Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River (28 page)

“You remember what occurred under the archway last night quite vividly. Now,” she ordered, “step away, before some house servant spies us doing more than feeding the birds.”

He obeyed, fighting a twenty-first century urge to have her, and have her now, but it wasn’t mere lust. It was some amazing, bemusing warm feeling he’d never felt for a woman before.

The white rabbit had hopped along with them, and as they neared the wall shrubberies, he was startled to see the creature now had an Alice, a young girl wearing a patched white pinafore, with her long ash-blond hair tied back. She smiled at him, fading in and out as if in a strobe light, a stranger who sometimes looked just like his sister, Lucy.

An annoyed cry nearer the house broke the spell. Marianne and Adrian turned at once, and when he looked back, the apparition was gone.

“Dirty old thing!” Selina stood by the wicker cage with its door sprung wide. “It almost bit me. You
will
bring the most miserable, deformed, ungrateful, ugly creatures home, Marianne.” She was looking at Adrian.

“Selina, you know better than to open one of my holding cages!” Marianne rushed over. “He’s gone! You’ve driven him away and he’ll never come back.”

Adrian eyed the folly’s lattice, thinking the hungry cat would first bound in that direction. No. It wanted hiding and escape; hunger came later, just as it had for him. He turned to where he’d seen the girlish ghost and saw even the rabbit had bounded out of sight. Scanning the bushes, he spotted the gray stripped cat clinging high in a hawthorn tree, only feet from jumping atop the wall and down into unfenced countryside.

Adrian could climb the tree, but he needed to cut off the cat’s escape route before he could force it back down to the grounds.

“Bring the cage,” he called to Marianne.

Selina was indignant. “A footman ordering a lady?”

Marianne obeyed immediately. Adrian flung himself up a neighboring tree, working through brittle, sharp branches as he pressed against the wall, ever climbing, until the cat started to back down the precarious limb toward the trunk.

Once up there, Adrian glimpsed the brown and green misty land rolling toward the gray horizon. He could jump over the wall and disappear into whatever fate he could find elsewhere.

He looked back to Marianne’s anxious face below, watching him and the cat with equal distress. His abrupt lunge toward the cat had its three legs scrabbling back down the trunk. Marianne caught it, still three feet above the ground, and plunked it into the cage, her coat protecting her from the churning claws.

Adrian stayed where he was. Pitt had promised that, if he bested his forebear by despoiling a virgin, Hell would be his, and he would like it. If he eloped with Marianne, he’d have to do a hell of a lot of good deeds to earn Heaven. If either of them existed. All this could be delusion.

Grabbing one thorny branch after another, he bounded to the ground.

“Your hands look cat-clawed,” Marianne said, dismayed. “I’ll treat you inside.”

Selina was staring daggers at them, and had likely released the cat out of spite.

“How wonderful,” Marianne told him, “you could get poor Tricorn down.”

“Simple,” he said, with an expression he realized was rare to him: a smile. “A cat is a contrary creature. The more you chase it, the farther it will run, and the less you try to lure it, the closer it will come.” This time
he
was staring at Selina.

***

Adrian’s next duty was stand by with Heggs to serve the family at a mouth-watering Boxing Day breakfast of rashers of bacon and sausage and potatoes.
Wait.
He was hungering for
food
.
He could actually feel things; thorns hurt, tenderness healed.

Marianne praised his cat-retrieving exploit at the table and Papa cast him an approving glance.

Boxing Day was not the Christmas Day celebrated in the modern media. Only a few neighboring guests joined the family for mid-day dinner. As a footman, Adrian was able to “salt” the stolen snuffboxes around the drawing room for the cleaning staff to find before the owners even missed them.

Adrian joined Heggs at attention on either end of the buffet, observing the merriment. Punch flowed, as it had the previous evening. Adrian’s high was watching Marianne in a tissue-thin red gown that swayed and clung to her figure in dizzying turn.

“You sly puss,” Sir Pinchot Farthingay, well in his cups, addressed her in the drawing room later. “Scandal indeed. Our legs were pulled and our eyes wool-blinded. What a fine jest you’ve made this Christmas.”

“I’m sorry?” Marianne said.

Sir Pinchot wagged a crooked finger. “No denying it, Miss. I’ve seen through the disguise. This will be the talk of Pall Mall. I should have known no sane girl would jilt a peer of the realm.”

“Please, Sir Pinchot,” Mama wailed from the sofa, sending the spaniels into flight. “Do not speak of the unspeakable. My daughter’s disgrace—”

“Is a hoax. Did you think I wouldn’t see through it? I am the most perceptive person in my circle.”

A silence fell. Apparently Sir Pinchot’s self-evaluation was not universally recognized.

“This fellow here,” he pointed at Adrian. “He is no footman.”

No one spoke. How could they deny it?

“In fact,” the man went on, “he is a horribly
bad
footman. I’ve never seen such a bungling fellow in a house of presumed first water.”

More silence. This insulted the family and staff, which mattered far more than Adrian. In fact, he felt more embarrassed for them than himself.

Selena finally spoke. “That is because of Marianne with her selfish, selfish ways; too good for a well-connected lord, but not too good for a footman!”

“Selina!” Mama cried out in shock. “Marianne, is this true?”

“I’m sure not.” Papa looked for denial from Marianne, who was blushing to match her gown and looked about to make a fiery speech.

“Of course it is true,” Sir Pinchot said, winking and lifting his punch cup, “and we should toast the happy couple.”

With a shriek, Mama swooned, but couldn’t resist opening one eye to peek. The spaniels circled the sofa, barking. Adrian stepped forward to do, say something.

