Christmas Gifts

by Mary Balogh

  He frowned at the cottage when his carriage finally stopped outside its gate. It was small enough, though larger than he might have expected, considering the fact that Parr and Marjorie between them had wasted both his property and small fortune and her considerable dowry and had got themselves deeply and irrevocably into debt. But it was a shabby enough place. Gloomy. Depressing.

  He felt rather sorry for the children. He wondered how deeply they mourned. Marjorie and Parr had been their parents, after all.

  He became aware as he jumped down from his carriage that another was drawing up behind it. And a glance in its direction revealed the face of Lady Carlyle pressed to the glass, peering out at him. She withdrew her face hastily enough. Of course. It would be far beneath her dignity to give the impression that she was in any way interested in him.

  He was annoyed. She had proved him wrong and he hated to be wrong. He would hate to think that she had an ounce of compassion for children in her soul. And the thought flashed through his mind that they would be at the house together. With Christmas approaching. And with a snowstorm imminent.

  Bloody hell! He allowed his mind the luxury of the expletive.

  Sometimes he hated the constraints placed upon him by the fact that he was a gentleman. He would have liked to ignore her presence and stride up the path to the cottage door alone. But he was a gentleman. He strode toward her carriage instead and opened the door. But he could not deny himself altogether the indulgence of bad temper.

  “Ah,” he said, looking into her beautiful, cold, arrogant face, so at variance with the vivid red hair visible beneath the brim of her bonnet. “I see that I would have lost my wager had I been unwise enough to make it with anyone. You came.”

  Her lovely wide mouth became a thin lin and her jaw became so hard that he imagined her teeth must be just about cracking from the force with which they were pressed together.

  “I came, my lord,” she said, her voice every bit as icy as the day, “because in my wildest imaginings I did not believe that you would. It seems that we can both occasionally be wrong.”

  He did not like having to look up at her. Yet there was no sign of her coachman approaching to put down the steps for her to descend.

  “Allow me, ma’am,” he said, and he leaned inside the carriage, pushed aside the blanket that covered her legs, set his hands at her waist, and swung her down to the roadway to stand in front of him. That was better. The top of her head barely reached his chin. Her waist, he noticed belatedly, was as small now as it had ever been. And she still wore the same perfume she had used to wear, a subtle scent that teased rather than assaulted the nostrils.

  “Thank you,” she said with curt sarcasm, “for awaiting my permission, my lord. Your hands?”

  He removed them and pursed his lips.

  “Ma’am.” He bowed with exaggerated courtesy and contemplated pleasurable ways of curbing her sharp tongue. “Will you take my arm so that we may approach the house in seemly fashion to meet our nephew and nieces?” He waited for her answer.

  “Thank you.” She elevated her chin and her nose—though both of necessity moved together, she succeeded in making it appear to be two quite separate motions. She set her arm lightly along his as if he were about to lead her into a dance and so saved herself from the appearance of having been bested.

  They proceeded through the gate and up the path in stiff silence.

  What a Christmas it was shaping up to be, Viscount Morsey thought. A shabby country cottage, an unwelcome snowstorm, three young children, a cold, haughty woman. Good God, what a Christmas!

  He wondered by what madness he had once imagined he loved the woman. And he wondered for what unknown good deed the powers above had rewarded him by saving him from marrying her.

  Two carriages. Not one, but two. They had all felt an almost sickening excitement at the sight of one drawing up outside the gate, especially since it was far grander than any carriage they had ever seen before. But when the second appeared behind it, they were saucer-eyed and ecstatic. Except that they were not allowed to enjoy the sight for long. Nurse whisked them away from the window and was soon scrubbing their faces with painful haste and changing the girls’ aprons for newer and cleaner ones.

  It seemed that their aunt and uncle had arrived.

  Rupert and Patricia, instantly alert, wanted to rush downstairs to meet the visitors. But Nurse said that neither the excitement nor the eagerness to leave the nursery was seemly. They must wait quietly where they were until their aunt and uncle had recovered from their journey and chose to call on them or summon them. And they must be on their best behavior.

