Christmas Gifts

by Mary Balogh

  “And no Christmas,” he said. “No decorations, no presents, no goose or any of the trimmings, no caroling. Just perhaps a sedate attendance at a Christmas church service.”

  “The little one asked if there is such a thing as Christmas,” she said. “She is four years old. Surely she can remember Christmas from last year, even if not from the year before.” She had been disturbed by the question. She faced its full implications now. She looked up at him, her eyes troubled. “Have they never had a proper Christmas, Timothy? Were Marjorie and Adrian never here with them? Not even at Christmas?”

  She realized too late that she had used his name and hoped he had not noticed.

  “Christmas is a time adults are often most reluctant to give to anyone but themselves,” he said.

  His words stung as she remembered her own peevish irritation in the carriage earlier.

  “Myself included, my lady,” he said, with such emphasis on the last words that she knew he had noticed her slip of the tongue.

  “It is criminal,” she said at last. “If you and I miss Christmas, we merely miss a few parties. If children miss Christmas, they miss one of the magic elements of childhood. Have Marjorie and Adrian deprived these children of it in the past? Are they to deprive them again this year because they have died? Is it fair to make children mourn?”

  “For two people they scarcely knew?” He was not eating his pudding. He was leaning back in his chair and turning his spoon over and over on the cloth with one hand. “Is the making of snowmen and snow angels disrespectful to the dead?”

  “Who makes the rules by which these children live?” she asked.

  “Their nurse?” he said. “A competent, affectionate, unimaginative woman, by my judgment.”

  “In charge of at least one child of superb imagination,” she said, thinking with unexpected fondness of the snow snakes and the snake prince and the dragon and princess. “Should it not be you or I making the rules?”

  He pursed his lips and looked at her from those maddeningly drooping lids. “You want to give them Christmas?” he asked. “Do you know how, Urs—, my lady?”

  She thought. “It has been a long time,” she said. “But I can remember. I can remember the magic and perhaps what caused it. And you?”

  He too thought for a while. “Yule logs,” he said. “Holly, ivy, mistletoe. Stirring the pudding. Wrapping gifts. Unwrapping them. Singing carols.”

  “And the Christmas story,” she said.

  “Ah, yes.” He laughed softly. “Sometimes one almost forgets. So we are to break all the rules and sacrifice our own comfort and time in order to give our nephew and nieces a Christmas to remember—before they are incarcerated on one of my country estates. Snow is always an extra bonus at Christmas, of course. Are you prepared to acquire red and tingling fingers and toes—and nose, my lady, in the cause of entertaining three children neither of us really cares a damn about?”

  “Mind your language,” she said sharply, glaring at him. “And it is not true.” Her eyes wavered from his when she remembered that it was perfectly true, as she would realize when she had got past this madness of wanting to give them something they had never had. “It is not true. I felt something in the nursery earlier. Rupert is trying to be the man of the family. He is trying to be brave. And Patricia is trying to be worthy of him. The little one is simply adorable. Patricia has my red hair. Rupert has your blue eyes. Caroline is quite herself. They might almost be—”

  “Ours?” His eyebrows had shot up and his eyes had opened wide to reveal the full extent of their blueness. “Hardly, my dear ma’am. We have never bedded down together, even once, though we came close on that one occasion in Vauxhall when your mama allowed us to slip free of her chaperonage for almost a whole blissful hour.”

  He had kissed her hotly, with opened mouth and probing tongue. His hands had wandered all over her—on top of her clothing—as had hers over him. She had been pressed, and had pressed herself, hard enough against him and had known enough about life even then to realize how aroused he was and how easy and pleasurable it would be to couple there on the darkened path beyond the main thoroughfare. She was still not sure which of them had ensured that it had not happened.

  It was a memory she did not care to take out of the recesses of her brain with any great regularity.

  “It is just like you,” she said, “to have the vulgarity to remind me of that indiscretion.”

  “Is it?” he said. “Am I vulgar, ma’am? I suppose that to a bluestocking like yourself most activities that are not of the intellect appear vulgar.”

  “Touché!” she exclaimed, slapping down her napkin on the table and rising to her feet. “I shall leave you to your port, my lord.”

  “On the contrary, ma’am,” he said, getting up too and coming toward her in order to offer his arm. “We will adjourn to the drawing room in order to plan the Christmas we are going to give the children who could not possibly be of our own bodies. Do you suppose we can remain civil to each other long enough to make it happen?”

  “I always know how to be civil, my lord,” she said.

  “Except,” he said, “when you are ending a betrothal.”

  “I believe your memory is at fault, my lord,” she said. “I believe the ending of our betrothal was at least mutually agreed upon. I believe I was accused of being mercenary and conniving. Not quite the words of a man who valued his betrothal.”

  “And I was cold and tightfisted and hard-hearted,” he said. “Not quite the type of accolade a man expects of his betrothed.”

  “You were quite right,” she said. “This is a damnable situation we find ourselves in. I cannot imagine anyone in whose company I would less like to spend a few days. Even the devil himself would be preferable.” It was his nearness, the firmness of his arm muscles beneath her hand, the heat of his body, the smell of him, all so strangely familiar, that was doing it. She hated his nearness. She hated the thought that they must live in the same house for an indeterminate number of days, and sleep in the same house.

