“You think she may not?” he asked.
“I think it very possible,” she said. “We have all tried, you know, and most of us have considerable influence, Alex and Avery most of all. There is really no reason for her to be ostracized, even though the highest sticklers will doubtless always consider her birth tainted. But I am not sure Abby is willing to allow others to help her slip and sidle into a life that would be very nearly like her old one but never identical. She is Viola’s daughter. She is sweet and quiet and dignified. But I do believe she has a spine made of steel.”
“Ah,” he said. And she was also a lovely girl.
“Oh, oh,” Elizabeth said suddenly. “That was thoroughly predictable.”
A shriek and shouts of laughter came from up ahead and the bellow of Molenor’s wrathful voice, and Bertrand Lamarr was hauling Winifred out of the snow while Molenor’s boys quelled their laughter and made excuses to their father for dropping her. Molenor was obviously not convinced. He grabbed each boy by his coat collar and marched them at a brisk trot toward the house. Winifred meanwhile was gazing rather worshipfully at Lamarr.
Colin laughed. “I love this family,” he said. “I really do, Elizabeth. And I love this place, shabby as it still is at present. And I am loving this Christmas. It is the only real Christmas I have ever experienced, you know.”
“Is it?” she asked. Then her eyes grew mischievous. “Since it is also a white Christmas, I must see to it that you come to love it even more. But later. I want to get inside and take these boots off before my feet turn to blocks of ice.”
“Latermeaning games in the outdoors, I suppose,” he said. “Hmm. We will see about that, Lady Overfield. I can fight quite fiercely when I am provoked, you know.”
“Empty bravado,” she said, laughing as they climbed the steps to the house and stamped their feet and shook off the hems of their outer garments.
“I can also fight dirty,” he said.
“With snow?” She preceded him into the house, smiling an acknowledgment to the footman who held the door open. “Impossible, Lord Hodges. It is a contradiction in terms.”
Three
Elizabeth had never quite understood why snow could turn grown adults into children as no other weather condition could. They all did indeed overeat at dinner, or if they did not exactly stuff more into themselves than usual, it still felt like overeating because of all the rich foods—the goose, the stuffing, the gravy, the Christmas pudding and custard, to mention just a few. And they did indeed feel a bit lethargic afterward and would doubtless have adjourned to the drawing room and drifted from there up to their rooms for what would euphemistically be called a rest—if, that was, there were not the snow outside, making a vast and sparkling white playground in the sunshine that had broken through the clouds, if only temporarily. It beckoned with a quite irresistible allure.
Everyone went outside, with the exception of the babies, Josephine and Jacob, who were both sleeping in the nursery, and the dowager countess and Mrs. Kingsley, who were flanking the fireplace in the drawing room, and Lady Matilda Westcott, who felt it incumbent upon herself to keep an eye upon her own mother and Viola’s in order to make sure they were not sitting in any draft and had taken no harm from their dinner.
Elizabeth was standing with Anna and Viola on the steps outside the front doors, looking at the scene below with some satisfaction and the anticipation of being a participant soon. She had been delayed when her maid had had to dash downstairs to retrieve her boots, which had been set to dry before the kitchen range. They had been toasty warm when she put them on.
“How lovely it is to see Harry looking healthy again,” Anna said.
“It is,” Viola agreed, sounding wistful as she gazed at her son, who had only recently recovered from serious injuries incurred in battle “I just wish this recruitment business could take a year or more, though that is very selfish of me when so many other men are exposed to grave danger out in the Peninsula, the French as well as the Allies. And he is very eager to return to his regiment. He would go today if he could. Sometimes I wonder if the wars will ever be over or if anyone but the female half of the population wants them to be.”
“But how well blessed you are, Viola, and how well blessed we all are, that he came home so unexpectedly in time for your wedding,” Elizabeth said.
Captain Harry Westcott was attempting to direct Mildred and Thomas’s teenage boys in the building of a snow fort, complete with battlements, dungeons, and tunnels. Oh, and apparently the obligatory maiden in distress. Ten-year-old Winifred had been volunteered for the role—though that seemed something of a contradiction—by one of the boys, and she was looking rather pleased at the prospect of being locked up in a tower with nothing but dry bread and water for sustenance while she waited for her prince to ride to her rescue. No one had yet volunteered for that role. Harry was trying, not too successfully, to inject some engineering sense into the builders and tunnelers, while Bertrand Lamarr stood with folded arms watching him, and Jessica and Estelle called out contradictory words of advice and encouragement.
The sisters Abigail and Camille were strolling along the driveway, which had been partially cleared since the morning, arm in arm with Colin. Avery and Joel were taking young Sarah and Mary Kingsley, the Reverend Kingsley’s wife, for a sleigh ride. Sarah was laughing with glee and reaching for the jingling bells. Alex and Wren had gone out to the hill behind the house to make sure it was ready for the sleds when the action should move that way. Marcel and the Reverend Kingsley had gone with them. Thomas and Mildred—Lord and Lady Molenor—were watching the action a short distance away with Mildred’s sister Louise, the Dowager Duchess of Netherby.
“I am indeed well blessed,” Viola said in answer to Elizabeth’s last words. “Camille is happily settled and Harry is safe and sound, at least for the present. And Abby…She has been lonely. Perhaps now that I am married she will be less so. Estelle is ecstatic to have a stepsister and is determined that they be bosom friends. I think Abby is touched by her eagerness.”
Elizabeth was watching the three walkers, who had turned back toward the house. They looked to be in good humor with one another. She tried to imagine Colin and Abby as a couple. They would certainly make an extraordinarily handsome pair. And they would surely be compatible in character and disposition. But…Too compatible? Was that possible?
Perhaps we should put ourselves out of our misery and marry each other.
She smiled a little wistfully at the memory of his saying those words to her on the way home from church. It had been an absurdity, of course. But even so it was good to know that she was still young enough and personable enough to draw such a jest. Andwhywas thirty-five feeling almost elderly these days?
There was a shriek from the direction of the fort—from Winifred or Estelle or both—followed by a bellow from Thomas, Lord Molenor.
“I hate to say I told you so, lad,” Harry was calling out cheerfully to a sputtering Peter, who was digging his way out of a collapsed tunnel, “but I told you so. Just be thankful the roof was built of snow, not bricks.”
Bertrand was laughing and slapping snow off the boy. “If I were you,” he said, “I would listen very attentively when an infantry captain deigned to offered me advice. He is almost bound to know what he is talking about.”
“He is extremely handsome, is he not?” Anna said.
“He is, indeed.” Elizabeth assumed she was referring to Bertrand Lamarr, who was an outstandingly good-looking young man, very much like his father. But then she saw that both Anna and Viola were looking at Colin.
“He is an amiable young man too,” Viola said. “It was unbelievably wicked of his mother to tell him when he was a child that Wren was dead. I am so very glad Alexander went in search of him after he married Wren.”
