Carla Kelly's Christmas Collection

by Carla Kelly

  “Jemmy, I have a daughter,” he began.

  “I believe you have three, sir,” James said with a smile. He raised his knees and rested his arms on them, his eyes on Sir Waldo’s face. “Has Lady Hannaford ever forgiven Tim and me for assisting in the removal of Olivia’s two front teeth?”

  Sir Waldo laughed, and his young friend joined him. “Oh, they were due out, lad! The only thing Martha took exception to was when Tim taught Olivia to spit through the vacant space. I believe you were blameless in that.”

  “Actually, yes,” he said, grinning. “How nice to have a pure heart for once.”

  How good to talk about Tim! “Jemmy, you are the antidote,” he said simply. “I don’t know when Tim was ever in more trouble. Olivia was six then?”

  “I believe she was,” James agreed. “Tim and I were almost eighteen, and should have known better. How is Olivia?”

  “She is planning for a come-out this spring,” Sir Waldo said. “Martha and I have been long away from London, but Louisa is all eagerness to do this thing for her little sister.”

  “She is eighteen,” James said, more a statement than a question.

  “Or as near as.” Sir Waldo paused again. I could stop here, he reflected. Who is to say that my darling girl will not find the best man on her own? He frowned. And who is to say that she will?“Jemmy, I want to talk to you about Olivia.” He glanced over his shoulder at the valet, and James nodded to the man. Sir Waldo heard the door close quietly. “I want to find her a good husband, but I have certain requirements.”

  Sir Waldo went to sleep that night in his own bed, a happy man, a father with a clear conscience. I have explained to Lord Crandall my concerns for my dear daughter, he thought, warned him that she is often nose-deep in books, mentioned her considerable fortune in passing, not overlooked a single freckle or her unruly hair, and stressed her clear-eyed way of doing things. He smiled in the darkness. I have told Jemmy of his own father’s wish to see him married and setting up his nursery, and reminded him of the duty he owes there, and he took it without a murmur. Possibly I am trafficking on his own tenderness for Tim, and the sweetness of Jemmy’s own nature. The word love never came up, but kindness did. I am a happy man.

  He composed himself for sleep, thankful to be in his own bed, but restless without Martha nearby. I will leave it to James Enders to fill in the details. He knows his duty to his own family, and my personal interests to this little sister of his great good friend. Sir Waldo smiled into the darkness again. One can hope for love, too. Stranger things have happened.

  It took until the middle of November for James Enders to nerve himself to consider the next step in Sir Waldo’s plan. When he should have been concentrating on student recitations and tutorials, his fertile brain was taxing itself with a plan of his own. He had earlier congratulated himself that, while he had agreed to actively consider little Olivia Hannaford—great gadfreys, was she old enough for a man’s bed?—as a partner in marriage, the matter was not chipped onto an obelisk somewhere. It will certainly take a month to visit Enderfield, he reasoned. If she takes my fancy, I can pursue the matter.

  How, he had no idea—not one. True, his undergraduate days had not been without occasional visits to discreet women, and there was even one term when he was certain he was besotted with an opera dancer. The occasions passed, as do all the storms of youth. He had gone to Almack’s like the proper gentleman he was, bowed and danced, and carried on what light conversation he possessed, which was precious little. These females do not wish to know of autopsies, and quivering muscles of rats, the beauty of motion, and the people who perform the world’s labor, he decided after one particularly profitless evening several years before. He would not have thought it possible for a living woman’s eyes to glaze over while he talked, but after that evening, he did not doubt it again. He never returned to Almack’s.

  He knew he wanted a wife. Enough of his friends were walking arm in arm with pretty things that bore their name and children. Despite the concentration of hours and hours of rational scholarship, he found himself longing late at night, or at odd moments in the day, to reach for something besides another pillow or a second book off the shelf.

  “I want a wife,” he declared out loud.

  “My lord, we all do,” said his student, grinning in spite of himself.