Sir Pinchot pointed at him. “There, you see. The uncommon height.”

True, men in this time were all shorter than he.

“The profile.”

True, despite low birth, he had avoided the French and English excess of nose.

“And the way he looks at her. Only a donkey would miss the signs.”

Gasps were now audible. Marianne took a deep and most flattering breath. Adrian opened his mouth to deny anything and everything.

“Clearly,” Sir Pinchot said, narrowing his eyes, “if you shorn the hair and styled it à la Beau Brummel, then swathed the neck in more than that modest ascot, you would have Adrian Ashworth, Lord Heathford, standing before you in proper guise. Why the devil the young couple concocted this charade, I don’t know, but no engagement was broken.”

“It’s true.” Marianne was smiling as she came to Adrian’s side, all false docility. “Dear Adrian had a terrible accident while driving his perch phaeton last Christmas.”

So a perch phaeton was a buggy-whip era hot rod . . .

“He broke a limb and lost his memory. He’s been at his country estate gravely out of his senses, until recently, when his memory began to return. We decided he should rejoin polite company in disguise, to see if that stimulated his memory. He will have to relearn many things, but is well on the way to being fully himself again.”

Mama herself was fully conscious again. “So, Marianne, you will indeed wed a lord. Selina, stop pouting and sit up straight. You must be on your best behavior to obtain your own happy future. This has been the most amazing Boxing Day. Everything that is wrong is now right.”

Cheers and glasses were raised as Marianne led Adrian into the family circle and sat him beside her on a couch.

Near the fireplace, a blazing reflection seemed to be a small girl all in dazzling white, even to her beautiful long hair. The upright frills on her pinafore shoulders resembled small wings. Her transparent image still pulsed in and out of focus; half the time she was indeed Lucy. Adrian understood then that Lucy was indeed gone in his own time, had died as a child. Maybe limbo was a place where the innocent went when there was no one on earth to love and miss them.

Meanwhile, Adrian felt so gobsmacked by this turn of fate he was just happy that the yapping spaniels, not he, had messed the carpet.

***

Since the servants were honored on Boxing Day, Adrian insisted on occupying the butler’s pantry again. A lordly bedchamber would be prepared for him tomorrow.

Besides, he wanted time alone to understand his past and future.

So he lay in the candlelight fighting hot, childish tears for Lucy and his other, hopefully surviving siblings, whom he’d never see again. He understood Lucy had wanted him to have “a second chance,” and wondered how the real Lord Heathford was doing in Adrian’s former place and time. At least, he’d start addicted to nothing but snuff.

He wondered if that Adrian would ruin a virgin and opt for Hell, and if he himself would ever get a hot shower in this world.

A soft knock came on the door.

He rose to open it, sure of the incoming silks and scent.

Marianne rushed into his arms. “We forgot to give the new footman his Boxing Day gift,” she said breathlessly.

“Your hands are empty,” he pointed out, because they were curled tight into his shirt.

She pushed off the long lacy white cloak to reveal a long, semi-transparent white gown that spoke well of nightwear in this era. A wide crimson sash was tied in an immense bow beneath her breasts.

“I’m your Boxing Day present. Unwrap me.”

“This can’t be proper.”

“I certainly hope it isn’t.”

“You know I’m not really . . . him.”

“Of course. You are somewhat like, but not definitively so. Thank God for Sir Pinchot and his near-sighted, wine-loving notions.”

“You must wonder who and what I am.”

“We can discuss that later. I’m more interested in wondering what you plan to do with me now, for how long, where and when over and over forever. And what I can call you during it. ”

“Actually, it
is
Adrian. Adrian Arthur. When did you develop this mad . . . addiction?”

“When I first saw you soaking wet in the hay.”

Shocked, he held her away.

She sighed and shrugged, her eyes simmering. “You were the finest figure of a man I ever saw.”

“Why, you lusty little wench. . . .” He pulled a bow end loose and gathered his Christmas present close along the length of him, every length of him. “I can’t stick a society wedding. Can we go to this Gretel Green place and marry there?”

“Of course, we can. You are the newly eccentric Lord Heathford. You’ll have to cut your hair into the idiotic fashionable curls that will testify to your identity, but soon after you can grow it and wear it tied back the way I like it.”

“Am I to do everything the way you like it?”

“Everything.”

“I suppose Lord Heathford has a huge country estate?” he asked.

“Immense.”

“With room for the construction of a great number of follies for a great number of abandoned creatures?”

“What a wonderful idea.”

“And he is wealthy?”

“Beyond measure.”

“So I should be able to finance help for the poor on more than one day a year?” Adrian asked. “Even every day?”

“Certainly.”

He pulled her even closer. “First, I must tell you how much I love you, Marianne, and prove it. Only for you would I tolerate that awful haircut even for a moment.”

And Pitt could go to Hell.

Introduction to
“A Countess for Christmas”

We close the volume with one of my favorite traditions of the season: a perfect Regency Christmas story.

Booklist
calls Anthea Lawson “a new star of Historical Romance,” and it’s easy to see why. Her evocative and sometimes spicy romances go back and forth between the Regency era and the Victorian era. Her first novel,
Passionate
, was a finalist for the prestigious Rita Award. She also writes award-winning YA urban fantasy under the name Anthea Sharp.

“Whether in the 19
th
century or our own,” she writes, “everyone experiences both the delight and the stress of the winter holidays. I knew I wanted to write about a heroine valiantly holding everything together, and a hero blind to his own charm, who find their way to the perfect heart of the season.”

She does all that, beautifully.

A Countess for Christmas