“Just pretend she’s dead,” Arabel suggested airily.
Arabel said everything airily. Pretty, seventeen-year-old Arabel was dark-haired and dark-eyed and statuesque—like Chrystabel and the rest of the Trevors—and she was the happiest person Chrystabel knew. Nothing ruffled her. She could find the good side of anything.
Unabated cheerfulness like that set Chrystabel’s teeth on edge.
“Mother is not dead,” she pointed out unnecessarily. “I could forgive her if she were dead.” Their father had died, after all—fighting for the king in the Civil War—and Chrystabel had never blamed him for leaving them. Death was sad but normal.
But there was nothing normal about being alive and not even an hour’s ride away—and ignoring your own children.
Especially at Christmas.
Chrystabel set her jaw. “I will never forgive her for marrying that…that man.”
That man was the Marquess of Bath, and he had no interest in the grown children of his second wife. The sorry and shocking thing was that Mother seemed similarly disinclined to spend time with her first family. She was too busy with her new husband and his children that she was raising. Raising. Even though she’d barely deigned to notice Chrystabel and her brother and three sisters—the five children she’d given birth to—all the years they were growing up.
“You cannot let Mother’s selfishness ruin our Christmas,” Arabel chided. “We’re not children anymore. Let it go. I have. Martha and Cecily have.”
“Martha and Cecily are married with children of their own. They don’t need a mother anymore.”
“For heaven’s sake, Chrys, you’re nineteen years old—you don’t need a mother anymore, either.” Arabel handed her a perfect red bow. “Here. Attach it, and that’s one more wreath finished.”
“Still twelve more to make,” Chrystabel said with a sigh.
Arabel’s laugh sounded suspiciously like a snort. “You’re the one who insists upon decorating this entire, huge house.”
Arabel was right about that—and more. Chrystabel knew she needed to dispense with the anger she felt toward their mother. It served no purpose. She would take a lesson from her less-than-ideal childhood: When she had her own family, she would do better.
Right then and there, she determined to do better.
“Look.” For once, Arabel wore a frown. She motioned out the window. “Soldiers. Parliamentarian soldiers.”
Hearing hoofbeats approach down Grosmont Grange’s long, icy, hard-packed drive, Chrystabel dragged her thoughts from her mother to follow her sister’s gaze. Sure enough, the horsemen wore breastplates over buff leather coats, with lobster-tailed pot helmets on their heads. Oliver Cromwell’s Dragoons.
They couldn’t be bringing good news to a Royalist family.
Since the war had ended in September, the formerly fighting Dragoons were now roaming the countryside, enforcing Cromwell’s strict Puritanical laws: no music, no dancing, no theater, no sports, no swearing, no drinking, no gaming…no Christmas.
No Christmas!
“They mean to catch us preparing for Christmas!” Chrystabel ran from the chamber and down the corridor to her brother’s study. “Matthew, open up!” Without waiting, she pushed open the door and burst inside. “Dragoons! Here to catch us celebrating Christmas!”
Arabel had already scooped up as much greenery as she could carry and was racing past the open door. “Where should we put it?” she called.
“Under your bed, then go back for more—we’ll put it under mine!” Chrystabel turned back to Matthew. “We’ll hide everything. You answer the door when they arrive.”
It took three trips to and from the drawing room to hide all the Christmas evidence beneath their two beds. Once the sisters were finished, they shut the door to Chrystabel’s room and plopped onto the mattress side by side, pretending to be reading books.
“Surely they won’t look under our beds,” Arabel whispered in her usual cheerful manner.
“We can hope not,” Chrystabel muttered back.
Time passed while she listened to her own heartbeat and reread the same paragraph thirteen times.
“I don’t hear anyone searching the house,” Arabel said. “And they were wearing heavy boots.”
Chrystabel shrugged. “As you recently pointed out, it’s a big house. They’ll get here.”
They both jumped when a sharp knock came at the door.
Chrystabel steeled herself. “Enter if you must.”
“I must,” their brother said as the door swung open.
“Matthew! Are they gone?”
“They are.” He suddenly looked older than his twenty-five years. His handsome face appeared ashen. For the first time, he looked like the Earl of Grosmont to her, not just her big brother who unfortunately had inherited early.
“Why did they not search my chamber?”
“They didn’t search anything.” He held up a letter with a big, broken red seal hanging from it. A very official-looking letter. “They brought this.”
“What does it say?” Arabel breathed.
Leaning against the doorpost as though he couldn’t quite hold himself up, Matthew cleared his throat and read. “‘I thought fit to send this trumpet to you, to let you know that, if you please to walk away with your family and staff, and deliver your estate to such as I shall send to receive it, you shall have liberty to take one day to gather and carry off your goods, and such other necessaries as you have. You have failed to pay the fine assessed by the Committee for Compounding; if you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you may expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with. I await your present answer, and rest your servant, O. Cromwell.’”
“Oh, my God.” Arabel’s big brown eyes had never looked wider. “Did you give the soldiers your answer?”
“I had to. They wouldn’t leave without it.”
“And what was your answer?” Chrystabel asked impatiently. “What did you say?”
“That we’ll leave, of course. Tomorrow, as he ordered. What else could I say?” Matthew straightened up. Some color had returned to his face. “The fine is a third of the
