Christmas Roses: Love Blooms in Winter

by Putney, Mary Jo

  A little after Christmas. There had been time, then. She should have found it. He had no reason to hope. Jonathan sighed and offered a polite bow. "Then we can all go to our beds without fear of waking up in flames. I'll leave you to your tasks, Diana. Good night."

  * * *

  Once the door closed behind this cold stranger, the tears flowed, accompanied by great wrenching sobs. Diana curled up on the window seat, buried her face in a pillow, and cried like the child she had once been. For years, she'd harbored just the tiniest sliver of hope… But that hope was smashed now. Jonathan didn't love her, had probably never loved her. Somehow, she had to pretend it didn't matter.

  Her mother had to plan the Christmas menu without her help, after all.

  By the next morning Diana had recovered from her momentary lapse of self-pity, and no trace of last night's tears remained. Since it was the day before Christmas, she defiantly decided the occasion warranted her first break from full mourning, and she donned a lavender percale gown that pleated gracefully in back. Although it was a simple morning gown, the velvet-ribboned sleeves and shoulder ruffles made her feel feminine and sophisticated.

  She crimped the hair about her face so it curled attractively for a change. Let Jonathan see what he had given up when he had chosen life as a soldier over her.

  She was late coming down, but Charles was later. There was no sign of her brother as Diana joined her mother and sister in the dining room. Jonathan, however, had apparently overcome last night's excesses and sat sipping coffee at one end of the table. Diana noticed his untouched plate in passing, but thought nothing of it until she sat down with her own breakfast of muffins, ham, and soft-boiled egg. The minute she held her egg cup with one hand and lifted her knife to crack her egg shell with the other, she understood Jonathan's dilemma.

  "Good morning, Diana," said her mother. "Will you be certain Cook doesn't double up the spices in the pudding this morning? I want to freshen the linens in the guest rooms before everyone arrives."

  Without stopping for her daughter's agreement, Mrs. Carrington smiled at their single guest. "I hope you slept well last night, Jonathan. Your appetite didn't used to be so poor."

  "I've learned to live without, Mrs. Carrington. It will take some time to develop the habit of eating well again." Jonathan looked up at Diana's entrance, and in the spirit of Christmas, offered a tentative smile in greeting.

  Diana buttered her muffin, then set half on his plate. "Then you should begin breaking bad habits now. That dreadful brew will ruin your digestion, else-wise."

  Jonathan's smile grew as he accepted her muffin. "You always did have a way with words, Diana," he murmured before biting hungrily into the muffin he could not have managed to butter with one hand.

  "I should rather like to be thought of as a person who acts instead of talks," she responded tartly, breaking open her egg and neatly scooping the contents onto his plate, mashing it so he could use a fork to eat it instead of chasing the egg cup about the table. "Words aren't very reliable."

  "It is common knowledge that actions speak louder than words," Jonathan agreed. The egg was delicious, but he couldn't show his gratitude while she poked at still festering wounds. Diana was never one to carry out conversations on a single level. She was baiting him, and he didn't like it. He didn't think he would like being treated as an invalid, either, but Diana was somehow making it very easy to accept his limitations.

  Perhaps that was because she thought of him more as a brother than a lover, or even a rejected lover. In all these years of puzzling over her actions, he had never once considered that possibility, and it was a very likely one. They had grown up together. Just because he had felt their relationship had been a special one did not mean she thought of him as more than her brother's friend. The likelihood depressed him even further, and he couldn't bring himself to say thank you when she matter-of-factly placed the cut-up sections of ham on his plate.

  A startling bellow interrupted from above stairs. "By the devil, I'll have you martyred and hung upon the cross if you're not out of here at once!"

  "Charles!" Scandalized, Mrs. Carrington hastily pushed away from the table and hurried to chastise her eldest and to assess the twins' damage.

  Charles didn't wait for help to arrive. He appeared in the upper hall still in shirt sleeves and stockings, one guilty twin caught by the collar in each hand. Seeing his audience streaming from the dining room below, he shook the rascals and held them up for all to see.

