The Virtues of Christmas

by Grace Burrowes

  “Ach, now that’s enough,” Logan said, waving a hand in the horse’s face. “Be off with you.”

  The same words Henrietta had used.

  The horse, however, kept its grip of Michael’s greatcoat. If the beast could talk, it might have said, “I weigh nearly ten times what you do, my teeth could snap your arm, and my feet smash your toes. Ignore me at your peril.”

  I’m to fetch Henrietta home to Inglemere, and to me. For ten years, Henrietta had bided in London, probably longing for her family to fetch her home, because that’s what families were supposed to do when one of their number strayed. The idea had not the solid ring of conviction, but the more delicate quality of a hope, a theory, a wish.

  Which was a damned sight more encouraging than the cold toes and insomnia Michael had to show for the past week’s wanderings.

  “Have the team put to,” Michael said, scratching the gelding’s ear. “We’re for Amblebank.”

  The horse let him go.

  “Thank God for that,” Logan said. “But you’d best change into some decent finery, my lord. The ladies are none too impressed with muddy boots.”

  “I’m not calling on a lady,” Michael said. “But you’re right. The occasion calls for finery.”

  And some reconnaissance. A comment Henrietta had made about her brothers had lodged in Michael’s memory, and the comment wanted further investigation. Henrietta’s family was merely gentry, not aristocracy, and life in the shires ran on more practical terms than in Mayfair.

  Michael dressed with care, explained the itinerary to Logan, and made only one brief stop on the way to Amblebank. Less than two hours after making the decision to go calling, he was standing in Josiah Whitlow’s study, sporting his best Bond Street tailoring and his most lordly air.

  Henrietta’s father put Michael in mind of an aging eagle, his gaze sharp, the green of his eyes fading, his demeanor brusquely—almost rudely--proper.

  “To what do I owe the honor of this call, my lord?” Whitlow asked.

  “We’re neighbors, at a distance,” Michael said. “My estate lies about five miles east of Amblebank, and I’ve had occasion to meet your daughter.”

  Whitlow stalked across the room and stood facing a portrait of a lovely young redhead. His gait was uneven, but energetic. “For ten years, I had no daughter.”

  Whose fault was that? “And now?”

  “I’ve sent her off to her brothers. She tarried here for five days, made lists for the housekeeper, the maids, the footmen, put together menus, hung blasted greenery and mistletoe from—she’s no longer here, and I doubt she will be ever again.”

  Her name is Henrietta. Henrietta Eloisa Gaye Whitlow. “If you’ve driven her from her only home permanently, then you are a judgmental old fool who deserves to die of loneliness.”

  Whitlow turned from the portrait, his magnificent scowl ruined by a suspicious glimmer in his eyes. “Do you think I haven’t died of loneliness, young man? Do you think I haven’t worried for the girl every day for the past ten years? And what business is it of yours? You seek to entice her back to wickedness, no doubt, as if coin can compensate a woman for discarding her honor.”

  Michael advanced on Whitlow. “Your oldest was born six months after your wedding vows were spoken. Your first grandchild arrived five months after his parents’ union. I stopped at the church and leafed through the registries. If I’d had the time, I’d have gathered similar information on half your neighbors. Order a tea tray, Mr. Whitlow, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a hypocrite at best, and possibly a poor father as well.”

  “You are a very presuming young man.”

  Stubbornness must be a defining trait of the Whitlows, but the Brenners had clung to life itself on the strength of sheer stubbornness.

  “I will not lie—ever again—and say that I’ve been entirely honorable where Henrietta is concerned, but I promised her I’d do what I could to atone for the wrong I’ve done. She seeks a rapprochement with her family, and I’ll see that she gets one.”

  Whitlow hobbled over to the desk and dropped into the chair behind it. “I cannot condone immorality, you fool. So she sits down to Christmas dinner with us. If she takes up with the likes of you again, then I want no more to do with her. She deserves better than you strutting young popinjays with your coin and your arrogance. If she can’t see that, I’ll not stand by and smile while she waltzes with her own ruin.”