  Children should be seen and not heard. Children should speak only when spoken to. Caroline recited the rules in her head, though they were unnecessary. She was glad they had not been allowed to run downstairs. She hoped her uncle and aunt would take a long time recovering from their journeys. She hoped she would remain unspoken to even after they had.

  They came very soon. Nurse had said that they would want to wash and change and have a cup of tea, but Nurse must have been mistaken. Caroline tried to hide behind her when they came into the nursery, but she was pushed firmly forward after Nurse had curtsied deeply, and so Caroline clung to her brother’s sleeve instead and stood half behind him, peeping around his arm.

  “Rupert,” her uncle said. “Patricia. Caroline.” He looked at them each in turn and inclined his head to them. Caroline ducked right behind Rupert when it came her turn. Her uncle was a stern-looking man and very tall. She thought he was taller than Papa had been, though she could not remember Papa very clearly. Papa had never bowed to her. She liked being bowed to. Princesses were always bowed to.

  “Hello, children.” Her aunt smiled at each of them in turn. She was a very pretty lady. She had hair like Patricia’s. Caroline had heard the servants say that Patricia’s quick temper came from having red hair. Though Caroline had not noticed that Patricia was bad-tempered. She wondered if her aunt was. Her aunt, she noticed, would like to hide behind her uncle’s sleeve as Caroline was hiding behind Rupert’s. Her aunt was feeling shy.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, ma’am.” Rupert was bowing, taking Caroline’s hand forward with him. He was using his grown-up voice.

  “Good afternoon, Uncle. Good afternoon, Aunt.” Patricia’s curtsy was one of the best she had ever accomplished. She did not lift her skirt too high or topple sideways. Nurse would be pleased.

  There was a slight pause and Caroline realized that it was her turn. Her thumb wandered toward her mouth, but she caught herself in time and lowered it firmly. Thumb-sucking was for babies. She moved in against Rupert’s back for reassurance and fixed the one eye that was not hidden against his sleeve on her aunt.

  “There are snow snakes,” she said.

  At first she thought she had said the wrong thing. Rupert and Patricia shuffled uncomfortably, and her aunt and uncle looked at her as if they did not understand. They were both looking at her.

  “Are there?” her aunt asked at last. “Where?”

  “Out there.” Caroline motioned with her free arm to the window, though she did not turn her head. “On the path. They are all going the same way.”

  “Caroline!” Patricia’s voice was agonized.

  “Caroline has an imagination, ma’am,” Rupert said, rushing to her defense. “She is only four. She will grow out of it. Did you have a pleasant journey?”

  “Thank you, yes,” their aunt said.

  But their uncle was talking at the same time. “Perhaps you would be good enough to show us, Caroline,” he was saying. And he had stepped forward and was stretching out a hand for hers.

  Caroline looked all the way up into his face. He was not smiling and he still looked stern. But there was something in his eyes, something that took away some of her terror. But she had been talking to her aunt, and she had not intended to show them the snow snakes. She had merely been making conversation. Nurse always said that ladies—and gentlemen—
had to learn to make conversation. She reached out a hand tentatively and set it in her uncle’s large one. She left the sanctuary of Rupert’s back and led the way to the window. Her aunt came too.

  “There,” Caroline said, pointing downward. The snakes were still there, but there were more of them now and they were moving faster. She could not see them too clearly herself, though, because she was not kneeling down and leaning across the window seat.

  And then her uncle set his hands at her waist and lifted her up to stand on the seat. He kept his hands where they were so that she would feel safe. Caroline did not like to tell him that it was forbidden to stand on the window seat. She waited for Nurse to scold him, but she did not do so. Perhaps Nurse was being polite to guests.

  “They do indeed look like snakes,” her uncle admitted.

  “And they really are all going the same way,” her aunt said. “It is because of the wind, you know. They are not as strong as the wind and must go wherever it decides to blow them.”