  Perhaps, she thought, one could hate so intensely only someone one had once loved with an equal intensity. It was not a comforting thought.

  “The question is,” he said, seating her in the drawing room and standing before her, his hands clasped at his back, “can we put aside this mutual antipathy for each other, my lady, in order to bring a little happiness into the lives of innocent children. I can. Can you?”

  “Yes,” she snapped at him. “Yes, I can. But we must find something a little less personal on which to converse, my lord. Shall we begin with the weather?”

  “It seems a topic on which there is much to be said at the moment,” he said, seating himself opposite her, taking a snuffbox out of his pocket, and flicking it open with his thumb in a well-remembered gesture.

  This was certainly not going to be easy.

  He stood at the window of his bedchamber, drumming his fingers on the sill and staring outward. It was as he had expected, only perhaps worse. The light of morning hurt his eyes, though the sky was still full of heavy clouds and there was not the glimmering of a sign of the sun. It was still snowing, in fact. His eyes hurt because there was nothing outside except whiteness. Nothing. Even the fence posts were laden with snow, and the branches of the trees. It was impossible to know where the lawn ended and the path began or where the road began and ended. The gate was hardly visible. It would be next to impossible to open it. At a guess he would say that at least a foot of snow had fallen during the night.

  Wonderful! All his predictions had come true. They were well and truly marooned in this house for days. For Christmas. He and Lady Carlyle and the three children. And he would not even have the dubious comfort of shutting himself in his room or in the bookless library downstairs with the few books he had brought with him and a decanter of brandy. Just last evening he had agreed to break all the rules of decency and propriety in order to allow the children to enjoy Christmas. He had not changed his mind, but he was
realizing this morning that giving three young children a Christmas was going to involve some considerable exertion on his part.

  He could not expect Lady Carlyle to put herself out. It had not escaped his notice that she had avoided answering his question about her willingness to expose her fingers and toes and nose to the cold of the outdoors. Doubtless she would remain indoors, smiling encouragement through the windows. Perhaps even that would be too far from the fire for her.

  He scowled and his fingers drummed harder. He should have let her know that he was coming down here himself. She could have stayed in London. But, damn it, that would not have been fair. It was as much her responsibility as his to arrange for the future of their orphaned nephew and nieces. More hers than his—she was a woman, after all, and children were a woman’s domain. Though he had the grace to admit—irritably—to himself that there was little justice in that argument either.

  But he wished she had stayed away or that she had given him notice of her intention to come here so that he could have stayed away. It was not a large cottage. Their bedchambers were next to each other. He turned his head to glance at the wall between his chamber and hers. He had looked at the wall several times during a restless and almost sleepless night. He had even found himself idly calculating how many feet there must be between his bed and hers.

  And he had found himself remembering unwillingly the lithe, vividly beautiful, smiling, intelligent, witty girl she had been during her first season. And his own deep infatuation with her. And hers with him. They had been betrothed after two months, even though she was from an untitled family and had almost nothing for a dowry. For a month after that they had planned and dreamed and loved—innocently. The only real embrace they had shared was that one at Vauxhall.

  He had known many restless, almost sleepless nights in those days.

  And then her brother, whose unsavory reputation he had ignored because he loved her, had started paying attention to his sister, who at the age of seventeen had not even been brought out yet. And the two of them, who had been meeting behind his back, had soon declared their intention of marrying. They had driven Ursula and him apart. They had quarreled bitterly, each defending a brother or sister that each cast off just a short while later. But not soon enough to save their own betrothal.

  The viscount drummed his fingers faster yet. He had had a narrow escape. Before he had been able to gather together the shreds of his pride in order to go to her and apologize and patch things up, she had announced her betrothal to Carlyle and had married him almost immediately after. Such had been the depth of her feelings for him.

  He turned resolutely from the window and crossed the room to the door. He did not normally go without breakfast, but he did not feel like any this morning. He did not feel like being sociable or a prey to her sharp tongue. Not that she was likely to be up yet. Most ladies of his acquaintance, and even more so those who were not ladies, did not emerge from their boudoirs until close to noon. But he was not willing to take the risk. He turned his steps in the direction of the nursery. At least taking the children outside would give him a chance to escape from her altogether for a few hours.

  He turned the handle of the door quietly and opened the door slowly. Perhaps even the children were not up yet. But they were, and predictably they were clustered in front of the window with their nurse. No—their nurse was not slender. Neither did she have red hair.

  Damnation! His mind reached for—and found—a few far more satisfactory words with which to describe his feelings as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. The children’s nurse was curtsying deeply somewhere off to his right. He turned his head and nodded to her before giving his attention to the group by the window.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning, Uncle.”

  A frosty inclination of a proud head.

  Big brown eyes staring silently upward from beneath soft brown curls.

  The way I spent my Christmas, he thought ruefully, returning the greetings and strolling across the room toward them.

  “An empty, white world,” he said, looking out over their heads. “I believe your snow snakes have been buried, Caroline.”

