by Mary Balogh
Jane nodded.
“Jeffrey will be close by,” her mother said. “And the nurse will take care of you and keep you safe. Mama will not be far away. I will see you in the morning. Good night, sweetheart.”
Large hazel eyes gazed back at her. She bent and kissed her daughter before turning reluctantly to the door.
“Mama,” Jane said, “you forgot Pamela.”
“And so I did,” she said, turning back to kiss the doll on one cracked cheek. “Good night, Pamela.”
The Countess of Wyndham closed the door softly behind her and felt her spirits drop to lodge very firmly in the soles of her slippers. But then they had been there ever since she had opened his letter one month ago, her stomach fluttering as it always did on the rare occasions when she saw his bold handwriting on the outside of a letter. He was inviting Jeffrey to spend Christmas at Wyndham Park. Though it was not really an invitation. It was an imperious summons. And it applied only to Jeffrey. She had considered defying him. She could not do without her son at Christmas of all times. But she had known such defiance would be useless.
And so she had devised a different defiance. Perhaps she could manage without Jeffrey for Christmas. She would be able to manage by pretending that it was not Christmas at all, by living for the day of his return. But Jane could not manage without her brother—or without Christmas. If Jeffrey must go to Wyndham, then Jane would go too. And if Jane was going, then of course her mother would have to go with her.
It was a decision that had terrified her, though she had not wavered from it in the days and weeks since. He had never seen Jane, never inquired after her, never sent her gifts. Well, now Jane would be beneath his roof. Perhaps he would contrive still not to see her, but beneath his roof she would remain for as long as Jeffrey stayed there. They were brother and sister and there was a close bond of affection between them.
She had not seen him in over three years, the countess thought as she made her way from the nursery wing to the apartments that had been allotted her—her old rooms beside his. She wondered briefly if he would have her removed to a more distant part of the house when he realized that she had been put there.
He had changed since she last saw him. Oh, he was as handsome and as elegant as he had ever been. More so, perhaps. She had never seen him dressed in black evening clothes, as he had been tonight. They suited his dark good looks and lean physique to perfection, she was forced to admit. But his face was harsher, more cynical than it had used to be, his blue eyes harder, flatter.
She had hated him with a new intensity as she had watched him surrounded by all the members of his extended family, by all the friends who had once been hers too. She had hated him for the cool haughtiness of his reception of Jeffrey, for his total ignoring of Jane. She had hated the way he had kept her waiting, the way his eyes had raked over her, the way he had called her my lady, the way he had offered her a glass from the wassail bowl, just as if she were one of his precious carolers.
She was glad—oh, how glad she was!—that the bowl had been more than half empty. Only now did she consider the humiliation she would have felt if she had been unable after all to hoist it and chuck its contents in his face.
She smiled. And then she laughed. She entered her bedchamber and stood with her back to the door, unable to control her laughter. She held her nose and tried to suppress the sounds. One never knew when someone might be listening. And sound carried in this house. While eating her supper in the nursery with the children, she had been able to listen to the music of the carolers two stories below.
Oh, it was Christmas, she thought, sobering and setting her head back against the door. She closed her eyes. The last three Christmases had been bad enough, but this one was going to be intolerable. It was Christmas, yet for her and for her children there would be no peace or goodwill. No tidings of comfort or of joy.
He had asked the question with great reluctance only because he was afraid he might know the answer. He should have given more specific instructions, he thought when it was too late. But at the time he had been wet and uncomfortable and humiliated and furious. He had been fighting an inward battle for dignity and control.
The evening festivities went on forever, or so it seemed, first in the hall and later in the greater comfort of the drawing room. Everyone appeared to be in merry mood. Partly, he guessed, they were trying to comfort him, or trying to cover their own embarrassment at having been witnesses to that encounter between him and his estranged wife. No one mentioned her. And no one mentioned Jeffrey either, since doing so would inevitably lead to mention of her. Instead, everyone was determinedly merry.
And so it was not until very late, after midnight, as he followed the last of his guests upstairs to bed that he asked the question of his butler. He might have spared himself the breath. The answer was the one he fully expected.
“Her ladyship is in her own apartments, my lord,” Watkins said, a look of momentary surprise on his face. Perhaps it had not struck either him or the housekeeper as possible that he would not want her there in apartments that adjoined his own.
“Thank you, Watkins,” his lordship said. “Good night.”
He never had found the key to the door between their dressing rooms. It had been a joke between them in the years before they were estranged that there was no key, that neither could lock the other out. He had been through that door more times than he could count . . .
He felt something like fury now as he entered his dressing room, where his valet waited, and glanced toward the door, almost as if he expected it to burst open at any moment. Could she not have demanded to be lodged somewhere else in the house? Or had she made the assumption that because they were still legally married she had every right to be treated in this house with the deference due to his countess? He wondered if the child was with her or if she had left it in the nursery. It! The child was a girl. Jane. He knew that much. Nothing else. He knew nothing else about her and fully intended to keep it that way.
