Christmas Gifts

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh,” she said while the urchin’s eyes swiveled back and forth between the two of them.

  “Now do you know me well enough to come with me and this urchin into the warmth of the pastry cook’s?” he asked.

  The boy shifted from one foot to the other.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said.

  “But I do not know you, ma’am,” he said.

  “Julie Bevan, my lord,” she said.

  Julie. A thoroughly sweet name. He might have expected it, the Earl of Kevern thought. And he offered his arm to her and watched her hesitate before accepting it. He sallied forth along the street with her, the thieving urchin bobbing along at his other side, one foot in the gutter and the other on the curb.

  Christmas, he thought. It was like an octopus with a thousand tentacles or a fishing net of infinite size. Or like a giant hand covered with jam, to which anyone it touched would stick fast. There was no escaping it. It was happening all around him, and there he was in the midst of it all, a shabby lady on his arm, a ragged child bouncing along beside him, the three of them on their way to a pastry cook’s to partake of meat pasties and some hot beverage.

  The child had already told his heartrending story. Doubtless there were many more details to be wrung from his fertile imagination. He would hear some of them as soon as they were in the warmth of the shop, the earl decided. And he had yet to hear the touching details of Miss Julie Bevan’s impoverished existence. It was something to anticipate with some pleasure.

  It was a good thing he had not given his handkerchief to the boy, he decided. Before he left the pastry cook’s, a free and a sane man again, he would doubtless need it to mop up the moisture from his own eyes.

  If he had accomplished nothing else that day, Lord Kevern thought a few minutes later—and without a doubt he had not, beyond encouraging a budding criminal by rewarding him with half a crown instead of thrashing him and turning him over to a magistrate as he deserved—if he had accomplished nothing else, he had provided food for conversation in fashionable drawing rooms that evening.

  Fashionable heads turned as he entered the pastry cook’s with a shabby lady on his arm and a more-than-shabby urchin tripping along at their heels. And fashionable eyebrows rose when he seated the lady at one of the tables before seating himself. He also raised no objection to the urchin’s taking a vacant chair at the same table and drumming his heels against its metal legs.

  Fashionable heads, he thought, could go hang. And he winced as the boy sniffed wetly and solved the problem of the lack of a handkerchief by cuffing his nose dry.

  Miss Julie Bevan would not have a meat pasty, though she looked as if she needed one, the earl thought, his eyes passing over her slightly too slender figure. She would have only a cup of tea and a cake when one was pressed on her. Charlie Cobban had a meat pasty and two cakes without having to be pressed at all—and a cup of steaming chocolate, which he eyed with something resembling awe. Certainly his legs drummed a louder tattoo against the legs of his chair when it was set before him.

  “Charlie,” Miss Bevan said quietly and with a gentle smile, “keep your legs still, dear. You will be disturbing the other customers.”

  The tattoo ceased. The sounds of a meat pasty being thoroughly enjoyed and a cup of too-hot chocolate being sipped took its place.

  “Christmas!” the earl said, fixing his pale blue eyes on the lady and trying to guess the story she must have to tell and determining that he would draw it from her and thereby amuse himself. “The time for peace on earth and goodwill amongst men. The most wonderful, heart-warming season of the year. The time for family and gift-giving and feasting.”

  “Yes.” She smiled at him.

  He had known, of course, that she would agree with all the foolish clichés he had mouthed.

  “And how will you spend the holiday, Miss Bevan?” he asked her.

  “At home,” she said, “where Christmas should be spent, my lord.”

  “And where is home?” he asked.

  “London.” She smiled again. “It does not really matter where home is, does it, provided there is one. Especially at Christmas. Home is where one’s loved ones are. Where one belongs.”

  Ah, he thought, toying with the handle of his teacup and ignoring the plate of cakes, but what if there was a home—more than one, and all of them large and lavishly furnished—and no loved ones in it? What if one belonged to no one but oneself? If one discounted a brother and two sisters and their spouses and numerous offspring, that was, and their undying custom of coming together at Christmas? One could be even more alone in such company than in only one’s own.

