A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau (22 page)

Mr. Sperling bowed. Fanny curtsied deeply without once looking at him. Sir Webster cleared his throat.

“We are acquainted with Mr. Sperling,” he said. “We are—or were—neighbors. How d’ye do, Sperling?” He had pokered up quite noticeably.

“Acquainted? Neighbors?” Mr. Downes was all astonishment. “Well now. Who says that coincidences never happen these days? Amazing, is it not, Edgar?”

“Astonishing,” Edgar agreed. “You and Lady Grainger—and Miss Grainger, too—will be able to help us make Mr. Sperling feel more at home over Christmas, then, sir.”

“Yes, certainly. My dear Mrs. Cross,” Mr. Downes was saying, beaming with hearty good humor, “please do pour the tea, if you would be so good.”

Helena caught him alone after he had escorted her aunt to the tea tray. The Carews, she noticed, those kindest of kind people, were taking a clearly uncomfortable Mr. Sperling and Fanny Grainger under their wing while Edgar had taken the Graingers to join Cora and Francis.

“Sit here, Daughter,” Mr. Downes said, indicating a large wing chair beside the fire. “We have to be careful to look after you properly. It was thoughtless of me to take you so far from the house this morning.”

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “What are you up to, Papa?”

“Up to?” He looked at her in astonishment. “I am protecting my daughter-in-law and my future grandchild. Both are important to me.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “Who is Mr. Sperling? No.” She held up a staying hand. “Not the story about Edgar’s having discovered a prodigy quite by chance. The real story.”

His eyes were shrewd and searching. “Edgar has not told you?” he asked.

“Let me guess.” She perched on the edge of the chair he had indicated and looked up at him. “It does not take a great deal of ingenuity, you know. Mr. Sperling is a young and rather good-looking gentleman. He is a neighbor of the Graingers. Fanny Grainger, when she set eyes on him a few minutes ago, came very near to fainting—a little excessive for purely neighborly sentiment. His own face, when we came closer, turned parchment pale. Can he by any chance be the ineligible suitor? The man she is not allowed to marry?”

“I suppose,” her father-in-law conceded, “since we have just established that coincidences do happen, it might be possible, Daughter.”

“And Edgar, feeling guilty that the necessity of marrying me forced him to let down the Graingers, whose hopes he had raised,” Helena said, “devised this scheme of making Mr. Sperling more eligible and bringing the lovers together. And you are aiding and abetting him, Papa. A more unlikely pair of matchmakers it would be difficult to find.”

“But make no mistake,” Mr. Downes said. “Business interests always come first with Edgar, as with me. He would not have brought that young man to Mobley or offered him the sort of employment that will involve a great deal of trust on his part if he had not been convinced that Mr. Sperling was the man for the job. There is no sentiment in this, Daughter, but only business.”

“Poppycock!” she said, startling him again. “Perhaps the two of you believe the myth that has grown up around you that you are ruthless, hard-nosed, heartless businessmen to whom the making of money is the be-all and end-all of existence. Like most myths, it has hardly a grain of truth to it. You are soft to the core of your foolish hearts. You, sir, are an impostor.”

His eyes twinkled at her. “It is Christmas, Daughter,” he said. “Even men like my son and me dream of happy endings at Christmas, especially those involving love and romance. Leave us to our dreams.”

Edgar, Helena noticed, was laughing with the rest of his group and setting an arm loosely about Cora’s shoulders in an unconscious gesture of brotherly affection. He looked relaxed and carefree. But dreams—they were the one thing she must never cultivate. When one dreamed, one began to hope. One began to have images of happiness and of peace. Peace on earth and goodwill to all men. How she hated Christmas.

Her father-in-law patted her shoulder even as her aunt brought them their tea. “Let me dream, Daughter,” he said. And she knew somehow that he was no longer talking about Fanny Grainger and Mr. Sperling.

T
HE NEXT DAY
saw the return of some of the wedding guests who had come out from Bristol for that occasion and now came to Mobley Abbey to spend Christmas. Some of Edgar’s personal friends were among them and some of his father’s. Almost without exception, they had sons and daughters of marriageable age.