He lay down in his darkened bedchamber after he had dismissed his valet for the night. He had had a busy day, entertaining his guests—pleasure, he found, was often more wearying than business—and a long day. Tomorrow would be worse. And after that there would be Christmas Day. He needed a good night’s sleep. But sleep eluded him, Totally.
He threw back the covers impatiently at last and walked on bare feet through to his dressing room. Without benefit of light he found and donned his brocaded dressing gown. He shivered. There was no fire in the dressing room. He glanced to where he knew, even without the benefit of sight, that offending door stood shut but unlocked. The door that had been keeping him awake. Almost as if it acted of its own volition, his hand reached out and turned the handle slowly, so as to make no noise. Her dressing room was in darkness, but there was a thin thread of light beneath the door opposite.
Either she slept with a candle burning or with a bright fire burning, or else she was not in bed at all.
He stood for long moments in the doorway between their dressing rooms before striding across hers and opening the other door. He made no attempt at stealth this time.
The bed was unmade. She had obviously been lying down on it. But she was standing now beside it, her eyes on the door as he came through it. She must have heard him opening the first door. She was wearing a long white nightgown, which covered her from neck to wrists to ankles. But it was not the nightgown he noticed first. She had grown her hair, he thought. She had always worn it fashionably short. Now it reached halfway down her back, heavy and shining in the candlelight, and dark auburn in color.
There was no sign of the child in the bed behind her.
He closed the door, looking at her as he did so. She was smaller than he remembered, more slender, more fragile looking. More beautiful. He felt a return of the cold fury he had felt on his first sight of her earlier.
“On whose authority did you bring yourself to Wyndham Park, my lady?” he asked her.
“You think
to tongue-tie me with such a question,” she said quite calmly after a few moments of silence. “There can be only one answer. A good wife recognizes the authority of only one person in her life—of only one man. She may not lift a finger except with the permission of her husband, of her lord and master. I believe it has been long established between us, John, that I am not a good wife and that I do not recognize your authority over me. You forfeited my respect a long time ago.”
He felt a wave of hatred that shook him with its intensity. He thought it had muted to mere dislike. But his feelings had never been tested. He had not seen her for longer than three years, not since he had banished her to one of his smaller homes.
“I believe,” he said, “that one of the conditions for my further support of you, ma’am, was that you remain at Lanting for the rest of your life.”
“Well, then,” she said, “you still have power over me, John. That will be a pleasant feeling for you. All men need to feel that they have power over someone, I know, preferably a woman. Why are you here? Why have you come to my room? To exercise your conjugal rights? I suppose that being in the country, hemmed in by the propriety of family and other house guests, must be a severe trial for you. You are deprived of the services of your whores and mistresses.”
They had lived together for four years without any serious quarrel. They had lived in a make-believe world of harmony and love and passion. He had not known until close to the end how barbed her tongue could be, how scornful her face. He had not known how fragile was their accord. He had done something remarkably stupid and she had retaliated by outdoing him a thousandfold. She had torn their marriage asunder and in the process had ripped into his very being, leaving wounds that were still tender to the touch, wounds that would perhaps never fully heal.
“Yes indeed,” he said. “But I believe I will wait for their superior services when I return to town rather than disappoint myself with inferior goods before then.” He could not quite believe that those words had come from his mouth, but there they were, spoken, beyond recall.
She surprised and infuriated him by laughing and looking genuinely amused. “I came, John,” she said, “because I would not be deprived of my son at Christmas and because I would not deprive my daughter of her brother.”
“You had no business,” he said, “bringing the child here, Antonia. Have you no decency?”
“Fool!” she said contemptuously. “Obviously I have not. I like to have my children close to me. I like to have them close to each other. Most indecent of me. We will not offend your sensibilities for long, my lord. As soon as you have tired of Jeffrey, I shall take them both home again to Lanting. Your duty will be done for another year or so.”
It seemed impossible that she still had the power to hurt him. But some of those inner wounds of his were opening up. “As soon as I tire of Jeffrey?” he said in little more than a whisper.
She had the grace to look slightly disconcerted.
“Jeffrey is my son,” he said, his voice still very quiet. “He is my reason for living. It has broken my heart to be without him for the past three and a half years. I have endured his absence only because he has needed his mother—even such a mother—during those years.”
Her head went back almost as if she had been struck on the chin.
He wanted to hurt her because she had hurt him. He had been toying with an idea for a long time, though he had not intended to implement it just yet. But now it became a weapon more than an idea and he hurled it at her without stopping to consider that it was late at night, that they were both tired, that seeing each other again had frayed both their nerves.
“You may stay,” he said, “until the day after New Year’s Day. You and the child, provided you keep her out of my sight. In company I will even give you the deference due my countess. Then you will return to Lanting, Antonia, you and the child. Jeffrey will stay here. It is time he was with his father and learned about his future inheritance. It is time he had a tutor rather than a governess.”
He felt a moment’s pang of regret when she paled noticeably even in the candlelight and swayed on her feet. Regret and triumph.
