Noel's Wish

by Donna Lea Simpson

  Frowning, he almost decided to leave and send word to her through Stoddart that he had changed his mind and was off to bed. He was intrigued beyond reason by the quicksilver changes of Lady Ann’s personality, but he did not want to dive beneath the surface too deeply, for fear he would never come up. He preferred his affairs to be light and frothy and disengaged himself the moment the woman threatened, as Lydia had, to become clingy or demanding. With Lady Ann he was afraid he would lose the will to detach himself. He turned to exit.

  Then he heard her sigh.

  It was a ghost-sound that echoed in the still chamber. But there was so much of heartbreak in the sound, so much of unfulfilled longing, and sadness, and a deep, overwhelming desolation, that he was drawn against his own inclination into the room, toward the fire. What did he care if Lady Ice was sad? What did it matter to him if she had suffered heartbreak in her lifetime?

  But still, he moved toward her like a clockwork automaton on its well-oiled track.

  “This is one of the rooms Celia decorated in the years we were married, before she died.” Of all the things to say, why did he say that?

  Lady Ann started and turned but did not get up. Her expression was solemn.

  “I would have guessed that, it is so lovely. Did she also do my room, and Mossy’s nursery?”

  Ruston nodded and strolled around, touching some of the brass pieces Celia had collected especially for the gold saloon.

  “She had exquisite taste,” Lady Ann said, her quiet voice soothing, her melancholy tone sweet in its sadness. “You must miss her.”

  “It has been many years. To be honest, I think I have forgotten a lot about her. There is a painting on the landing that is quite a good likeness, but I cannot animate it with her expression, nor hear her voice anymore. I am often sad about that.” His words were an expression of thoughts and feelings he had not even acknowledged before.

  “It is natural, I think, to lose those things. It does not mean you are forgetting her.”

  Ruston came to a halt in front of her. Her face, as she gazed down at her entwined hands, was shadowed.

  “Doesn’t it? I think it does. I have forgotten a lot of things, important things, but still remember nonsense, like the way she would bite her nails when she was nervous, or how if she was tired she would become sulky, like a particularly irritating child. I hated that about her. And yet it is what I remember.”

  Lady Ann was silent. Ruston knelt and threw a piece of wood on the fire. He looked up into her face and read the guilt in her eyes, the haunted shadows in the violet depths. How was it that he could read her sometimes, when he never could understand Celia? Or was he only imagining things?

  “What about you? What do you remember about your husband?”

  Her eyes widened and she half shook her head. Lips compressed, she sat up straight. “I think I shall go up to bed now, if you don’t mind.”

  He put one hand on her arm, not clutching it but just to make her pause. “What is it? What are you remembering?”

  What could she tell him, that she remembered a year of nightly torture? That she learned to loathe Reggie for his hateful coldness and insensitivity to her pain? And that guilt overwhelmed her that she was so glad when he died she had not even worn mourning. A tear welled in her eye, but she held it back. It had been many years now since she had cried and she had no intention of starting again.

  “Oh, the usual things, I suppose. As you said, sometimes it is easier to remember the . . . the little faults and flaws.”

  “And what were those?” Ruston took the chair across from her as a footman entered the saloon with the coffee tray. Silently he set it down on a nearby table and glided from the room.

  What could she say, Ann wondered, without revealing too much? It was an old, private pain, one that she had shared with no one, not even her sisters, nor even her mother in the brief time she was alive after Ann’s marriage. “I remember how I hated that he never asked my opinion. He would sit at the end of the dinner table, even when we were alone, and talk. Talk, talk, talk! Never once would he say, ‘What do you think, Ann?’ ‘What is your opinion, Ann?’ He . . .”

  Ann stopped.

  Ruston poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Go on.”

  Clutching the cup between her cold hands, feeling the steam bathe her face in warmth, she gazed into the fire, the new wood starting to catch and dance with flames.

  “I did not exist as a person with feelings and thoughts to Reggie. He bought me much as one would acquire a broodmare. He wanted to get an heir on me, and for that one does not need a woman, just a vessel.”

  A sickening taste flooded Ruston’s mouth as he considered Ann’s words. There was no mistaking the pain and bitterness of her tone. Reggie Beecham-Brooke had been dead three years, and yet she still carried this burden of anger. He had always known there were bad marriages out there—had heard friends complain about their own—but if she was being honest, and he thought she was, Lady Ann’s words hinted at an empty life and a bitter legacy of anger.

  “I should not have said that,” Ann said, perilously close to tears. “I have told no one that in all the years . . .” She broke off and sipped her coffee.

  “He has been dead many years,” Ruston said, his voice as gentle as he could make it.

  But she stiffened. “And so I should just forget seven years of pain . . . just forget it even happened and blithely move on?”

  “I did not say that.” But it had been his intention. It was the easy advice to give, the course he would advise anyone to take after a painful incident. But this was not an incident, this was her life for seven long years. She must have been just out of the schoolroom when Beecham-Brooke wed her. Ruston had met the dry stick a few times in London and had disliked him on sight. What would it be like to be tied to him so intimately?

