“You never lack for appetite, exercise or no.”
“Oh, yes, let’s go to church,” Annabelle said. “Let’s walk there through the snow. Together, as a family. What a perfectly delightful Christmas this is turning out to be. The best ever. Thanks to Lizzie and Edwin, that is. You can invite us here every year, you two.”
There was a burst of hearty laughter and even a smattering of applause.
“Consider the invitation extended,” Mr. Chambers said with a twinkle in his eye. “And after we have feasted and stuffed ourselves tomorrow, we will go down to the lake and make a slide. Unfortunately we have no skates, though I promise there will be some next year. But a slide we will have-and a contest to see who can skid the farthest without coming to grief.”
They drank their tea and finally dispersed for the night with warm, cheerful good-nights. Mr. Chambers was talking with a group of uncles and aunts when Elizabeth slipped away to the nursery to give Jeremy his night feeding. Her mother caught up with her on the stairs.
“It is to be hoped, Lizzie,” she said, “that tomorrow you will exert more control over your own home than you did today. I cannot tell you how shocked I have been-and all this family has been-over the indiscretion of allowing the children out of the nursery to mingle with the adults when their nurses are being paid to keep them under control in the nursery. And the vulgarity of all those decorations, including the embarrassingly amateurish efforts of Oswald to produce a Nativity scene.And the kissing bough. I never thought to live to see such a day in any home occupied by the members of my own family. It comes, of course, of the unfortunate circumstance of your having to marry a cit.
Tomorrow you must look to me for guidance. I will not be overpowered by such a domineering man.”
Elizabeth stopped outside the door of the nursery. She had been hoping to avoid her mother tonight. Mama had been looking sour and outraged all day. Elizabeth still did not know when she drew breath to speak if she would have the courage to say what she wanted to say, what she had been longing to say for the past month or two, in fact.
She had never been able to stand up to her mother.
“Mama,” she said, “will you and Papa be returning home after Christmas?
You have been kind enough to stay with me here far longer than you originally intended, but you must be longing to be at home again.”
“Leave you?” Lady Templar said. “When you do not have any idea how to be mistress of your own home, Lizzie, or how to be a good mother to your son? I would not dream of being so selfish. You must not fear that I will desert you when you have such need of me.”
“But Mama,” Elizabeth said, her heart thumping loudly in her chest and her throat and ears, “I do not. I have much to learn before I can run a household as efficiently as you, but Wyldwood ran smoothly enough before you came here and will do so after you leave. You trained me well when I was a girl. And truth to tell, I look forward to the challenge of managing on my own again. I have been very grateful indeed for your help when I needed it, but I do not need it any longer. And I believe I am a good mother.”
“Lizzie!” Lady Templar’s bosom swelled, and her face was blotched with red patches. “Never did I think to hear such words of ingratitude from you of all people. It is the influence of that dreadful man, I expect.
You were always an impressionable girl.”
“I am grateful to you,” Elizabeth said again. “But I would not keep on expecting you and Papa to sacrifice your own comfort for me, Mama. It would be selfish of me. And against my inclinations,” she added lest she weaken.
“You will allow him to make you as vulgar as he is,” her mother said disdainfully.
“I do hope so, Mama,” Elizabeth said quietly. “A wife ought to allow herself to be influenced by her husband, especially when he was chosen for her by her own parents. Just as I hope Mr. Chambers will allow himself to be influenced by me.”
She did not know if her marriage stood any chance of becoming a real one. But she would prefer the aloneness of being a neglected, half-abandoned wife, she had realized today, than the oppression of living under her mother’s thumb, as she had all her life except for the few brief months between Christmas last year and her confinement.
Her mother turned and walked away without another word, her back stiff and bristling with righteous indignation. Elizabeth fought the wave of guilt that swept over her. She had been polite. She had been grateful.
But she had said what she had wanted and needed to say for a long time.
She wanted her home to herself again, to herself and Jeremy and Mr.
Chambers whenever he chose to visit them.
Separation from him after Christmas this year was going to be very much more painful than it had been last year, she thought as she let herself quietly into the nursery. Last year she had been upset, but she had also been disillusioned too. Part of her had been relieved to find herself alone. This year, though, she had seen another, warmer, more charming, more fun-loving side to her husband’s personality. This year he had kissed her beneath the kissing bough and smiled at her. The house was going to seem empty indeed when he left.
Her life was going to seem empty indeed.
But she had been firm with her mother. She had asserted herself as mistress of Wyldwood. She had made progress. She was proud of herself.
Jeremy was waiting for her with noisy impatience, she heard even before she entered his room. She smiled. For longer than three months he had been her world, her life. He would continue to be after Christmas. How could she even think of emptiness when there was a baby to nurture and love?
Edward Chambers’s baby and hers.
Elizabeth was sitting by the window of Jeremy’s room in the dim light of one flickering candle, the baby at her breast. She looked up when Edwin opened the door from the nursery quietly and stepped inside, and pulled hastily at Jeremy’s blanket in order to cover herself.
“I beg your pardon.” He moved a few steps closer to her. “I did not intend to embarrass you.”
But he was not going to go away either-not unless she directly asked him to. They had circled about each other for too long, he and his wife. He wanted to be a part of their son’s life. Oh, yes, and of hers too.
She gazed at him tensely for a few moments before lowering her eyes and relaxing back into the chair. She smoothed her free hand over the soft golden down of the baby’s hair, just visible above the blanket.
Edwin clasped his hands behind his back and watched.
They did not talk. The only sound that broke the silence was the hungry sucking of their child.
If only this moment could be immortalized, carried with him forever, Edwin thought. He felt absurdly close to tears. But he wondered which Elizabeth would leave the nursery with him when she had finished feeding the baby. The cold, dignified aristocrat he had known her as until today? Or the warm, smiling, quietly assertive woman she had been for much of today?
Was it just Christmas that had effected the change in her? Would she be herself again once Christmas was over? Even tomorrow, perhaps? But who was her real self? He really did not know her, did he? He had met her twice before their wedding, there had been the two weeks after it, and he had spent a few days here after Jeremy’s birth, always with her mother in attendance. They were essentially strangers.
He had never been particularly shy with women. He had not known many sexually, but he was acquainted with many as friends and had looked forward to making a marriage for companionship and affection as well as for physical gratification. He still had female friends. But Elizabeth was different. It was not so much that he was shy with her as that he was a little in awe of her-though he was not in awe of her mother.
Elizabeth seemed the perfect lady to him, someone far above him in some indefinable way. The feeling annoyed him. He had never been awed by social rank.
The sucking noises gradually slowed and then stopped altogether. Edwin stepped forward and lifted the sleeping baby from his wife’s arms as she set the bodice of her dress to rights. He turned and set the child down gently in his crib after kissing his soft, warm cheek and breathing in the baby smell of him.
It was Christmas Eve, he thought. He did not want to end it.
He held the door open for Elizabeth to precede him into the nursery and then the door into the corridor beyond. He closed it behind them.
She turned to say good-night to him. He could read her intent as she drew breath.
