to pick it up and recommenced wrestling with the contraption, which became more determined to unfold itself the more earnestly she attempted to set it up.

  ‘For the love of God,’ said the Captain, ‘just leave the thing and get out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just...’ She gave the maiden one last kick, which at least moved it far enough away from the door that she could close it behind her as she darted out.

  To the sound of the Captain’s laughter ringing in her ears.

  * * *

  ‘Looks like you’re in luck with the little brunette, Captain,’ observed Hopkins, as he emerged from behind his cover.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he said, reaching for a clean shirt.

  ‘Truly. You should have seen the way she was ogling yer backside, before, when you was lighting the fire. Hot for you, she is, and no mistake.’

  It said something about his state of mind that the remark, coupled with the hungry way her eyes had just been devouring him, made him feel less of a failure, less of a wreck and less unlovable than he’d done for a very long time. She’d known he would be stripping off, that he couldn’t possibly have had time to get fully dressed again, yet she hadn’t sent the boot boy here with the clothes rack.

  As he pulled the shirt over his head, his thoughts turned to the moment, in the kitchen, when she’d taken note of his wet clothing, and appeared to care about his well-being. Had he ever come across a female who both desired him and wanted to care for him? Nurture him? He frowned as he slid his arms into the sleeves. No. The women in his life had invariably wanted something from him. Had made demands he hadn’t been able to meet, either financially or emotionally.

  Nevertheless, he wasn’t so desperate for a female that he would take advantage of some lonely little housemaid, no matter how pretty she was.

  ‘Hot she may be,’ he growled, ‘but I have the children with
me. I’m not about to do anything that will give them a worse impression of their father than they already have.’

  ‘Just needs time, that’s all, Capt’n,’ said Hopkins as he pulled on his own clean shirt. ‘They’ll soon see you ain’t the ogre yer wife’s family have made you out to be.’

  Would they? Harry looked at him with distrust and suspicion. And Isabella with fear. And why should she not? To all intents and purposes, he was a stranger. What little girl wouldn’t be frightened by a stranger coming along, ripping her from the only home she’d ever known and carrying her off—into a snowstorm, for God’s sake?

  The only reason she wasn’t completely terrified was because of Harry. Every time something went awry in her world, she held out her arms to him. And he went to her, as though he was used to doing so.

  As soon as Jack was fully dressed, he returned to the kitchen to find Harry still sitting on the floor before the stove, with Isabella fast asleep on his lap.

  While Harry’s unnatural protectiveness made him uneasy, he couldn’t deny that he was glad, for her sake, that she had somebody.

  He frowned. A little girl of that age shouldn’t look to her brother for comfort, though. She should have had a nurse, or even a doll to cuddle, or something.

  He went over to feel his daughter’s flushed face and little white hands. She was much warmer now.

  He looked Harry over, too, but surreptitiously. The boy always seemed to flinch and close up if he thought an adult was examining him. As though he expected punishment. Had they beaten him? He hadn’t seen any bruises. But the lad gave every sign of having been whipped into submission at some stage.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Your little sister is nice and warm now.’

  Harry said nothing, just gave him a steady, steely stare.

  ‘I know, you don’t need to tell me, I shouldn’t have brought you out and exposed you to such weather.’

  Harry’s eyes widened, fractionally, before he hid his reaction. Clearly the boy had never heard an adult apologising before. Though plenty had let him down.

  And speaking of down, perhaps it was time to get down to his son’s level. Hang his dignity—he hated standing over his own children in what probably looked like a threatening manner.

  ‘This may not be the most luxurious of places,’ he said as he knelt down on the floor next to Harry, ‘but it is warm and dry, and we have food to eat. Isabella will be safe here, lad.’

  Harry didn’t appear to know how to react to having an adult kneel beside him and talk to him, rather than taking a vacant chair nearby. His little eyes darted round the kitchen in confusion.

  ‘These people may be poor,’ said Jack, leaning close so that only Harry could hear his words and not the girl stirring something at the stove, or the boy stuffing paper into his boots, ‘but they are willing to share what little they have. We should be grateful.’

  Something flared in his son’s eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  Harry lowered his head, his little shoulders hunching.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Jack, as gently as he could, mindful of his mother-in-law’s remarks about his parade ground voice scaring the children.

  As if they hadn’t been timid enough already.

  ‘If something is troubling you, you need to tell me, so that I can put it right.’

  Harry glanced up in disbelief. Then looked down at Isabella’s golden curls, before he took a deep breath, as though daring himself to leap off a cliff.

  ‘I just wondered,’ said the boy, ‘where we were going to sleep tonight. That lady said we aren’t allowed upstairs.’

  Jack’s jaw tightened. The fact that Harry was worried by that remark showed that he almost expected harsh treatment.

  Nevertheless, he was glad Harry had plucked up the courage to share his fears. It meant he was beginning to see that his father was not cut from the same cloth as his grandparents. He was beginning to trust him. Or at least, to want to trust him.