“No.” He saw her lips form the word though he scarcely heard it. “No. No, John. No. No.” She could seem to say only the one word over and over again. He could see that he had wounded her far more deeply than he had expected.
“It is my turn,” he said, the triumph of his words feeling remarkably hollow.
They had been standing well apart, she beside the bed, he just inside the door. But she came rushing toward him now and grabbed the silk lapels of his dressing gown. “No,” she said. “He is only six, John. He is a baby. He still needs me. Oh please, please. You cannot do this.”
“Cannot, my lady?” She had backed him against the door. Her body was pressed against his from bosom to knees. He wondered if she realized it. There was a familiar smell, a soap fragrance he had not smelled in three years.
“You are doing it to punish me,” she said. “Oh, cruel, cruel. My children are all I have to live for. You must not take them from me. Oh, you used not to be cruel, John. Don’t take them from me.”
“Them?” he said. “Them, my lady? I have one child, a son. He will remain here with me. You may keep your daughter.”
“John.” She was gasping, as if there was not enough air in the room. “John.” Her face was in shadow, but he could see the unnatural brightness of her eyes.
Triumph was an evil thing, more like a knife twisting in his stomach than the joy he might have expected. He had her where he wanted her—at last. She had looked at him only with scornful dignity and the peculiar half smile that was new to her when he had pronounced the sentence of banishment on her. And this evening she had dashed the contents of the wassail bowl in his face for all his family and friends to see.
He did something very stupid. Incredibly stupid. He spread one hand over the back of her head and set the other beneath her chin. And he kissed her—open-mouthed, angry, frustrated, upset, hungry. Ravenous. He thrust his tongue hard and deep into her mouth. She sucked on it so that he moaned. Her arms, he realized, had come tightly about his waist.
He lifted his head and looked down at her. His thoughts were paralyzed. He did not know what to say.
“John,” she whispered, “you were once kind. You once loved me, or so I thought. I loved you. Please not yet. Give me another year or two with him. Perhaps when he is eight—or ten. Please. In memory of the tenderness there once was between us. In memory of the day he was born.”
Contrary to custom, and to the eternal shook of physician and midwife, he had witnessed the birth of his son and the agony of his wife. He remembered that agony now and the discomfort she had suffered during the last few months of her confinement. She had borne his son in pain. The intensity of his love for her on that day had been an agony of its own.
“I can see that you remember,” she said. “John, give me one more year. One more? Please? What can I do to persuade you?”
Those last words were a mistake. He had felt himself weakening. “You would buy a year with our son,” he said, looking down into her eyes, “with your body?”
She did not hesitate. “Yes,” she said.
“My son,” he said, “is not for sale, my lady.”
Her arms fell away from him and she took a step back. The look of panic and pleading had gone from her face. She stared at him, chin up, expression unreadable. He turned without a word, opened the door, and closed it behind him after stepping into her dressing room. His hand, he realized, withdrawing it from the door handle, was shaking.
It was snowing. Thick flakes were falling, almost obscuring the view from her window. It must have snowed through most of the night. Already a thick blanket of white made it impossible to know where lawns and flower beds ended and where paths or driveway began. Tree branches, bare and brown just yesterday, were loaded with snow.
Of course it had snowed through the night. It was the imminence of the snow that
had persuaded them to push on after dark last evening. They had known that they might have been marooned at some country inn this morning if they had stopped. And all through an almost sleepless night she had seen the darkness almost as bright as daylight beyond her window.
It was a magical sight. It was a rare treat to have snow for Christmas and such fresh and such thick snow. The children would be ecstatic, and some of the adults too. There would be trudges and games in the snow. There would be sleigh rides. And the greenery would be gathered in the snow. It was traditional at Wycherly that the greenery with which the house was to be decorated was gathered on the morning of Christmas Eve by everyone who was fit to step outdoors. And everyone decorated during the afternoon. It was rather late to decorate, perhaps, but Christmas always came suddenly and with a burst of glory to Wycherly. It started with the carolers and the wassail bowl on the evening before Christmas Eve . . .
She rested her forehead against the glass of the window and closed her eyes. She felt physically sick. She had been unwilling to part with Jeffrey for the one week of Christmas and so had defied John and come with him. She and Jane. And now, as a punishment, Jeffrey was going to be taken from her forever. She was sure it was punishment—for coming and for the childish gesture of contempt she had made with the wassail bowl. He had not said anything in his letter summoning Jeffrey about not sending him back again after Christmas.
There was a buzzing in her ears. She thought she might faint.
I have one child, a son.
He had not believed her, then. She had always known it, of course. He had not acknowledged Jane’s birth. He had never made mention of her in his infrequent letters. And he had never revoked the banishment. But hearing him speak those words last night had been a shock anyway. I have one child . . . You may keep your daughter.
It was Christmas, she thought, lifting her forehead away from the glass and turning toward her dressing room. For the children’s sake she must silence the terrible panic she was feeling. She could imagine the excitement that must be reigning in the nursery as the children realized what day it was and noticed what was beyond the windows. She must make sure that Jeffrey and Jane were part of that excitement.