  "They're too blood—" he cut his curse off short and rephrased the oath—"too young for catechism class! They've made the Last Supper out of my last bottle of wine. Where the h—" Again, he stopped to rephrase. "Where is their d— " Giving up in disgust, he released his brothers. "The army is easier. Where's their nanny? I can't dress with this mess stinking up the room."

  Jonathan smothered a grin, but Diana's muffled giggles made it difficult to keep a straight face. The twins looked decidedly green around the edges as they ran to their mother for comfort.

  "Don't worry, Charles," Diana called out sweetly. "The maids haven't forgotten how to take care of drunken little boys. I'll send someone straight up."

  Charles glared down at her. "See if I do you any more favors, Miss Jane."

  "And when have you ever done me any?" she demanded, irked that he had used the private name only Jonathan should have known. She turned but Jonathan was leaning against the door jamb, eating his toast and watching the entertainment.

  From his lofty perch, Charles glared down at his friend. "Drummond, we're going after the yule log just as soon as I break my fast. No excuses." He stalked back up the stairs.

  Puzzled, Diana studied Jonathan's noncommittal expression, but he merely shrugged and asked, "He didn't have his cravat on yet, did he? It will be another hour before we see him again. I, for one, prefer to return to the table." And he did so, leaving Diana to stare after him with bewilderment and a new awareness of his physical presence that left her shaken.

  The boy's shoulders she remembered so well had broadened into those of a man, a man accustomed to the rigors of a soldier's life. Muscular arms strained the seams of his civilian coat, and his athletic grace and masculine strength made a mockery of any injuries. Obviously, his wounds were such as not to limit a man of his stature to any great degree.

  She could detect no bandages beneath the knit of his trousers, but she suspected Jonathan's pride would prevent him from wearing bandages if they were at all to be avoided. She almost felt his wince of pain as he entered the dining room and reached for a chair. Were his wounds so painful that he could not relax and be himself, or had the war changed him?

  She had loved Jonathan Drummond for as long as she could remember, since she had been too little for him to notice. He had been just one of her older brother's many friends, but he had always been special. He was the only one who had spoken to her, treated her as an equal, and she had adored him. Later, when they were older, their families had shared their holidays, and there were picnics and romps and theatricals where they had just naturally paired off together, or against each other, depending on their ages or the game.

  Diana remembered a particular snowball fight where she managed to catch him squarely in the head, and he had chased her until they both tumbled down a hill of snow, soaking themselves thoroughly.

  They had both caught a chill that day, but he had arranged to send her a bouquet from their greenhouse to cheer her sickroom. It was that next summer when his nonsensical notes began to take a more serious vein. The hiding place in the old secretary that had been their cache of secret jokes became a place to exchange private thoughts.

  Diana watched as Jonathan adjusted his injured leg beneath the cloth and propped his bandaged hand upon the table. Four years couldn't have made him a total stranger. Charles had not changed that much. Why should Jonathan hate her now when he had at least considered her to be a friend before?

  She could no longer bear the suspense of wondering. He was
alive and here and she would find out. That was the smallest price he would have to pay for leaving her with a heart that would not open to anyone else.

  He nodded without smiling when she returned to her breakfast. Mrs. Carrington and Elizabeth had run off to direct the settling of the twins' latest disaster, so there was no one to monitor their conversation. Not that Jonathan invited conversation, Diana thought wryly as he lifted his cup of coffee with his undamaged hand.

  "Where did you take your injuries?" Trying her best to be as cool and sophisticated as this stranger across from her, Diana added more hot water to her tea.

  "No grand battle but the retreat from Burgos," Jonathan said with distaste. "Your brother has been seeing to my welfare. That is why he was so late in returning. I don't suppose it occurred to him to write and tell you that, and unfortunately, I was not in a position to do so. I am exceedingly grateful for his care. The army surgeons would no doubt have insisted on amputation, and I would still be in some fly-infested tent if he had not come to my rescue."