  ‘The lady, as you call her,’ he explained, ‘is in fact only a servant. And she told me that she daren’t offer us her employer’s beds.’

  Harry nodded, solemnly. As though he already knew that a servant would not dare flout her employers, not even to shield a child.

  ‘Besides which, there aren’t enough servants here to keep fires lit in the bedrooms. However,’ he said, when Harry started to look troubled again, ‘I have done some reconnoitring, and found the front parlour to be a good place for us to bivouac for the night.’

  ‘Bivouac?’ For the first time since he’d come back into his son’s life, his little face showed open interest. ‘Like you did in the army?’

  In the few letters his wife had written to him, during the final months of her pregnancy with Isabella, she’d told him that although her family had taken her back, they had forbidden her to speak of the time she’d spent following the drum. From what he could tell, the ban on mentioning the army or the brief part Elizabeth had played in it as an officer’s wife had extended to his children.

  Which appeared to have given his son the kind of curiosity that all small boys—and most men, too—felt towards the forbidden.

  ‘Just like when I was in the army,’ he therefore said without a trace of shame. ‘Would you like to come and see? I think it should be warm enough in there by now for your sister to finish her nap in peace. And you will both be more comfortable in there on the sofa than on this hard stone floor. Here, let me take her,’ he said firmly.

  Harry didn’t appear as reluctant to hand over his sister as he would have done earlier in the day. Which was a step in the right direction.

  When they reached the parlour, it was to see Hopkins propping a couple of feather mattresses against the fireside chairs.

  ‘Miss Alice found these up in an attic,’ he said. ‘She reckons they just need airing, but I don’t think we’ll get the smell of mice out in a hurry.’

  Alice? That must be the pretty housemaid’s name. She never had introduced herself properly. Alice, he mused. The name suited her somehow, with her contrasting mixture of caring attitude and tart tongue, her warm heart and her hot eyes.

  ‘Just the two mattresses?’ He pulled his mind back to the task in hand.

  Hopkins nodded. Captain Grayling scanned the room again. And had an idea. ‘When they are as free from damp as you can get them, put one under that desk, there, for the children. And then we can turn it into a den.’

  Harry’s eyes widened in what looked like interest, rather than suspicion, as his father gently put Isabella down on the sofa, then tucked the blanket round her.

  ‘We will need sheets to spread over the desk, and something heavy to keep them in place. Harry, fetch me some books from the shelves over there, would you?’

  As he began to drape sheets over the desk, Harry darted across the room and selected the heaviest books he could carry.

  It took them a few attempts to pin the sheets exactly as they wanted them. At first Harry flinched every time something went wrong, especially when both sheets slithered to the floor and they had to start constructing the den all over again.

  ‘Somebody’s been doing a lot of polishing, I think,’ said Jack with a grin. ‘We’ll have to be extra quick with placing the books down, so the sheets don’t make a bid for freedom, won’t we?’

  Harry firmed his jaw.

  ‘I won’t let the sheets get away this time, Papa,’ he said.

  He didn’t. But Jack almost did. Because hearing his son call him Papa, for the very first time, made him want to get down on his knees and crush the boy to his chest.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Good lad,’ was all he managed to say. But it seemed to be the right thing. Because Harry began to look positively cheerful as they painstakingly constructed their makeshift tent.


  ‘That’s secure enough now,’ said Jack, when Harry began to show signs that lifting the heavy books was tiring him. ‘We just need one last thing.’

  He went to the linen pile and fetched a blanket, which he arranged so that it hung down over the gap at the front of the ‘tent’, making a door flap.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘You will be snug as anything in there, tonight.’

  Harry was so keen to try out his den that he darted inside without asking permission.

  ‘This is the best tent ever,’ he said, poking his head back out through the door flap.

  And then a troubled look flickered across his face.

  ‘Where will you sleep, Papa? There isn’t enough room in here for you and Sergeant Hopkins.’

  ‘Why, we will be on guard, naturally,’ he said, waving his hand towards the mattress by the fireplace. ‘Hopkins will have the mattress by the fire, and I will do my guarding from the sofa, with my feet up,’ he admitted.

  ‘And Izzy will be safe,’ said Harry.

  ‘You will both be safe now,’ he vowed. ‘I am never going to leave you behind ever again.’

  Chapter Five

  When they returned to the kitchen, Captain Grayling saw that Alice was setting only six places at the table.

  ‘Your daughter isn’t big enough to reach the table from her own chair, is she?’ she said at once, as though she’d heard his unspoken question about the missing place setting. ‘I thought you might want to have her on your lap.’ And then she looked down and blushed. As though she was remembering the earlier incident and picturing him naked.

  Fortunately, nobody noticed his instant reaction to the way she’d looked at him in all the bustle of getting to table. He gritted his teeth and got himself under control.