  Caroline was encouraged to say more. People usually called her silly when she said such things. These days she usually kept them to herself.

  “One is going to go back the other way soon,” she said. “A hero snake. A prince. He is going to rescue the princess.”

  “Ah,” her uncle said. “Of course. Hero princes always rescue princesses.”

  “And marry them and live happily ever after,” her aunt added.

  “Miss Caroline is given to flights of fancy, my lord and my lady,” Nurse said quickly, her voice breathless and flustered. “If the children are a trouble to you . . .”

  “They are not,” Caroline’s uncle said. “They are our kin, Mrs. Chambers.”

  “Perhaps you would care to take the opportunity to go down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, Mrs. Chambers,” her aunt added.

  “The fierce dragon has taken her captive,” Caroline said. It was getting dark. It did not look as if the hero were going to slither back across the path today. Perhaps tomorrow. The princess would have to spend another night in captivity.

  “Dragons have a tendency to do that,” her uncle said.

  “I do believe it is starting to snow in earnest,” her aunt said. She did not sound too happy about it.

  “We are not to build snowmen,” Rupert said. He was talking in his own voice again. His own voice, but sad.

  “Or to make snow angels,” Patricia said. She sounded sad too.

  Caroline remembered last year and the dreams that had not come true. They were not going to come true this year either. “Or to have Christmas,” she said, forgetting about her snow snakes and staring into the gloom of the road beyond the gate. “Is there Christmas? Or is it just a story?”

  “We are in mourning,” Rupert said. He had changed voices again.

  “Our mama and papa have passed on,” Patricia said, “and we must wear black out of respect for them.”

  There was a silence.

  Caroline turned on the window seat and looked into her uncle’s face. It was not so far above her own now. He looked a little bit like a prince himself, only old, of course. She liked his eyes. They stopped her from feeling frightened of him. And she liked his embroidered waistcoat. Her eyes were drawn to the gleaming black button visible above his coat. She reached out a finger and touched it. It was smooth and ridged where the pattern was.

  “Is there Christmas?” she asked him. She suddenly felt very sad, expecting that he would say no, just as Nurse always said that there were no fairy godmothers and no elves at the bottom of the garden. And no dragons with captive princesses. She wanted desperately for there to be Christmas.

  His eyes—they were blue, like Rupert’s—changed and became quite noticeably kind. “Yes, there is Christmas,” he said. “There is always Christmas, every year.”

  “But not this year,” Rupert said. He remembered his manners. “Sir.”

  “And there is a story too,” their aunt said. “A wonderful story that comes true every year.”

  “Except this year,” Patricia said.

  “Mama and Papa passed on to heaven,” Caroline told her uncle, in case he had not heard Patricia or did not know the completion of their story. “They are with angels. And there is a throne.”

  “Yes.” Her uncle did something unexpected. He slid one arm down from her waist to the back of her knees and the other up about her back, and he lifted her into his arms. She was looking down at her aunt and at Rupert and Patricia. She liked being up there. She felt safe. And she liked the way he smelled. It was all snuffy and leathery and soapy. She set one arm about his neck.

  “Are we going to the orphanage, Uncle?” Patricia asked.

  “No,” their uncle said.

  “No,” their aunt said at the same moment.

  “Why did Mama and Papa pass on?” Caroline asked her uncle.

  His arms tightened about her, but he did not answer her question.

  “Oh, dear,” her aunt said, and Caroline could tell that she was pretending to be cheerful when she did not feel cheerful. “I think we had better ring for tea.”

  The tiresome butler—or, rather, the servant who performed the functions of butler, footman, groom, and probably gardener too—had placed them at opposite ends of a rather long dining table. He—Viscount Morsey—was at the head, of course. She was at the foot. She had thought of asking for a dinner tray to be sent to her room, but she would not give him the satisfaction of believing that he had driven her into hiding.