  “Forgive that, Walters. I received a wedding announcement from a friend today, and the matter was on my brain,” he lied. “Now, where were we?”

  “I was describing the function of the female pelvic floor,” the student said.

  James had the good grace to laugh. “Walters, that accounts for it! Do proceed, and I will remember my manners.”

  He delayed in suggesting to his father that they return to Enderfield for Christmas, partly out of stubbornness, and partly from a certain delicate shyness that he knew was part of his nature, which irritated him from time to time.

  He did bring up the matter during dinner after one of his visits to London University. I wonder if fricassee of liver was the right choice tonight, he asked himself. I have been wrist-deep in a hip reduction all afternoon, and this looks very like that. He pushed away the plate. “Papa, let us go home for Christmas,” he suggested.

  The sentence had barely left his mouth when his father declared that it as a capital idea. “I am perfectly at liberty to go as soon as you wish, son,” he said. He frowned at his own plate. “Ah, Jemmy, we have been so long away that things are probably shabby there. I wonder… do you think… do we dare impose on Sir Waldo to loan us Olivia to offer suggestions on refurbishment? If she is anything like her mother, she has some skills along those lines.”

  It was a wonderful suggestion, and James leaped on it. Only after he was lying in bed that night did he wonder if Sir Waldo had been discussing intimate matters with his own father. It seemed unlikely, considering his father’s somewhat formal demeanor and Sir Waldo’s easygoing nature. Merely a coincidence, he told himself. And that probably accounted for his dream of dissecting fricassee while Sir Waldo smiled benignly from a seat in the surgeon’s gallery. At least he did not dream about Olivia; those dreams left him a trifle embarrassed with himself.

  There is something about Sir Waldo’s suggestion that is doing strange things to me, he thought the next afternoon as he walked from the Camera back to All Souls. Is the world in a conspiracy? Only moments ago among the books, he had chanced upon one of his brightest pupils and surprised himself by suggesting that they end the tutorial a week ahead of the Christmas holidays. He knew the lad—so intense, so eager to learn—would object, so he had not been prepared for the swiftness of his acquiescence.

  “You don’t mind?” James had inquired in all amazement.

  “I’ll bear the strain, Lord Crandall,” was the reply, given in such a serious tone that James could not be sure if he was being quizzed. Students today are certainly more subtly layered than I ever was, he thought as he nodded and left the Camera.

  He surprised himself further by his own heated argument with his valet that night as the poor man attempted to pack his clothing for the return to Enderfield. James knew that his was a mild disposition, absentminded even, in all areas outside of his studies, and he disconcerted himself with the vehemence he directed toward his own shabby shirts and collars.

  Mason, ever the soul of rectitude, was finally driven to say in clipped tones, “My lord, if you will not go to a tailor, the result is what is laid before you!”

  “You could have insisted more strenuously,” James countered, but he knew his argument was weak at best. The valet only tightened his lips and maintained a stony silence that persisted throughout the remainder of the evening. I have been more pointedly ignored only by cats, James thought as he went to a cold bed, unencumbered by the usual solace of a warming pan. I can only hope that Mason’s miff wears off before he brings me shaving water with ice chunks in the morning.

  To his great relief, the shaving water was hot. Mason unbent long enough to inform
his master that he had taken the liberty of writing to Lord Crandall’s London tailor to request an audience the next afternoon.

  “My lord, you are going to London anyway to retrieve your father,” Mason reminded him. James thought it prudent not to argue.

  Two days later, he sent Mason to Kent and his own relatives for Christmas. Having discharged any London duties, James and Lord Waverly traveled back along the same road through inland sleet, stopping ten miles shy of Oxford at the village of Woodcote.

  On the advice of his father’s butler, they dined at the inn while the family servants rode ahead to reconnoiter at Enderfield. “For while I suspect that the Carvers have been adequate caretakers, one cannot assume that the chimneys are drawing properly or that the beds are made,” the butler warned.