He had invited them, Mr. Downes explained to his son, when it had become obvious to him that his home was to be filled with aristocratic guests. He had welcomed the connections—he had wanted both his son and his daughter to marry into their class, after all—but he would not turn his back on his own. He was a man who aimed always to expand the horizons of his life, not one who allowed the old horizons to fade behind him as he aggressively pursued the new.

“But more than that, Edgar,” he explained, “I realized the great gap there would be between the older, married guests and the children, with only Miss Grainger
between. This was when it appeared that you would be celebrating your betrothal to her over Christmas. It seemed important that she have company of her own age. Under the changed circumstances, it seems even more important. And I like young people. They liven up a man’s old age.”

“The old man being you, I suppose,” Edgar said with a grin. “You have more energy than any two of the rest of us put together, Papa.”

His father chuckled.

But Edgar was pleased with the addition of more young people and of his own friends. He was more relaxed. He was able to see Fanny Grainger and Jack Sperling relax more.

The house guests had all arrived safely—and only just in time. The following night, the night before the planned excursion to gather greenery for decorating the house, brought a huge fall of snow, one that blanketed the ground and cut them off at least for a day or two from anywhere that could not be reached by foot.

“Look,” Edgar said, leaning against the window sill of his bedchamber just after he had got out of bed. He turned his head to glance at Helena, who was still lying there, awake. “Come and look.”

“It is too cold,” she complained.

“Nonsense,” he said, “the fire has already been lit.” But he went to fetch her a warm dressing gown and set it about her as she got out of bed, grumbling. “Come and look.”

He kept an arm about her shoulders as she looked out at the snow and the lowering clouds which threatened more. Indeed more was already sifting down in soft, dancing flakes. She said nothing, but he saw wonder in her eyes for a moment—the eternal wonder that children from one to ninety always feel at the first fall of snow.

“Snow for Christmas,” she said at last, her voice cool. “How very timely. Everyone will be delighted.”

“My first snowball will be targeted for the back of your neck,” he said. “I will treat you to that delicious feeling of snow melting in slow trickles down your back.”

“How childish you are, Edgar,” she said. “But why the back of the neck? My first one will splatter right in your face.”

“Is this a declaration of war?” he asked.

“It is merely the natural reaction to a threat,” she said. “Will the gathering of greenery have to be canceled? That snow must be several inches deep.”

“Canceled?” he said. “Quite the contrary. What could be better designed to arouse the spirit of Christmas than the gathering of greenery in the snow? There will be so many distractions that the task will take at least twice as long as usual. But distractions can be enormous fun.”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh.

It struck him suddenly that he was happy. He was at Mobley Abbey with his family and friends, and Christmas was just a few days away. There was enough snow outside that it could not possibly all melt before Christmas. And he was standing in the window of his almost warm bedchamber with his arm about his pregnant wife. It was strange how happiness could creep up on a man and reveal itself in such unspectacular details.

He dipped his head and kissed her. She did not resist. They had made love each night of their marriage and though there had been little passion in the encounters, there had been the warmth of enjoyment—for both of them. He turned her against him, opened her mouth with his own, and reached his tongue inside. One of her arms came about his neck and her fingers twined themselves in his hair.

He would enjoy making love with her in the morning,
he thought, with the snow outside and all the excitement of that fact and the Christmas preparations awaiting them. There could surely be no better way to start a day. It felt good to be a married man.

She drew back her head. “Don’t, Edgar,” she said.

He released her immediately. How foolish to have forgotten that it was Helena with all her prickliness to whom he was married. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I thought I had been given permission to have conjugal relations with you.”

“Don’t be deceived by snow and Christmas,” she said. “Don’t imagine tenderness where there is none, Edgar—either in yourself or in me. We married because I seduced you and we enjoyed a night of lust and conceived a child. It can be a workable marriage. I like your father and your sister and your friends. And I am reconciled to living in one place—even Bristol, heaven help me—and doing all the domestic things like running your home and being your hostess. I am even resigned to being a mother and will search out the best nurse for the child. But we must not begin to imagine that there is tenderness. There is none.”