  “Are there loved ones?” he asked. “In your own home, I mean.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes softened, and he wondered for the first time if that home contained a husband and perhaps some children. She had not said that she was Miss rather than Mrs. Bevan. But she wore no rings. Perhaps Mr. Bevan could not afford rings.

  He turned his attention to the boy and wondered how the pastry cook would react when the crumbs that liberally dotted the tattered jacket were decorating the floor after the boy stood up.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you would like to stuff the rest of those cakes inside yourself, Charlie, but find to your chagrin that there is just no more room in there.”

  “I would like for Vi’let an’ ’Arry to taste them,” the boy said.

  “Never fear.” The earl pursed his lips. “We shall have them wrapped up, and you shall be allowed generously to share your treat with Violet and Harry—or is it Roddy? You must be careful of such details, lad.”

  Sharp eyes darted to his. “ ’Arry is my friend wot lives next door to us,” Charlie said. “Roddy is too little to eat cakes. Well, maybe ’alf a one.”

  “Ah,” Lord Kevern said. “If you cannot always have a perfect memory, lad, then a quick and fertile imagination is the next best quality.” He raised his hand to summon a waiter and directed that the cakes remaining on the plate be wrapped up to take and that another meat pasty be wrapped separately. And if the next three days did not hurry on by, he thought, he would be joining the world in its collective insanity. The boy should have been soundly thrashed and long forgotten by now.

  When he returned his attention to Miss Julie Bevan, it was to find her eyes fixed on him thoughtfully. “You are kind,” she said, “though you pretend not to be, I think. And what will your own Christmas be like, my lord?”

  He grimaced. “Soon over, it is to be hoped,” he said. “I shall shut myself inside my town house and try to ignore the merriment of my servants and try to forget what day it is. I choose not to be a part of the universal hypocrisy that seizes everyone during the second half of December.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she looked so infinitely sad that he felt the urge to look over his shoulder to see who could have aroused such a tender emotion in her. “Do you have no family, my lord?”

  “A brother and sisters and nephews and nieces galore,” he said. “For the first time I shall keep myself away from their Christmas gathering. Why should I be a witness to all the affecting maternal and paternal tenderness that afflicts my brother and sisters and my in-laws on Christmas Day and to all the unbounded affection for their parents that the receipt of gifts inspires in the bosoms of my nephews and nieces?”

  “And to have no part in it yourself,” she said quietly, the sorrow still in her eyes.

  They were almost an emerald green, he thought. But he was feeling too irritated to enjoy the admiration of her eyes. He had come there to amuse himself with the stories of his guests, not to tell his own. He rose to help the lady to her feet, and Charlie gulped down the last two mouthfuls of his chocolate.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said, offering him her hand when they stood outside the shop. “May Christmas bring you a blessing as you have brought one to this boy today.”

  Lord, he thought, she must have been rehearsing the speech all the time she was sipping at her tea. But he took her slender litt
le hand and applied a polite degree of pressure to it.

  “Will you allow me to call you a hackney coach?” he asked her. “The wind is cuttingly chill.” He was in grave danger, he thought wryly, of falling headlong into Christmas as into a vat of treacle and finding himself quite unable to pull himself out again. What an unspeakably awful fate!

  “Thank you, my lord.” She smiled. “But I do not have too far to walk.”

  And she turned from him and proceeded on her way while he watched. She looked briefly into the jeweler’s window as she passed.

  The Earl of Kevern glanced down at Charlie Cobban, who was still standing beside him, looking from him to the disappearing figure of Julie Bevan, and clutching his bundle tightly in one hand.

  “That was a mistyke, guv,” he said in his piping voice. “Lydies like ’er don’t take carriage rides from gentlemen.”

  “Don’t they, indeed?” the earl said. “But ladies like her rescue worthless thieving rascals from the thrashings they deserve, lad, and fill their bellies instead. And don’t you forget it. And next time you decided to thieve—I do not doubt that there will be a next time—steal from someone who looks as if he or she can spare what you take. Now be off with you. And don’t eat that food all at once, or it will make you sick.”

