“Thank you,” he said. He had taken the few steps to the branch of the orange tree, beneath which she and Viscount Luttrell had been kissing when he had arrived. He reached up one hand and smiled rather ruefully. “There really was mistletoe. I suppose he has been carrying it about with him in the hope of getting you alone.”
“Yes,” she said.
Their eyes locked. She almost walked toward him—and toward the mistletoe. She almost acted as much without conscious thought or decision as she had at Mr. Pinkerton’s hut the day before. But she caught herself in time.
“Come for tea,” he said, breaking a moment of unbearable tension.
“Yes.”
He had never really had much of a feel for Christmas. During his childhood it had been an occasion for adults only, a time when his uncle had invited guests, almost exclusively male, for hour upon hour of drinking and carousing. He had always been very careful to avoid his uncle as much as possible during the week or so following Christmas, when the man’s temper had been more volatile even than usual.
In Canada he had always been invited out for Christmas while in Montreal and had celebrated with other winterers during his three stints in the Northwest. But really the day had always seemed much like many other days of the year.
This year was very different from any other. It was not just being in the vast comfort of Thornwood and knowing that it was his. It was not just being surrounded by congenial friends and even a few family members. It was not even just the snow and the greenery and the carolers and the rich smells escaping from the kitchen. It was not entirely the anticipation of the following two days in which the celebrations would reach their climax.
It was everything all combined and something over and above the sum of all the parts. He admitted that to himself as he sat in the earl’s pew in the village church late on Christmas Eve, Margaret on one side of him, his aunt on the other. The church was full. The carolers were not perhaps the most musical choir he had ever heard, but the angel choir outside Bethlehem could not have warmed the hearts of the shepherds more thoroughly than they had warmed his heart earlier in the evening in the gloomy, chilly great hall at Thornwood—which had seemed neither gloomy nor cold with the carolers and all his guests and servants in it and Christina serving the mince pies while he ladled out the wassail.
Christina. She was seated on the same pew as he. If he leaned forward a little or back a little he could see her in her gray cloak and bonnet, seated next to Rachel, who was next to his aunt. Tess, who had been at her other side, was on her lap now and would doubtless be asleep soon. When he had been her age, he thought suddenly and for no apparent reason, his own mother had still been alive. He had only vague, flashing memories of both her and his father—they had died when he was five. Had he been able to climb upon his mother’s lap when he was tired and curl against her, his head on her bosom, knowing the world to be a safe, nurturing place?
He would see to it, he thought, that the world was always like that for both Tess and Rachel—until they were old enough to cope with its uncertainties alone. Even if he was at the other end of the earth he would see to it. They would remain here. She would not have to marry again and risk another bad marriage. The marriage to Gilbert must have been bad. He had not missed what she had probably not meant to reveal in her anger during the afternoon—her assertion that children, evenlegitimatechildren, did not have to bear the stigma of their paternity.
He listened to the service, gloried in that warm and wonderful but entirely intangible atmosphere of Christmas that was really so new to him, felt his heart expand with love for the Child who was being born into the world again tonight as He had been at Bethlehem almost two thousand years ago—and rested that love on the small family sitting just beyond his aunt.
He would never marry now. He would give no other woman a claim to Thornwood. It would be her home in which to bring up her children in safety and peace. And after the children were grown up and married and moved to the homes of their husbands? Well, then, it would be her home to grow old in. She would never have to face the humiliation of being compelled to live with younger relatives, who might not want her. Immediately after Christmas, certainly before he returned to Montreal, he would rewrite his will. Unlike his predecessor, he would see to it that the countess had some private settlement, some modest fortune on which to live in the event that he predeceased her.
Tess was fast asleep by the time the final hymn came to an end and the church bells pealed joyfully. Rachel was big-eyed with fatigue, the side of her head against her mother’s arm.
“They will wake up in the fresh air,” Lady Hannah said cheerfully, “poor little lambs. But they will sleep as soon as their heads touch their pillows at home. Would you like to hold my hand, Rachel?”
Rachel was a polite little girl and would have accepted the offer without a murmur. But it was very clear to the man who had remembered losing his own parents at the age of five that she wanted only Christina tonight.
“Perhaps,” he said, “Rachel could hold her mama’s hand, Aunt, if I carried Tess.” He looked at Christina. “It would be a shame to wake her, but she is too heavy for you to carry all that way.”
“Thank you,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.
She had had the forethought to bring a warm blanket. They wrapped it carefully about the sleeping child, and he took her into his own arms, pillowing her head on his shoulder. She was all warm, limp, trusting babyhood. He felt curiously like crying.
And so they walked home together, he and the countess and her family. He met Lizzie Gaynor’s eyes briefly as he stood up from the pew—they had walked to church together. But she was far too well-bred to show any disappointment she might have felt at seeing him encumbered with a child. She turned and smiled beguilingly at Sam Radway.
It was not a lonely walk home. All about them were family and guests, some of them conversing quietly and walking as fast as they could in order to get in out of the cold, others laughing and dawdling and resuming some of the games that had occupied them during the morning. And yet it felt curiously like a lonely walk—or at least a lone walk.
It felt like family—the family he had not known as a child beyond the age of five, the family he had never had as a man because. ..
Because the woman at his side had chosen to make this family with another man. With his childhood tormentor. She was not his wife. These were not his children. He heard a gurgling in his throat and swallowed.
“There is not too much farther to go, sweetheart,” she said to Rachel, whose footsteps were lagging. And she opened her cloak, wrapped it about the child, and drew her close against her side. Her eyes met the earl’s. They had not spoken a word to each other since leaving church.
“If you think you can carry Tess the rest of the way,” he said, “I’ll carry Rachel—if she will permit me.”
“She is heavy,” Christina warned him.
He smiled at her. Rachel’s large, overtired eyes were gazing longingly up at him from the folds of her mother’s cloak.
And so Tess once again changed hands—she did not awake though she grumbled sleepily. And he opened his greatcoat, stooped down, enveloped Rachel in its folds, and stood up with her. She was cold. She snuggled against him and yawned.
“I suppose,” Christina said as they walked on, “I should have left them at home. But they both wanted to come, and Gilbert always insisted upon it. Besides, tonight seemed— special. I wanted them there with me.”
She felt it too, then—the specialness of this Christmas?