  It had been widely known that he had a mistress in his keeping, some other man’s castoff wife, and a couple of bastards. Rumor had circulated that Beecham-Brooke was not his mistress’s only entertainment. When he was gone, it was said that the lady was not too particular about who slept in her bed. Many jokes had been made about the oldest boy’s bright, copper-penny hair.

  Had Ann loved him at first, or had she been one of those frightened girls he had seen on the marriage mart who were coerced into marriage with an older man? From her words it would seem she was the latter. For the first time he thought about her reaction to his kiss. She had stiffened, and when he stepped away from her there was such a confusion of reactions on her face he could not pick out one.

  Was she frigid, or just . . . just what?

  He glanced over at her as he took his own cup of coffee and leaned back in his chair. She was lost in thought, staring into the fire, the bright flickering glow lighting her amethyst eyes with porphyrian fire. Lovely she was, but hurt somewhere deep inside, shattered in the very depths of her soul. Ruston could not believe he was having these thoughts, these musings, about a woman, when he had never even tried in the past to consider a woman’s life, what it must be like to be constrained to marry whether one’s inclination were to wed or not.

  The lot of unmarried women was not enviable. Unmarried women were ape-leaders, figures of ridicule and pity, and young girls did as their parents commanded. But to marry where one could not love, or even like!

  Not his Mossy. Ruston swore that when the time came for her come-out, he would make it clear to her that she was to choose as husband the man who loved her best . . . unless that man was a cad, of course. He reserved a father’s right to refuse permission if the man was a bounder.

  “I did not realize, when I was seventeen and betrothed to Reggie, that my father had chosen for my husband a man just like himself, just as cold, just as unapproachable.” Lady Ann still stared into the fire, and seemed to be talking as much to herself as to him. “Why, I wonder? Because he loved me or because he didn’t love me? I will never know.”

  “I cannot imagine a father not wanting what was
best for his daughter.”

  “Ah, but you love Mossy.”

  “I do. She was the best thing to come out of a marriage that was essentially a friendship.”

  “You love Mossy, but not enough to stay here, to stay with her.”

  Stung by her attack, he retorted, “I have not abandoned her! I always come back. She knows I love her.”

  “How?”

  “How?” He glared at her, not believing his ears. No one had ever questioned his love for his child, and by God, they were not going to start now. “That is not in question. She knows I love her. I may travel, but when I am here we dine together, and walk together, and in the summer I am going to teach her to ride. I have promised.”

  “But in the meantime you will travel again. She told me you are already planning your next trip.”

  “She doesn’t mind. She has everything she could want here and a staff who dote on her. Celia’s parents take her for a few weeks every summer, and when I come back I have promised her a pony of her own. She is completely happy.” It was said with anger, and a touch of defiance.

  How could he be so blind? Ann wondered. She gazed at his face, ruddy from the heat of the fire. She could not forget Mossy’s voice as she told Ann that she hoped if she was good enough, and if he liked the sampler she had made for him as a gift, he would stay a little longer, or maybe even take her with him. The yearning in her young voice broke Ann’s heart, reminding her once more of the desperate need she had felt for her father’s love and acceptance.

  If she did one thing while she was here, perhaps she could convince Ruston that he was tearing his little girl apart every time he left her for foreign destinations. It was abandonment time after time after time. “She doesn’t need a pony. She doesn’t need things, she needs you! She only has one parent, and you are everything to her.”

  Ruston’s large hand tightened around the handle of the cup and Ann held her breath, expecting it to snap. From the beginning, his hands had fascinated her. Reggie’s hands had been long and narrow, aristocratic. Ruston’s were broad and big, with dark hairs on the back. He had encircled her arms with them as easily as he held a riding crop.

  “You have been here one day, my lady, and you presume to know everything there is to know about my little girl? You know nothing. You don’t even have children of your own, so who are you to judge me?”

  Ann felt her heart constrict and a pain shoot through it, a physical pain that she thought she was beyond. His angry words had pierced her like an arrow. She stood and put her cup down on the coffee tray. With a calmness she did not feel, she said, “You are right. What could a barren widow know of children? Good night, my lord.”

  Head held high, she walked from the room, through the great hall, and up the winding stairs. She paused on the landing to stare at the huge painting of Lady Celia Montrose. She felt cold and alone, but those were feelings she was used to and could live with. Much better than the initial pain his words had caused. So much better not to feel at all. After a moment she proceeded on her way, up the staircase to her bedroom, and then to bed.

  Chapter Seven

  Ruston slammed the cup down on the tray and thrust his fingers through his hair. He had reacted badly to her words and had wounded her with his stinging comment that she had no children. He could feel it in the air the moment he said it, her sudden tension, her pain. But dammit, she had no right to say such things to him! He had been well within his rights to deliver a rebuke after that unbearable bit of righteous indignation. Who was she to say what his little girl, the light of his life, was feeling?

  Unless Mossy had told her.

  He remembered the cozy scene he had witnessed, with Mossy gazing adoringly up at Lady Ann and the woman’s arms tight around his child. That was why he had interrupted; he couldn’t bear the thought that Mossy would be hurt when Lady Ann went away . . .

  When Ann went away.

