have tried to talk with you.”
Again, she had heard only one thing, her face still buried in her pillow. My dearest. He had called her my dearest. No one, in her whole life, had ever called her by any endearment, except the shortened form of her name- Lizzie.
“Is it too late for us?” he asked her. “Is there any chance of making a workable marriage of this one we are in together?”
She shrugged her shoulders but said nothing. She did not trust her voice yet.
“How have you thought of me all year?” he asked her. “I have thought of you as a beautiful, unattainable, aristocratic icicle. You cannot have thought of me in any more flattering terms.”
“Morose,” she said into her pillow. “Dour, humorless.Wondrously handsome.”
“Am I still all those things?” he asked after a short pause.
“You are still wondrously handsome,” she said.
“I have assumed,” he said, “that you despise me for marrying social position.”
She turned her face out of the pillow, though she did not look at him.
“I have assumed,” she said, “that you despise me for marrying money.”
“Lord God,” he said after another pause, “you would think that two reasonably intelligent adults who happen to be married to each other would have found a moment in which to talk to each other in a whole year, would you not?”
“Yes,” she said.
He sat there looking down at her for a while. She lay still and did not look directly at him. She felt that a great deal had already been said.
But what, really, had changed?
He got to his feet suddenly and turned to slap her lightly on one buttock.
“Get up,” he said, his voice brisk and cheerful. “Get dressed.”
“Pass me my nightgown, then,” she said. He had dropped it over the other side of the bed.
“Dressed,” he said with more emphasis. “Put on your warmest clothes.”
“Why?”
“We are going out,” he said.
“Out?” She stared at him with wide eyes. “Why?”
“Who knows why?” He looked down at her and grinned-her stomach turned a complete somersault inside her, she would swear. “We are going to talk.
Perhaps we will build a snowman. Or make snow angels. That would be appropriate for the occasion, would it not?”
“The doors are all bolted,” she said foolishly. “It is almost midnight.”
He said nothing. He merely continued to look down at her and grin at her.
He was mad. Wondrously, gloriously mad.
Elizabeth laughed.
“You are mad,” she said.
“You see?” He pointed a finger at her. “That is something you have not known about me all year. There is a great deal more. And I have not known that you could possibly laugh at the prospect of being dragged outside on a cold, snowy night in order to make snow angels. I daresay there is a great deal I do not know of you. I am going out. Are you coming with me or are you not?”
“I am coming,” she said, and laughed again.
“I’ll be back here in five minutes,” he told her, and he strode to the door and left the room without a backward glance.
Elizabeth gazed after him and laughed again.
And jumped out of bed.
Five minutes! Never let it be said that she had kept him waiting.
“You lie down on your back,” he explained, “and spread out your arms and legs and swish them carefully back and forth. Like this.” He demonstrated while she watched and then got to his feet again and looked down at the snow angel he had made. “Rather a large one.”
“The angel Gabriel,” she said softly.
She was wearing a pale, fur-lined cloak with the hood drawn over her head. She looked ethereally lovely in the reflected light from the snow.
She also looked very much on her dignity. But she lay down carefully on the snow beside his own angel and made one of her own with slow precision and downcast eyes.
He was so much in love with her that he wanted to howl at the moon. He was also afraid, uncertain. Was this his dutiful wife he had with him?
Or was she the repressed daughter of a humorless tyrant, ready to break free, like a butterfly from the cocoon? But would she simply fly past him when she discovered her wings?
“Ah,” he said after she had got back to her feet again, “a dainty angel.
A guardian angel, I believe. Jeremy’s, perhaps. Mine, perhaps.”
She looked at him and smiled-and then her eyes went beyond him to the sky.
“Oh, look,” she said, “the clouds are moving off. Look at the miracle.”
The moon was almost at the full, and suddenly, it seemed, the sky was studded with stars. They looked unusually bright tonight, perhaps because he was in the country rather than in London, as he usually was.
One in particular drew his eyes. He stepped a little closer to her and pointed, so that she could look along the length of his arm to that particular star.
“I believe the Wise Men are on their way after all,” he said.
“Edwin,” she said softly, “have you ever known a more perfect Christmas?”
The sound of his name on her lips warmed him. No, he never had-he had never known a more perfect Christmas or a more perfect moment. If he held his breath, could he hold on to it forever?
“I have not,” he told her.
He was about to set one arm about her waist, to draw her to him, to begin, perhaps-one year late but surely not too late-to speak the words of the heart, so difficult for a man who spent his days speaking the practical words of business and commerce. But she spun around to face him before he could lift his arm, and in the semidarkness he could see that her body was tense and her expression agitated.
“Take us back with you,” she said. “When you go home to London, take us with you.”
The words were so stunningly unexpected, so exactly what he wanted to hear that he stared stupidly at her for several moments without speaking.
“Why?”
She stared back at him, still tense, before closing her eyes and turning away from him.
“Jeremy needs you,” she said.
Again there was a long pause, during which he dared not ask the question whose answer might shatter his newfound, fragile dream. How foolishly hesitant he was with his wife-so different from the way he was in all other aspects of his life. But she answered the question before he could ask it.
“I need you.”
“Do you?” His heart felt as if it might burst.
“Edwin,” she said in a rush, her voice breathless, her face still turned away, “I should have said no. Even though Mama and Papa were in desperate financial straits, I should not have agreed to buy their reprieve at the cost of your freedom and happiness. But I had met your father and liked him enormously, and I knew that he really wanted me for you. And so I persuaded myself that perhaps you wanted me too. But it was purely selfish of me. I thought I could leave behind the cold, loveless world in which I had grown up and become part of your father’s warm, joy-filled world. Instead I killed any joy you might have had. I am so sorry. But let us go home with you, and I will try…”
His hand closed tightly about one of her arms, and she stopped talking as he turned her to him and gazed down into her face, bathed in the light of the moon and the Christmas star.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “I am the one who destroyed your happiness, taking you away from your own world only because I knew my father was dying and I could not say no to him. I despised myself for agreeing to that bargain