  They tarried long enough over dinner for the butler to work any number of miracles. When they arrived at Enderfield, long after all light was gone from the sky, fires were in the hearths, holland covers removed from the major rooms, and beds made. James strolled with his father through the gallery to gaze upon any number of Enders ancestors, a trifle dusty in their frames, but none the worse for neglect.

  “It is a little shabby,” Lord Waverly admitted, stopping before the portrait of his lovely wife, dead since James’s days at New College.

  “Mama is not shabby,” James contradicted. “No, indeed,” his father agreed. “She never was.” After a moment’s contemplation, he set them both in motion again. “But we can certainly refurbish her house before she looks down on us from whatever celestial sphere she graces and despairs over husband and son!”

  I am here to claim a wife who will turn this into a house again, James told himself as they proceeded toward the bedroom wing and slumber. Mama would have liked that, Papa will be ecstatic, Sir Waldo suggested it, Tim would have approved, and I think it must be a good idea if everyone feels that way. As he composed himself for sleep that night in his old chamber, James wondered if anyone had ever asked Olivia.

  Over eggs and bacon the next morning, he knew that it was not a question to put to Olivia, or to any female probably. One does one’s duty, he thought, even if the nuts and bolts of the matter are less discussed between men and women than Watt’s steam engine or Lavoisier’s treatise on the properties of oxygen. And, he reflected, gentlewomen seem to have a knack for knowing. We assume the rightness of marriage, and if some among us need prodding… He took his cup and saucer and stood gazing out the French doors that would have been open in the summer, giving onto the small breakfast terrace. In some matters, I am a slow learner.

  It was good to be home, he decided as he leaned against the doorframe. The snow had stopped and the sky was so blue that he squinted. The trees were bare of leaves now, and he could easily see Sir Waldo’s property, the house substantial as Enderfield, if not quite so large. He thought of Tim and of his youth, which suddenly seemed so long ago.

  He knew it was a simple matter to pay a morning call on the Hannafords, but by the time he worked up his nerve the next day, it was afternoon, and really too late for such a call of courtesy. “They will think I am finagling a dinner invitation,” he explained to his father.

  “You used to do that,” Lord Waverly pointed out.

  “And Tim was my excuse, sir. I have none now, beyond a desire to see the family,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  He never did pay a courtesy call to the Hannafords that week, choosing instead to organize his notes for lectures after the holidays were over and reread Ketchum’s paper on motion. His father had a mild sore throat, so they did not attend church. By the next week, he realized that he had waited too long to make a casual visit and might as well give it up as a hopeless case and return to Oxford. Some men are not destined to marry, he told himself; perhaps I am one of them.

  James wondered how to broach the matter to his father, who seemed content to regard him with a certain fondness and continue his own career in front of the fireplace, reading when he felt like it, and dozing when he did not. Papa is glad to be here, James thought. He would be disappointed if I suggested that we return to London for Christmas. James decided that he would find stationery in the book room and write Sir Waldo a letter, telling him to choose another son-in-law who was not too shy to pay an initial morning call.

  He was in the hallway, heading for the book room with the firmest of intentions, when someone knocked on the door. He knew that his father had gone out earlier to walk among the shrubbery and breathe deep of the brisk air, so he hurried to open it, waving away the footman. He opened the door, and there stood Olivia Hannaford.

  He knew he would be surprised the first time he saw her—if he saw her—because at their last meeting at Tim’s funeral she was only eleven years old. Time does things, he thought as he looked upon her loveliness. He remembered her from her childhood, but even then he was not prepared for that certain something about her that he—the most eloquent of men on paper and in lecture hall—was totally unable to explain. Sir Waldo was so right: I have never seen anyone like this, he thought.

  There she stood, not greatly taller than he recalled from their last meeting, but so different. She wore a heavy grey cloak with the hood up, but her marvelous hair threatened to spill out of its boundaries. Wonderful, impudent hair, he thought, entranced by the curls. She was covered completely by the cloak, but her shape was a graceful outline. Time, which had done nothing to ameliorate her hair, had managed to subdue her freckles. They were the palest marks now, and completely bewitching. What a woman this is, he reflected.