  Like he went away, hurting his little girl time after time after time.

  Was Ann right? She had some experience, after all, with abandonment. Reading between the words that she spoke, he thought that perhaps she had been a lonely little girl, never sure of her father’s love. But Mossy knew he loved her, didn’t she? He told her so often enough.

  He leaped to his feet and paced in front of the fire. He had never been the introspective sort, and all of this thought in one night was making his brain ache, but he was no coward. If he was wrong, he wanted to know about it. If he was failing at some elemental part of his role in life as a father, it was best to know now, while there was time to make amends.

  His own father had always proclaimed that a man was known by his actions, not his words. Words were easy; it was harder to do the right thing day after day. Value your family, the old man had always said. Ruston sighed and sat down, staring into the fire. Value your family. When he was a boy and home from school on holidays, his father spent a good portion of every day with him, taking him on his weekly visits to the tenants, teaching him what the figures and numbers in the estate books meant, spending valuable time.

  At school he had learned that not all fathers were like his own; many sons would not be able to point their fathers out in a crowd. Some only saw the old man if they had done something unforgivably bad.

  For Ruston it was different. When he was just three, his mother had died giving birth to a little brother who lived only ten months after her. His little brother had died suddenly in the middle of a dark winter night. Little Charles, as Ruston was known by one and all when he was a child, was just four then, but still he remembered clearly his father holding him and explaining that wee Jonathan had gone to keep Mummy company because she was lonely in heaven. His father’s strong arms around him in the darkness had been an anchor in a time of shifting sands, when it seemed that anyone might just die in the night, like his mother and little brother had.

  Until the day he had gone off to school, his father had spent as much time with him as was possible, given his duties as an active member of the House of Lords, and that he was a landlord with considerable holdings. Did he measure up to the awesome strength of his father? He didn’t think he did, and that was one more reason why he spent so much time away, wandering the Continent. He didn’t think he would ever stretch to fit the old man’s enormous shadow.

  But that was no reason not to try.

  • • •

  The rain had stopped, but the morning air was frigid and crystalline. Ruston breathed deeply and waited while Mossy caught up with him.

  “And where is your kitten this morning while we are out gathering Christmas greenery?” He smiled and put out his gloved hand, enclosing his daughter’s in his own.

  “Noël is with Lady Ann.” Mossy laughed, mischievously. “Only she doesn’t know about it!”

  Ruston shot her a mock-severe look. “What are you doing to our guest? Are you playing a trick on her?”

  Elfin face a picture of innocence, Mossy said, “Oh, no! Noël is. I went to see her this morning in her room, and he followed me. He . . .” She broke into giggles and covered her mouth with one gloved hand.

  They walked across the frosted grass, the ice crystals crunching under their booted feet. Snow in the next two days after this icy frost, if local lore was true. Ruston glanced down at his daughter with affection in his brown eyes. “You might as well tell me, young lady. If that madcap little monster is planning a surprise for Lady Ann, I should know about it before she rings a peel over my head.”

  “He wiggled into a shawl that she had laid on the bed. If she picks it up . . .” She dissolved in a fit of giggles again.

  “And you never said a word to warn her, you rascal,” Ruston said, grabbing her under the arms and swinging her up onto his shoulder as they entered the home wood. “Now you scout ahead and see if you can find us some mistletoe up in the trees.”

  They walked in silence, followed at a distance by a groom with a sledge to put the evergreen boughs, holly and mistletoe on.

  “How
was she this morning?” Ruston said finally, unable to refrain from asking. He had spent a sleepless night, part of it worrying that he had been unforgivably rude to Ann when she was right all along.

  Mossy didn’t answer and he repeated the question, thinking she hadn’t heard him. When she still didn’t answer, he swung her down and knelt at her side.

  “What is it, sweetness?”

  Mossy’s expression was troubled.

  “She’s sad. Why is she sad, Daddy? When I went to see her this morning, she just looked at me, an’ I think she was going to cry, but then the maid came in an’ she had her tea. Lady Ann said she’s going this afternoon. She’s leaving.”

  Oh, God, he had chased her away with his unkindness. He gazed into his little girl’s hazel eyes, eyes that reflected the sadness she had seen in Lady Ann. He reached up and pulled her to him, holding her in his arms. “I don’t know why she’s sad, sweetness, but if I can, I’ll talk her into staying. Would you like that?”

  He released her and watched her expression.

  Her small lips pursed, she nodded slowly. “Do you like her, Daddy?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “If she stayed forever, would you stay home?”

  “What?” His shock made him abrupt.

  “If Lady Ann stayed forever and ever, would you stay here? Not travel again?”

  Her face had a pinched, unhappy look, and Ruston was stricken with guilt. Did she think he needed another reason to stay home, that she wasn’t enough? What else could she think? It was what he had taught her every time he went away, just as Lady Ann had said.

  Kneeling in front of her on the damp bed of leaves that covered the forest floor, Ruston gazed steadily into her eyes. “Sweetness, I am not going away again after Christmas. I’m going to stay here until summer, and then you and I shall go to Brighton, or maybe to Lyme Regis for the sea bathing. I’ve been spending too—”