If he had fully believed her, he would have been chilled to the bone. As it was, he felt as if someone had thrown a pail of snow through the window and doused him with it.

“There must at least be an attempt at affection,” he said.

“I cannot feel affection,” she said. “Don’t try to tempt me into it, Edgar. You are a handsome man and I am strongly attracted to you. I will not try to deny that what we do together on that bed is intensely pleasurable to me. But it is a thing of the body, not of the emotions. I respect you as a man. I do believe sometimes I even like you. Do the same for me if you must. But do not waste emotion on me.”

“You are my
wife
,” he said.

“I hurt badly what I am fond of,” she said. “I hurt badly and forever. I do not
want
to be fond of you, Edgar. And I am not trying to be cruel. You are a decent man—I do wish you were not, but you are. Don’t make me fond of you.”

Did she realize what she was saying? She was
fond
of him and desperately fighting the feeling. But what had she done? He had been very deaf, he realized. She had insisted every time he had asked that no one had ever hurt her, that she had done the hurting. He had not listened. Someone must have hurt her, he had thought, and he had asked his questions accordingly. He had asked the wrong questions. Whom had she hurt?
I hurt badly and forever
. The words might have sounded theatrical coming from anyone else. But Helena meant them. And he had felt the bitterness in her, the despair, the refusal to be drawn free of her masks, the refusal to love or be loved.

“Very well, then,” he said and smiled at her. “We will enjoy a relationship of respect and perhaps even liking and of unbridled lust. It sounds good to me, especially the last part.”

He drew one of her rare amused smiles from her. “Damn you,” she said without any conviction at all.

“We had better dress and go downstairs,” he said, “before all the snow melts.”

“I would hate that snowball to miss its destiny and never collide with your face,” she said.

T
HEY WERE BACK
down by the lake, spread along one of its banks, searching for holly and mistletoe and well-shaped evergreen boughs of the right size. The lake itself was like a vast flat empty field of snow on which some of the children—and three or four of the young people,
too—had made long slides while whooping with delight. The snow would have to be swept off before anyone could skate, though the ice had been pronounced by the head gardener to be thick enough to bear any human weight. But the skating would have to wait until tomorrow, they had all been told. Today was strictly for the gathering of greenery and the decorating of the house.

Of course it had turned out not to be strictly for any such thing, just as Edgar had predicted. There had been a great deal of horseplay and noise ever since the first one of them had set foot outside the house. A vicious snowball fight had been waged and won and lost before any of them had succeeded in getting even twenty yards from the house. Edgar’s first snowball had been safely deflected by Helena’s shoulder—she had seen it coming. Her own had landed squarely in the middle of his laughing face.

“If you think to win any war against me, Edgar,” she had told him while he shook his head like a wet dog and wiped his face with his snowy gloves, “let that be a warning to you.”

“You win,” he had said, smiling ruefully and setting a hand at the back of her neck. When he had picked up a palmful of snow she did not know. But every drop of it, she would swear, had found its way down inside her cloak and dress.

Samantha, Marchioness of Carew, and Jane, Countess of Greenwald, had shown all the little girls and some of the older ones, too, how to make snow angels and soon there was a heavenly host of them spread out on what was usually a lawn.

By slow degrees they had all made their way to the lake and the woods and been divided into work parties. Both her father-in-law and her husband had tried to persuade Helena to return to the house instead of going all the way. She wished they had not. She might have gone
back if she had been left to herself. But once challenged, she had had no choice but to go. Not that she felt too weak or fatigued. She just did not want any more merriment.

In the event she soon became involved in it. It really was irresistible. There were children to be helped and children to be played with and young people and people of her own generation to be laughed with. She had forgotten how warm and wonderful family life could be. She had forgotten how exhilarating a good old-fashioned English Christmas could be. She had forgotten how sheerly pleasurable it was to relax and interact with other people of all ages, talking and teasing and laughing.