  She looked down the table at him while the servant was ladling out her soup. “They will not be sent to an orphanage, of course,” she said. “But I cannot be expected to be solely responsible for their care. I live in town, and neither the place nor my home is adapted to the upbringing of young children. You, on the other hand, have three homes, two of them in the country. You would not be inconvenienced by them at all.”

  “Except that I am a single man,” he said. “Children need a mother’s care.”

  “And a father’s,” she added, bristling.

  “Girls need a mother figure on whom to pattern their ways,” he said, spreading his napkin rather ostentatiously on his lap and picking up his soup spoon. He had changed into evening clothes grand enough for a court appearance—black, of course, she noticed, and wondered if he had dressed so immaculately in mockery of her. But then he had always dressed well and still did, if the occasional glimpses she had of him in town were anything to judge by. And he was handsomer now than he had been. . . . Well, perhaps not. But his good looks irritated her.

  “And boys need a father figure for the same reason,” she said. “This family includes both genders, my lord.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, his empty spoon suspended halfway between his mouth and his dish, “you would suggest that we split the family, my lady? You take the girls and I take the boy?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said tartly. “Did you not see how the little one depends upon her elder brother and how protective he is of both sisters? They must remain together.”

  “At one of my country houses,” he said, setting his spoon down altogether and gazing down the table at her with half-closed eyes. The bored look. The look she had found irresistible as a girl. To say that she had been head over ears for him was to understate the case. Foolish girl.

  “They will not be an inconvenience to either of us there,” she said.

  She cursed him silently for not making an immediate reply. Silence stretched and her words—her callous, heartless words—seemed to echo and reecho about the walls of the large and gloomy dining room. How could she have spoken them? Worse, how could she have meant them?

  “Just as they were no inconvenience here to Marjorie and your brother,” he said at last.

  She felt her cheeks grow hot and made matters worse. “Do not pretend that you want them any more than I do,” she said. “Both our lives are set on a course of childlessness.”

  “Not really,” he said, nodding to the butler to remove his dish and bring on
the next course. “I am a viscount, heir to an earl’s title, and this year I reached that dreaded landmark for a single man of title and property, my thirtieth birthday. I will doubtless do my duty and marry and set up my nursery within the next few years.”

  She felt her blush deepen. They had once intended to set it up together. Four children, they had both agreed. They would do it in good order, he had said laughingly. Boy, girl, boy, girl—the perfect family.

  “Why did you never have children?” he asked.

  She looked up at him, shocked. “My lord?” she said.

  “I have often wondered,” he said. “You married him eagerly enough, less than a month after you ended our betrothal, as I recall.”

  She drew breath slowly. “My marriage and my childlessness are none of your concern, my lord,” she said. “None whatsoever.” She had had no children because after the first month of her marriage Carlyle had made it clear to her that he far preferred his men friends to her, and guessing at his meaning, she had kept her bedchamber door locked against him ever after. He had married her for respectability, she suspected—a suitable fate, perhaps, when she had married him for escape.

  “No. My apologies.” He glanced toward the window, across which the curtains had not yet been drawn. “This is the most damnable time for a snowstorm. We are going to be trapped here together for days, Ursula. And with three children. Over Christmas. Can you imagine a worse nightmare?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “Not even if you gave me an hour to think about it. And I would be obliged if you watched your language in my presence, my lord. And I have not granted you permission—lately—to use my given name.”

  “Lady Carlyle, ma’am,” he said—there was as much frost in his voice as there was snow outside, “do accept my humble apologies.”

  She tackled the veal course with as much appetite as if she had already eaten twelve hearty courses.

  “They have to wear black,” he said, “for parents they rarely saw. And they must behave as if they are in deepest mourning.” He sounded faintly angry.

  “They will not be allowed to play in the snow tomorrow,” she said, “though there will undoubtedly be plenty of it out there to tempt them. No snowmen and no snow angels. Or snowball fights. Or sliding on the paths. Or shrieking for the mere fun of it.”