  Michael’s father would have understood this version of love. I’ll shame you to your senses, the argument went. The difficulty was, two people could engage in a mutual contest of wills that had nothing of sense about it.

  “Henrietta never wants to see me again,” Michael said. “And from everything she’s said, she feels similarly about the popinjays, dukes, and even the king.”

  Whitlow put his head in his hands. “The king?”

  “Turned him down with a smile. Wouldn’t do more than share his theater box for any amount of money.”

  “Good God. My little hen… and the king.” Whitlow’s expression suggested he was horrified—and impressed. “She wasn’t just making talk about dukes, then?”

  “She had her choice of the lot,” Michael said. “Dukes, princes, nabobs. She never had dealings with men who were married or engaged. Not ever, and she demanded absolute fidelity from her partners for the duration of any arrangement. The titled bachelors of London will go into a collective decline at her retirement, and she gave up all that power and money just so you could behave like a stubborn ass yet again. I’ll not have it.”

  Whitlow produced a plain square of soft, white linen. “Who are you to have anything? Henrietta made choices. She was stubborn. You don’t know how stubborn. I had a match all picked out for her. A decent chap, settled, respectable. She flew into hysterics, and then she was gone.”

  Michael appropriated the chair opposite Whitlow’s desk, because the man apparently lacked the manners even to offer a guest a seat.

  “You chose one of your widowed friends, I’d guess. A man at least twice Henrietta’s age, with children not much younger than she. Her fate would have been to give up drudging for you and her brothers for the great boon of drudging for some middle-aged man and his children. What sixteen-year-old girl with any sense would be flattered by that arrangement?”

  Elsewhere in the house, a door slammed, though Whitlow didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was hard of hearing as well as of heart.

  “She was growing too rebellious,” he said. “I had to marry her off, or she’d… Sixteen isn’t too young to be engaged. I’d talked Charles into waiting until she was eighteen for the wedding, and that would have been in the agreements. Henrietta said in two years the damned man would probably have lost the last of his teeth. She cursed at me. My own daughter, cursing.”

  “And because even cursing didn’t get your attention, she ran away rather than bow to a scheme that would only make her miserable. What else was she to do?”

  Whitlow had had ten years to convince himself that he was the wronged party, and yet, Michael still saw a hint of guilt in his eyes.

  “In time, she would have been a well-fixed widow,” Whitlow said. “Many women would have envied her that fate.”

  “In twenty or thirty years? Assuming your friend and his children didn’t spend his every last groat first? You are blind, Whitlow, and Henrietta was too. She went to London, a complete innocent, a young girl who thought men were selfish, irascible, and high-handed, but not her enemies. She went into service, glad to have employment in the house of a titled family, prepared to work hard for a pittance.

  “She had no inkling that her virtue was at risk. She’d been trained to wait on the men of her family, to see to their every need, to put their welfare before her own, and by God, you trained her well. She had no grasp of her own beauty, no sense of what men might do to possess it, or how to defend herself from them. That is your fault as well, and no other’s.”

  Whitlow erupted from his chair, bracing
his hands on his desk blotter. “How dare you lecture me about the daughter I raised in this very house? How dare you presume to make excuses for a girl who knew right from wrong as clearly as I know noon from midnight?”

  “Better you should ask how dare her employer ruin her and suffer no consequences for his venery,” Michael said. “Read this.”

  He tossed Beltram’s letter onto the desk, where it sat like a glove thrown down to mark a challenge.

  “What is it?”

  “A letter to me from the man who destroyed your daughter’s good name, but not, fortunately, her self-respect. He plotted, he schemed, he lied, he charmed, and he made empty promises of matrimony. He behaved without a shred of honor and left Henrietta broken-hearted, ruined, and alone at the age of sixteen. She took the same risk her mother did—granted favors to a man promising matrimony. Her mother is enshrined over your mantel for that decision, while Henrietta was banished from your household.”