  She shook her head and pointed. When he looked down, he could see that sure enough, there were snakes—far longer ones—blowing across the top of the snow cover.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “They are going to the ice palace,” the child said. “Where the prince lives.”

  “I see. They are going to tell him so that he can go and rescue the princess,” he said. He had almost forgotten the magic wonderland of a child’s imagination, the world in which anything could be something else and nothing was impossible. He felt a sudden and quite unexpected wave of nostalgia.

  “Patricia is going to paint, sir,” Rupert said. “She is a good painter. I am going to practice my penmanship. I make too many blots when I write and my letters are different sizes.”

  “But he tries, Uncle,” Patricia said. “And he is getting better.”

  The viscount looked down at them, at the brave little eight-year-old boy who was trying valiantly to be a man and to ignore the snow beyond the window, and at the loyal little seven-year-old redhead, who would defend her brother in any way she could from an uncle’s possible wrath over a blot or a malformed letter.

  Something that felt very like his heart turned inside him.

  His eyes met Lady Carlyle’s and held them. She looked steadily back.

  “I left it for you,” she said. “Men are generally the rule-makers.”

  He looked down at the upturned faces of his nephew and nieces, faces without any hope, but with only a quiet acceptance of the way things were and must be.

  He clasped his hands at his back. “Do painting and penmanship sound more inviting than going outside into the snow to play and build snowmen and make snow angels and throw snowballs?” he asked. “If they do, we will forget about going outside. But I for one will be sorry.”

  The little one gazed up at him without a noticeable change of expression. An almost painful hope came alive in the eyes of the other two.

  “My lord—” The nurse sounded almost panic-stricken.

  He turned to look at her, his eyebrows raised. He shamelessly used his haughtiest, most aristocratic manner. “Yes, Mrs. Chambers?”

  “My lord,” she said. “The vicar. The Misses Hickman-Pugh. There would be a scandal.”

  He would have verbally consigned the vicar and the Misses Hickman-Pugh, whoever they were, to the devil, but he remembered the presence of the children and the two reprimands for his language he had received the evening before. “We will use the back garden so that no one will see and be scandalized, Mrs. Chambers,” he said. “If, that is”—he turned back to the children—“anyone wishes to accompany me outside. If not, I shall stay inside too. It is no fun playing in the snow alone.”

  “I’ll come, sir,” Rupert said hastily. “If it is not improper and disrespectful to Mama and Papa.”

  “It is not, sweetheart,” Lady Carlyle said quietly.

  Lord Morsey’s eyes flew to hers. She had called him that—twice—during the month of their betrothal. But she was smiling down at their nephew, something like tenderness in her eyes.

  “I’ll come too.” Hope sounded almost like agony in Patricia’s voice. “May we, Nurse? Please, please?”

  “With respect to Mrs. Chambers, Patricia,” Lady Carlyle said firmly, “it must be said that your uncle Timothy now stands in place of your papa, since your papa is—has passed on. If Uncle Timothy says you may play outside in the snow, then you may do so.”

  “Oh,” Patricia said, her eyes widening with longing.

  “I am going to make a snowman eight feet tall,” Rupert cried, his eyes beginning to sparkle, his voice sounding like an exuberant child’s. “And six feet broad.”

  Someone was patting one leg of the viscount’s pantaloons, just above the knee. Big brown eyes were gazing up at him. “Are you
our Uncle Timothy?” Caroline asked.

  “The one and only.” He smiled at her. “And this is your Aunt Ursula.” He realized that the children had not even known their names. He should not have turned his back completely on Marjorie, he realized. He should have tolerated her, and the intolerable Parr, if only for the sake of the children. Children needed uncles and aunts. And cousins. He thought briefly of the four cousins—two boys and two girls—he and Ursula might have been able to present them with by now.

  “Nurse will bundle you all up warmly,” he said. “We will meet downstairs in ten minutes’ time. Are you coming too, Caroline?”

  She nodded. Her face was still tilted up sharply to him. How could any parents with three such children look for treasure elsewhere? he wondered, setting a hand lightly on her soft curls.

  “Can Aunt Ursula come too?” she asked him.

  “I believe your aunt would prefer the comfort of the indoors,” he said. “Grown ladies usually do.”

  “What?” He heard the indignation in Lady Carlyle’s voice before he looked up to see her nostrils flaring, her eyes flashing, and her hair glowing—he could remember teasing her that her hair seemed to take on more vivid color when she was angry about something. “I have never heard anything more ridiculous in my life. I am to be denied the fun of romping outdoors after a rare snowstorm merely because I am a grown lady and ladies usually are milksops? This one is not, my lord.” She turned in the direction of the door. “I shall see you all downstairs, suitably attired for the outdoors, in nine minutes.” The door closed none too gently behind her.

  “I think Aunt Ursula wants to go out to play,” Caroline whispered.

  The other two children whooped and squealed and snorted with glee at the idea of a grown lady wanting to go out to play, and Caroline giggled at the reaction her words had provoked. It was the first time the three of them had really looked or sounded like children since his arrival, Viscount Morsey thought.