  Diana's eyes widened in horror as she gazed on the gauze-enshrouded hand resting amid the china and silver. That was his writing hand, his right hand. He could have lost it forever. The fear of loss must have been as great as the physical pain.

  Determined not to let Jonathan see how he had upset her, Diana rested her gaze on the raw scar of his forehead and quizzically raised an eyebrow. "Amputation of the head would have been a trifle drastic, but I daresay it would have relieved any concern about the flies."

  His table companion said this with such a straight face that Jonathan nearly choked on a swallow of coffee. He had forgotten Diana's dry sense of humor, or rather, he had forgotten its effect on him. She was much too beautiful in the mornings for his senses to resist. The physical urge to gather her into his arms and kiss that sassy mouth into submission had to be prevented in some way.

  "Your sympathy is gratifying. I shall always remember it with fondness." Collecting himself, he returned to his coffee.

  "Then let me give you something else to remember with fondness." Diana rose precipitously from her chair and overturned his plate and carefully cut breakfast into his lap.

  Without further word, she sailed from the room trailing lavender ribbons.

  Jonathan almost smiled as he contemplated the remains of his breakfast running down his once immaculate trousers. In some ways, Diana hadn't changed at all, and he felt oddly relieved that the little hoyden still remained behind all her stylish beauty. And there certainly couldn't be any pity lingering there if she felt free to take advantage of his temporary handicaps. In another time and place he would have chased after her and made her pay for her temerity, but he was no longer that heedless boy, just as she was no longer the pigtailed girl who would wrestle him to the ground. Just the thought of such a combat roused definitely unchildish desires.

  With a grimace at his response to a woman who had made it quite clear that she held him in disfavor, Jonathan struggled from his lonely seat and set out to find clean trousers.

  Charles found him sometime later—staring up the narrow back stairs to the attics. He slapped a hand to Jonathan's back and steered him toward the main staircase. "The maids don't sleep up there, old fellow, if you've taken a sudden penchant for slap and tickle. It's too damn hard to heat those rooms."

  Jonathan scowled. "I bloody well don't give a damn where they sleep. I owe you a great deal, Charles, and don't think I'm ungrateful, but this won't work. You should have left me in London."

  "To do what, may I ask? Hide from your father? Or Diana? Or both? Devil take it, Drummond, but you're a bloody great hero on the field, and a complete horse's ass on home ground. You have the courage to stand up against the worst Boney could send you, but you haven't the backbone to stand up to one sharp-tongued female. You're the one who has thrown his cap over a windmill for that frippery sister of mine. I could have warned you it was a foolish piece of business. Diana's a right one, but she can be mighty high in the instep when she wants to be. She's not so easy-natured as your Marie."

  "Marie is a senseless chit, even if she is my sister. And I'm damned sorry you ever got near me while I was fevered. Remind me never to become ill again."

  The two men clattered down the last of the stairs and into the hall where the butler waited with their greatcoats and mufflers. Unoffended by Jonathan's irascibility, Charles grinned and shrugged into the caped coat.

  "On the contrary, you should be ill more often. It's quite an enlightening experience. You're a damned close-mouthed devil, Drummond. I had no idea your passion for my sister had gone so out of hand as to stoop to pet names! Come on, nodcock, let us find a log that will last into eternity. That will show them what kind of stuff we're made of."

  They disappeared into the blowing cold of a white-laced winter wonderland.

  * * *

  The yule log arrived while Diana was completing the greenery in the drawing room later on Christmas Eve. Besides the kissing bough in the center of the ceiling, she had decorated the mantel candelabra with ivy and holly and made a centerpiece of evergreen branches intertwined with ivy for the spinet. Already several small gifts dangled tantalizingly from the boughs on the ceiling, and Diana smiled as a gust of wind from the open front door sent them dancing. Her father had initiated the tradition of hanging gifts when they were very young and the kissing bough's mistletoe meant nothing to them. This year, only the gifts would be there. The mistletoe was not only perilous to cut down from the thorny hawthorn, but inappropriate for a house of mourning. But she could not resist the gift tradition.