  The boy darted away in the same direction Julie Bevan had taken and was soon lost among the crowds and conveyances. The Earl of Kevern stood where he was for a few moments longer and felt a little emptier than he had felt before. The great myth had beckoned him for a moment and then laughed in his face again.

  He turned about with a cynical curl of the lip and continued on his way.

  The Earl of Kevern was in a bad mood. At least that was the word being spread belowstairs in his town house on Hanover Square. He had barked at his valet for producing the wrong coat when he got up from bed, though no particular coat had been asked for. And he had commented with caustic tones to his butler at breakfast that there was enough food on the sideboard to feed the five thousand, and Cook would do well to remember that despite his exalted rank, he was but one man in possession of but one ordinary-sized stomach.

  Christmas was approaching again, his servants reminded one another, as if any of them needed reminding, and they nodded sagely to one another as if that fact alone accounted for their master’s irritability. And he was not going down to Buckland Abbey this year even though it was his own country home and the rest of the family would be there as usual.

  It would have taken his mind off things if he had gone, the housekeeper gave as her opinion. All those children would cheer anyone’s heart at Christmas.

  But it was the very children who made it so hard for him, Cook said, shaking her head and muttering “Poor dear gentleman” into the large pot of soup she was stirring. It was Cook’s philosophy that the very best way to help a man forget bad things was to fill his stomach with tasty dishes. And so it was unlikely that future breakfasts would diminish in size or in the variety of foods prepared.

  Whatever the cause of the bad mood, it was there. It was to be contended with. The butler, therefore, tapped on the library door at some time after breakfast with the firm conviction that he might be committing suicide by so doing—or at the very least ensuring that he would be out on the streets, jobless, for Christmas.

  “Set it down,” the earl said, glancing up briefly from his book at the salver full of the day’s post that his butler clutched. And then his look became irritable. “What is it, Horrocks?”

  Horrocks had coughed, a genteel clearing of the throat, the sure signal that he had something to say.

  “There is a person, my lord,” he said in the haughty tones that usually turned mere persons into quivering jelly. “A bundle of rags. An impertinent boy.”

  His lordship looked at him coolly from pale blue eyes.

  “In the kitchen, my lord,” Horrocks said. “Sidling up to the fire, trying to warm himself despite discouragement.” Horrocks warmed to his story as perhaps the boy had to the fire. He coughed again.

  “Throw him out,” the earl said and prepared to turn his attention back to his book, though truth to tell he might as well have been holding it upside down for all the attention he had been giving it before the interruption. “Give him some bread and a coin first.”

  “He demands to speak with you, my lord.” Horrocks spoke as if the noose were being lowered over his head. “Says it is a matter of life and death.”

  Lord Kevern lowered his book and Horrocks stiffened his upper lip. “His name is not by any manner of chance Charlie Cobban, is it?” the earl asked.

  “Yes, my lord.” The brief answer seemed the best defense against such an unexpected question. But the boy had told the housekeeper that it would mean certain death and dismissal—though he had not said they would come necessarily in that order—to deny him admittance to His Highness.

  “Show him in by all means,” the earl said, laying aside his book altogether and getting to his feet.

  Horrocks disappeared rather like a shot from a gun, only with far greater dignity.

  The Earl of Kevern stood before the fire and warmed his back and his hands, which he clasped behind him. He had spent the night dreaming alternately of emerald green eyes and urchins swinging in the breeze from a gibbet at Tyburn and had woken in the blackest of moods because Christmas was still two days off instead of being comfortably behind him already. He might as well amuse himself with the sight of an intelligent and inventive urchin who still had his feet firmly on the ground.

  Why was it, he wondered, that he was in no way surprised by the arrival of Charlie Cobban on his doorstep?

  “Good morning, Charlie,” he said when his butler ushered the boy into the library and disappeared again at a nod from his master.