  This was not the speech Michael had rehearsed, but he should have, for the recitation nearly broke his heart, while Whitlow appeared entirely unmoved.

  “Henrietta’s failing was that she trusted the wrong man,” Michael went on more softly. “She trusted you to forgive her for straying into the wrong pair of arms, and in that, she erred. I’d guess she wrote to you, asking permission to come home, and you denied her. Read that letter, Whitlow.”

  Whitlow subsided into his chair, regarding Beltram’s letter like the foul excrescence it was.

  Michael rose and leaned across the desk. “Read it, or I’ll read it to you loudly enough that the whole house will hear me. Then I’ll read it in the tavern. I’ll read it to her brothers. I’ll read it in the church if I must, or the village square. I’ll read the damned thing in the House of Lords, and then all will know of your shame. Not hers. Beltram’s—and yours.”

  Whitlow read the letter, then sat unmoving, his gaze on the portrait over the mantel.

  “Will you apologize to your daughter, Whitlow?”

  He nodded once, a tear trickling unchecked down his weathered cheek.

  “Then I’ll wish you the joy of the season and take my leave.”

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  I don’t regret a moment of the time I spent making Henrietta Whitlow what she is today, though she’s never thanked me for the effort I put forth, peeling her grip from the dust mop and rags of propriety. When our paths cross now, she adopts an air of subtly injured dignity, though I can’t imagine she’d ever want to go back to dreams of wedded contentment, or a quiet life in the shires.

  She’s had the pleasure of my protection, after all, and I’m nearly certain when I ended our affair, her heart was broken for all time. I did her a very great favor, if so, for what woman plying the oldest trade has any need for tender sentiment or permanent attachments?

  “She has your hair, Henrietta,” Isabel said, taking a seat across the kitchen table. “I think Thad is pleased by that. Philip’s two got it as well.”

  Henrietta stroked the downy head pillowed on her shoulder. “The little ones all have Mama’s hair. I hope the children got Mama’s sweet nature too.”

  Isabel searched through a bowl of whole cloves. “You have a sweet nature.”

  “You’re being kind.” Both brothers, and their wives, and even Alexander and Dicken were being kind, treating Henrietta with the unfailing cheer of those on nursing duty in a sickroom. She was sick—at heart—but her family need not know that.

  “I’m being honest,” Isabel said, jabbing a clove into an orange. “If you’d been less sweet, the squire would never have been so daft as to think he could marry you off to Charles Sampson. Those oldest three sons of his have gambled away half his fortune, and the second Mrs. Sampson is rarely out of childbed.”

  The kitchen was perfumed with cloves and oranges, and the baby was a warm bundle of joy in Henrietta’s arms. Isabel’s words were an odd sort of comfort too.

  Henrietta had been sweet, far too sweet. “I didn’t know Mr. Sampson had remarried.”

  “Mrs. Sampson got a procession of runny noses and lazy housemaids. You got London and the company of dukes, from what I hear.”

  Isabel selected another clove from the dish, her focus overly intent.

  “Only two dukes, Isabel, and they’re much like any other man. One of them snored a bit and had a cold nose, which he delighted in nuzzling against my neck. The other fretted endlessly over his three sisters and had a fondness for chocolate.”

  Isabel popped the clove into her mouth. “No orgies, then?”

  “Not a one. I would have sent any man who suggested such foolishness on his way with a flea in his ear.”

  “And they would have departed on your whim,” Isabel said. “You’re not sweet, biddable Hen anymore. Has that child gone to sleep?”

  A quiet slurping near Henrietta’s ear suggested otherwise. “Not quite. How many cloves will you stick into that poor orange?”

  The hapless fruit resembled a beribboned mace from days of old. Isabel set it aside and plucked another orange from a bowl on the table and measured off a length of red ribbon.

  “So what now, Hen? You’ve made your fortune, turned your back on Sodom, and here you are. The whole shire knows you bided with the squire for most of this week, and we’ll drag you to services on Sunday if you like. If you were here to make a point, you’ve made it.”