  Jonathan and Charles carried in the enormous log meant to burn for the next twelve days. Not many houses had fireplaces large enough for the old custom, but the drawing room in the old part of Carrington House was ideal for the purpose. The enormous room had a fireplace that engulfed one wall. Dwarfed by the towering stone and timber fireplace, Diana balanced precariously on the edge of a wing chair as she added another piece of ivy to her bouquet.

  She climbed down from her perch, nearly dancing with delight as she inspected the beribboned log. "It is lovely. I do believe it is the best log ever. It will make a splendid sight when you light it tonight. Do we have any of last year's chips left to light it with?"

  "How am I supposed to know? You were here, not me, but I shouldn't think Father would have forgotten to set a few pieces aside," Charles admonished, brushing off his gloves.

  At this mention of their father, Diana's delight faded. Last year, that had been her father lowering the log to the grate. As much as she admired Jonathan's strength in maneuvering it with one hand, he was not the father who had loved her. Nor the man she had hoped would love her. Half-heartedly, she pressed a kiss to her brother's cheek in gratitude.

  Charles pulled off his gloves and circled her shoulders. "I'm sorry, Di. I have been tormenting myself for weeks for not being here when you needed me. It's hard to come home and act cheerful when there's this big gaping hole that he used to fill."

  Diana nodded in understanding. "I keep waiting for him to come through the door and yell for the twins and spin Mama around the room as he did when he had a good day. I miss talking to him in the evenings. I even miss his scolding. I catch myself sounding just like him sometimes when the twins are in the briars."

  Jonathan slipped unobtrusively to the door to escape this family scene, but Charles caught him before he could escape.

  "Don't bolt yet, Drummond. The greenery ain't up yet in the hall and unless you want Diana climbing up there to do it by herself, you'd better stay here to help. The twins are in their best clothes, and I promised Mama to keep them entertained until their keeper returns from the village, so I'm taking them out." He ignored Diana's dubious look. "Goudge ain't much help, but he may lend a hand if you need him."

  Releasing Diana, Charles reached up to spin one of the dangling packages. "Or, Jonathan, you can take the twins and I'll help Diana."

  "Heaven forbid." Jonathan raised expressive eyes t
o the ceiling. "I'd rather face Boney himself than those two. Were we ever like that?"

  Diana nibbled a fingernail as she contemplated her older brother and his friend. "Don't I remember a time when the two of you put me in an empty barrel and sent me down Scott's Hill? And then, of course, there was the time—"

  "Don't let her start!" Charles dodged a Chippendale sofa in his effort to reach the door before she could continue. "She'll make the heathens look like saints before she's through."

  He was gone, leaving her with a pensive Jonathan. "I am nearly done decorating," she lied. "You don't need to help me unless you wish. Mama's right. This is a house of mourning—I should not be so frivolous."

  "I should think a little frivolity is what we all need right now. I speak for myself, of course." He grimaced as he gestured with his bandaged hand. "But the twins and Elizabeth are young yet. They need things to be the way they used to be, just for a little while. It's hard on them."

  "You've changed, Johnny." She saw him stiffen at this boyhood name and regretted her familiarity. He was no longer a lanky adolescent but a man full grown, a gentleman she had trouble recognizing. His windswept chestnut hair tumbled across the sun-darkened brow of a seasoned soldier who had spent years on foreign shores. What had made her think he would have any interest in a country miss such as herself? She had not even a London bronze to catch his eye or hold his attention.

  "You've changed, too," he reminded her. "You're not a skinny little girl in pigtails or a bluestocking with her nose in a book or even a hoyden who can climb trees with the best of them. We all grow up."

  Diana cut viciously with her pruning shears at the evergreen branch she was trimming. "I still read books and can climb trees as well as the twins. In happier times, I even know how to laugh. But not you. You look just like your father when you glare at me like that with your nose up in the air and that disapproving frown between your eyes."