  “I wish you would ask me in,” she said, “My feet are cold. Jemmy, that wreath has to go.”

  He smiled and motioned her forward. “Miss Hannaford, excuse my bad manners. Come in, please. What wreath?”

  She stopped right in the doorway and stared at him, and then turned pointedly to look at the door directly next to him. “That one you are almost leaning upon. And please do not call me Miss Hannaford. I have always been Olivia to you, except when I was Oblivious, or Ollie, or… what was that other name Tim hatched?”

  He thought a moment, resisting the urge to shake his head because he knew his brains would fall out and drop onto the floor at her feet. “I believe it was just plain Livy.”

  “You’re too kind,” she said with a smile of her own. “I believe it was Liver.” She held out her hand to him. “Livy will do, unless you are determined to be formal.” She wore gloves, of course, and as he took her hand, he wondered how human bones could feel so delicate. I will have to take such good care of all this magnificence, he told himself, and then said without another moment’s thought, “Olivia, you have superior bones.”

  What just came out of my mouth? he asked himself in stupefied amazement. Goodness, but she will think I am crazy, he thought and then blundered on, “I mean… oh, hang it, I have seen a lot of bones in autopsies, but none of them ever felt like yours.”

  Open-mouthed in total shock or wonder (he wasn’t sure which), her hand still in his, she stared at him.

  “I mean…” he began lamely and stopped. Shut up, James, he thought. And let go of the nice lady’s hand. There’s a good man. Step away slowly, and maybe she will think you are harmless. No quick motions. If she slaps you or faints at your feet, it will be only what you deserve.

  To his surprise, she did neither. While she did carefully remove her fingers from his grasp, she merely stepped back and shook her head.

  “Mama would say you have not changed an iota, Jemmy,” she told him.

  “I probably have not,” he agreed. “Olivia, please come in. I promise to remove the wreath.”

  “And I will make you another one,” she said, stepping inside and looking around. “Oh, it has changed here.”

  I suppose it has, he thought to himself as the butler took her cloak. We have stayed away since Mama died, and I fear that our neglect shows. He took a deep breath. “What would you do with the place, Livy?” he asked.

  “Paint it and put on new wall-covering, and
send the crocodiles packing,” she said promptly, pointing to the chaise with the reptilian limbs, a remnant of an earlier remodeling—modish after Napoleon’s plunge into Egypt.

  “And go to the warehouses in London for new furniture?” he suggested, walking with her toward the sitting room. She shook her head.

  “First, I would go into your attics and see what is there.” She stopped. “Are you planning to marry and bring a viscountess here?”

  He almost winced. “I suppose I am,” he managed to say.

  “I would not have thought you would ever leave All Souls,” she said as they moved into the sitting room. “Papa tells me that you are doing great things there.”

  “I like to think so,” he said, hoping for a touch of modesty where he felt only embarrassment and the surest conviction that she would think him strange, indeed, if he explained his study.

  “What, for instance?” she asked.

  “I doubt it would interest you,” he replied. Lord Crandall prided himself on the sensitive side of his nature, but he winced again at the expression that came into Olivia’s eyes after his bumbling statement. It was as though he had blown out a candle inside her.

  “Perhaps not,” she said, her voice as nicely modulated as before—but with something less in it, he thought, some overtone that seemed to bank the fire he had noticed when he opened the door on her loveliness.

  To his dismay, no amount of small talk seemed to bring about any recovery. Gracefully, she accepted his offer to pour the tea when it came, and she certainly held up her end of the inconsequentials that both of them seemed to be uttering. A man more shallow would have not noticed a thing, but James knew he had blundered, and the deuce of it was he was not entirely sure how.

  After she left, he took the wreath off the front door and stood for a long time gazing into the mirror in the entrance hall, wondering how it was that a man such as he should be permitted to roam free in England without a restraint around his neck. He was still standing there, heaping all sorts of abuse on himself, when his father returned from his stroll through the shrubbery.