  “I am here to enjoy my family’s company over the holidays,” Henrietta said, though also, apparently, to make a point. “Attending services needn’t be part of the bargain. Papa allowed me to bide with him, but he might as well have been billeting a French prisoner of war for all the hospitality he extended.”

  The squire had barely spoken to her, had barely acknowledged her at meals. Henrietta had been tolerated under her father’s roof because to toss her out would have created more scandal than to allow her a few days at her childhood home.

  And that tolerance had been more hurtful than all his years of distance, oddly enough.

  Isabel cut the red ribbon with a single snip of the shears. “Do you believe that if you attend services, then you can’t go back to your old life? Is waking up in the middle of the night to a duke’s cold nose pressed to your neck that thrilling? I can suggest a few dogs who’d be as obliging, though they might not pay you in any coin but loyalty and devotion.”

  The baby sighed, and no exhalation was ever softer than a baby’s sigh.

  “She might be falling asleep now,” Henrietta said.

  “Good. I suspect the poor thing is getting ready to present us with a few teeth, and that’s always an occasion for misery.”

  Isabel wrapped the ribbon about the orange with an expert flip and a twist, such that the fruit could be tied to any handy rafter or curtain rod. Henrietta had dealt with her partners in much the same way.

  Flattery, affection, an interest in the man’s welfare, a semblance of friendship always bounded by pragmatism. When the gentleman grew too demanding or restless, a subtle cooling from Henrietta was all it took to nudge him out the door and add another diamond necklace to her collection.

  The oranges Isabel decorated would shrivel and turn brown, then be tossed to the hogs, no matter how pleasing their fragrance now.

  “I don’t want to go back to what I was,” Henrietta said, “but I’m not sure in what direction I should move next.”

  Michael Brenner’s image came to mind as Henrietta had last seen him. He’d followed her out to the drive at Inglemere, bowed over her hand in parting, and remained bare-headed at the foot of his front steps, his hair whipping in the winter breeze as the coach had taken off down the drive.

  He’d looked lonely. Papa had looked lonely when Henrietta had packed up her coach and taken herself to Thad’s house. Her next stop would be Philip’s, after Christmas, but then…

  Would Michael still be at Inglemere when the new year came?

  “Has Thad ever broken your heart?” Henrietta asked.
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br />   Visiting with Isabel wasn’t so different from visiting with other courtesans. Henrietta had somehow concluded that decent women sat about discussing the weather or recipes for tisanes rather than men and teething babies.

  Courtesans had all too many babies, and all too many men.

  “He came close,” Isabel said, impaling the second orange with its first clove. “The year after we were married, I thought I was carrying, though it came to nothing, and that unnerved him. He got a bit too close to Penelope Dortmund, who’d been widowed the year before. She had the knack of grieving ever so prettily.”

  Henrietta had not been invited to her younger brother’s wedding or any of the christenings. “What happened?”

  Isabel jabbed three more cloves into the orange. “I saw them in the livery, literally rolling in the hay, though Thad hadn’t got under her skirts yet. When he came home, I plucked a bit of hay from his hair and told him only a very foolish man would sleep beside one woman while playing her false with another. He barely tipped his hat to the widow after that.”

  “You forgave him?”

  Isabel set the orange aside and took another from the bowl, a perfectly ripe fruit. She tore a section of peel off, then another.

  “Have you seen Izzy’s cradle, Henrietta?”

  “It’s gorgeous.” The cradle was made of polished oak—a heavy, durable wood that wasn’t easy to work with. The oak was carved with flowers, a rabbit, a kitten, and the words Mama and Papa Will Always Love You.

  Henrietta couldn’t stand to touch it. Another one very much like it lay in the squire’s attics.

  “Thad made that cradle. Stayed up late, worked on Sundays. He said it wasn’t labor, it was love for the child I carried that sent him out to his woodshop. He built this house for us. He puts food on my table and coal in my hearth. He’s not perfect, but neither am I. The widow wanted a stolen moment, but Thad asked me for my entire future. For better or for worse means for better or for worse.”