  “Cor blimey, guv,” the boy said, “is there as much stuff as this in Carlton ’ouse?”

  “I daresay there is a great deal more,” the earl said. “Did you come for a guided tour?”

  “Naw!” Charlie said scornfully. “You don’t know where she lives, do you, guv? And you wants to know. I seen that yesterday when you watched ’er walkin’ down the street. I’ll tell you where she lives. I followed ’er.”

  “Did you?” his lordship said, beginning to feel the first stirrings of good humor that he had experienced that morning. “And will you? For a small fee, I assume?”

  “One guinea, guv,” Charlie said firmly. “I figures you wouldn’t miss a guinea.”

  “Ah,” the earl said, “I see you have taken to heart my final words of wisdom to you yesterday afternoon, my lad. But one guinea is a prodigious amount to pay for information I have never considered necessary to my existence or well-being.”

  “Or ’alf a guinea to tell you where she went this mornin’, guv,” Charlie said.

  The earl’s eyebrows rose. “Gracious,” he said. “You have been doing your homework. Perhaps I should search your person, Charlie, to see if you have any of the lady’s property about it. If you have, you know, it will be over my knee with you and a spanking with my bare hand that you will never forget.”

  “Naw,” Charlie said scornfully. “I decided to give up thievin’, guv. She came to an ’ouse quite close to ’ere. She must work there.”

  Yes, she must, to be up and out at an hour when most ladies were still abed. Close to Hanover Square. Bond Street was perhaps, then, on her route to and from work.

  “So you have decided to make a more honest living by, ah, selling information,” the earl said dryly. “Were you sick on the cakes and pasty, by the way?”

  “Me muvver an’ Annie ate the pasty,” Charlie said, “an’ . . .”

  “Annie being Violet’s middle name, I suppose,” the earl said.

  “Naw,” Charlie said, “Annie’s me older sister, the one wot ’ad a job wiv ’er needle ’til she lost it day before yesterday.”

  “Ah,” the earl said. “So the burden on your shoulders becomes more and more onerous.”

  “We always ’ad
meat for Chris’mus,” Charlie said, his eyes soulful as they had been the afternoon before for Julie Bevan’s benefit. “But this year there won’t be none.”

  “My heart is rent in two,” the earl said. “Now, then, Charlie, I shall send you back to the kitchen with instructions that you are to be fed dinner. Here is a crown with no information asked for in exchange. I suppose you gave yesterday’s half crown to your mother, like a good boy?”

  “Yes, guv,” Charlie said.

  “I thought you would have,” his lordship said dryly. “Make sure you do the like with this. Your mother doubtless has the wisdom to spend it carefully.”

  “Yes, guv,” Charlie said. “But for anuvver one like this I’ll tell you where she lives. Special price, guv, for Chris’mus.”

  “Spying on a lady,” the Earl of Kevern said, “will earn you only a session with the heavy side of my hand, Charlie. Mr. Horrocks, my butler, will be waiting outside the door for you. Go belowstairs with him, eat your dinner, and then take yourself off. I feel compelled to add that I will not grieve dreadfully if I never set eyes on you again.”

  “Cor, guv,” Charlie said, his hand on the knob of the library door, his free arm gesturing through the door with a jerking thumb, “I thought ’e must be a duke or somethin’.”

  The earl waited for the door to close behind the boy before grinning. Yes, Horrocks would make the perfect duke—on stage.

  But his grin faded quickly enough. If she worked for a living, the chances were that she worked regular hours. She probably walked to work at exactly the same time every morning and home again at exactly the same time in the afternoon. And along the same route.

  The earl frowned down at the carpet before his feet and tried to reconstruct his movements of the day before. At exactly what time had he left White’s? Had he stopped off anywhere along the way before arriving opposite that jeweler’s shop?

  And was he seriously making these calculations? he asked himself suddenly, his frown deepening. Why would he want to know the answers if he was not planning to be in the same place at the same time today?