please. I shall have tea sent to you while you await the arrival of my carriage to take you home.
I take it you walked here?”
He would not take no for an answer, although there was no apparent kindness at all in his manner. Lilias found herself gazing once more into the fire a few minutes later, having been left to take her refreshments alone. And after drinking her tea, she was to have a warm and comfortable-and dry-ride home.
She should be feeling elated. She was feeling elated. But uncomfortable and humiliated too. As if, after all, she were taking charity. She blinked back tears and stared defiantly into the flames.
She was not taking charity. She was merely accepting what was hers by right.
He seemed to be made of stone to the very heart. Not once had he smiled.
Not once had he given any indication that theirs was no new acquaintance. And he had called her explanation an affecting story. He had said so with a sneer, as if he thought it contrived and untrue.
It did not matter. She had got what she had set out to get. More. She had not even been sure she was going to ask for the doll. But as well as that, Andrew was to have a watch. It did not matter that he had not smiled at her or wished her a happy Christmas.
It was at Christmastime he had first kissed her. It had been one of those magical and rare Christmases when it had snowed and there was ice on the lake. They had been sledding down a hill, he and she the last of a long line of young people, all of whom had been trekking back up again by the time they had had their turn. And she had overturned into the snow, shrieking and laughing, and giggling even harder when he had come over to help her up and brush the snow from her face and hair.
He had kissed her swiftly and warmly and openmouthed, stilling both her laughter and his own until he had made some light remark and broken the tension of the moment. It had been Christmastime. Christmas Eve, to be exact. She had been fifteen, he one-and-twenty.
It did not matter. That had been a long time ago, almost exactly seven years, in fact. He was not the same man, not by any means. But then, she was not the same, either. She had been a girl then, a foolish girl who had believed that Christmas and life were synonymous.
She turned and smiled at Mrs. Morgan, who was carrying a tray into the salon.
He had a daughter somewhere in the house, Lilias thought for the first time since her arrival.
The child tugged at her father’s hand, trying to free her own.
“The water is running down my arm, Papa,” she complained. A few minutes before she had told him that the rain was running down the back of her neck. “I want to go home now. Pick me up.”
The Marquess of Bedford stooped down and took his daughter up in his arms. She circled his neck with her own arms and burrowed her head against the heavy capes of his coat.
“We’ll be home in a twinkling, poppet,” he said, admitting to himself finally that he was not enjoying tramping around his own grounds any more than she, being buffeted by winds and a heavy drizzle that seemed to drip into one’s very bones. “The snow will come before Christmas, and we will build snowmen and skate on the lake and sled on the hill.”
“Your coat is wet, Papa,” she said petulantly, moving her head about as if in the hope of finding a spot that the rain had not attacked. “I’m cold.”
He was clearly fooling only himself, Bedford thought, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his coat so that his daughter might burrow her damp head inside. Christmas would not come. Not this year or ever again.
December the twenty-fifth would come and go, of course, this year and every year, but it would not be Christmas for all that.
Christmas had come for the last time six years before, when his father had still been alive, and Claude too. When he had been a younger son.
When Philip Angove had still been alive.Before Spain had taken Claude and Waterloo, Philip.When life had been full of hope and promise.
Christmas in that year and in all the years preceding it had invariably been white. Always snow and skating and sledding and snowball fights.
And Yule logs and holly and mistletoe.And family and laughter and the security of love.And food and company and song.
Christmas had always been white and innocent. How could there ever be Christmas again?
His brother-his great hero-had died at Badajoz. And his father less than a year later. And soon after that he had discovered that the world was not an innocent or a pleasant place in which to do one’s living.
Suddenly he had had friends by the score. And suddenly women found him irresistibly attractive and enormously witty. And suddenly relatives he had hardly known he had, developed a deep fondness for him.
In his innocence he had been flattered by it all. In his innocence he had fallen for the most beautiful and most sought-after beauty of the London Season. He had married her before the Season was out.
Lorraine. Beautiful, charming, and witty. The only thing she had lacked-and she had lacked it utterly-was a heart. She had made no secret of her affairs right from the beginning of their marriage and had merely laughed at him and called him rustic when he had raged at her.
“Papa, open another button so that I can get my arms in,” his child said, her voice muffled by the folds of his cravat.
He kissed one wet curl as he complied with her demand. He was not even sure that she was his, though Lorraine had always insisted that she was.
“Darling,” she had said to him once, when she was very pregnant and fretful at being confined to home, “do you think I would go through all this boredom and discomfort for any other reason than to give you your precious heir?”
She had been very angry when Dora was born.
Lorraine had drowned two years later in Italy, where she had been traveling with a group of friends, among whom was her latest lover.
And the lures had been out for him again for almost all of the two years since. Women gazed at him with adoration in their eyes. Women cooed over a frequently petulant and rather plain-faced Dora.
The Marquess of Bedford ran thankfully up the marble steps in front of his house and through the double doors, which a footman had opened for him.
“Let’s see if there is a fire in the nursery, poppet, shall we?” he asked, setting his daughter’s feet on the tiled floor and removing her bonnet and cloak. “And buttered muffins and scones?”
“Yes, if you please, Papa,” she said, raising a hand for his. But her tone was petulant again as they climbed the stairs side by side. “When will Christmas come? You said there would be lots of people here and lots to do. You said it would be fun.”
“And so I did,” he said, his heart aching for her as he looked down at her wet and untidy head. “But Christmas is still five days away. It will be wonderful when it comes. It always is here. You will see.”
But he was lying to her. The dolls and the frilled dresses and the bows would not make a happy Christmas for her. The only real gift he would be able to give her was his company. The choice had been between any of a number of house parties to which he had been invited alone, and Christmas spent, for the first time ever, with his child. He had chosen the latter. But he was not at all sure that that was not more a gift to himself than to her.
Where was the snow? And the young people?And the laughter and song?
“When will the rain end, Papa?” the child asked, echoing his own thoughts.
“Soon,” he said. “Tomorrow, probably.”
“But it has rained forever,” she said.
Yes it had. For all of a week, at least.
He should not have come. He had not been home for almost six years. Not since leaving in a hurry with his father when the news about Claude had come. He should have kept that memory of home intact, at least. That memory of something perfect.Something pure and innocent.Something beyond the dreariness and the corruption of real life.
But he had been fool enough to come back, only to discover that there was no such place. And perhaps there never had been. Only a young and innocent fool who had not yet had his eyes opened.
The rain was bad enough when he had been expecting the magic of his childhood Christmases. Worse by far had been that visit two days before.
Even Lilias.
