Under The Mistletoe (2 page)

“Yes, thank you,” she said. Her chin rose a notch, and she suddenly looked arrogant as well as cold. “We decided to have a family Christmas here. All the members of my family arrived yesterday.”

What? Good Lord!
Without any consultation with him? Was he to have been even informed? How disastrous his own decision to come home at such short notice must have seemed to his wife and her family. How disastrous it seemed to him! If he could, he would have
turned and left the house without further ado and ridden away back to London.
All
her family? He had never even met most of them. Their wedding had been a fair-sized affair, but apart from Lord and Lady Templar and their son and daughter-in-law, all the guests had been his family and his friends and his father's. He could not leave now, though.

He
would
not leave. This was, after all
his
home.

“I will meet and welcome them to Wyldwood later,” he said. “But first I would like to go to the nursery. Will you come there with me?”

“Of course.” She turned to accompany him through the arch to the staircase. She clasped her hands gracefully in front of her, discouraging him from offering his arm.

“How many guests?” he asked as they ascended the stairs. He could hear the chill in his own voice. He had never been able to inject warmth into it when speaking with his wife. How could one hold a warm conversation with an icicle?

“Thirty-two adults altogether,” she said. “Thirty-three now.”

He winced inwardly. Under different circumstances he might have felt some amusement over the realization that he had made the numbers odd. Doubtless his wife and his mother-in-law had planned meticulously in order to ensure even numbers. He would even be willing to wager that of the other thirty-two adults sixteen were gentlemen and sixteen ladies, even though normally one would not expect a family to fall into such a neat pattern.

He was surprised when he opened the nursery door and stood to one side to allow his wife to precede him inside. He had expected a hush appropriate for a sleeping baby. Instead there was a noisy, cheerful hubbub. But of course—there must be children as well as adults in her family. There was a vast number of the former, it seemed, all rushing about at play, all talking—or, rather, yelling—at once. A few nurses were supervising, but by no means subduing them.

Several of the children stopped what they were doing to see who was coming in. A few of them came closer, and a copper-haired, freckled little boy demanded to know who Edwin was.

“You must remember to mind your manners, Charles,” Elizabeth said, nevertheless showing a human touch by ruffling the hair of the offender. “This is your . . . uncle. Charles is Bertie's eldest,” she explained, naming her brother. She identified the other children in the group, all of them cousins or the children of cousins.

“What is
your
name?” Charles asked.

“Charles!”
Elizabeth exclaimed, sounding embarrassed.

But Edwin held up a hand. “Have you noticed,” he asked, winking at the boy, “that when a lad does not know something he ought to know, adults invariably tell him he should have asked? Yet when he does ask, he is treated as if he had been impertinent?”

“Ye-e-es!” The children were all in loud agreement, and Edwin grinned at them all.

“He is Uncle . . . Edwin,” Elizabeth explained.

There was a chorus of requests that Uncle Edwin come and play with them. He held up a staying hand again, chuckling as he did so. Almost all his closest friends had young families, who for some inexplicable reason always saw him as a potential playmate. His friends claimed that it happened because he was still a child at heart. He liked children.

“Tomorrow,” he promised. “We will play so hard that you will not have to be told to go to bed in the evening. In fact, you will beg your nurses to let you go there.”

There was a swell of derisive denials. Charles, who was obviously something of a leader, snorted.

“It is a promise,” Edwin told them. “But today I have come to see a certain baby by the name of Jeremy, who is mine. Has anyone seen him running around here, by any chance?” He looked around him with a frown of concentration.

“Nah,” a plump little boy told him, the utmost contempt in his voice. “He's just a
baby
.”

“I wanted to play with him,” a little girl added, “but he had to go to sleep. Is he yours? He is Aunt Lizzie's too.”

Elizabeth led the way to a room beyond the nursery.

“You ought not to have said that about tomorrow,” she said with quiet reproach. “They will be disappointed when you do not keep your promise. Children do not forget, you know.”

He did not answer. The room was quiet and in semidarkness with the curtains drawn across the window. But the baby was not asleep. Edwin could hear him cooing and could see him waving his fists in the air as he lay on his back in his crib. His eyes focused on his father when Edwin stepped closer. Edwin swallowed hard and was glad that his wife was standing well behind him. He had ached for this moment for almost three months.

Being separated from his child was the most bitter experience of his life. He had considered a number of schemes for bringing him closer, including buying a second house in London for Elizabeth to live in. But there would be too many awkward questions if he and his
wife both lived in London but not together. Yet it seemed somehow impossible to set his family up in his own London home, formerly his father's, even though it was large and tastefully decorated and furnished and well staffed and situated in a fashionable part of town. It was, nevertheless, well known as the home of a prosperous merchant.

“He has grown,” Edwin said.

“Of course. You have not seen him for almost three months.”

Was it an accusation?

“He has lost much of his hair,” he said.

“That is natural,” she told him. “It will grow back.”

“Do you still . . . nurse him?” He could remember his surprise when her mother and the doctor had been united in their protest against her decision not to hire a wet nurse. It was one issue on which she had held out against her mother's will.

“Yes.”

She made no move to pick up the child, who admittedly seemed happy enough where he was. Edwin longed to do so himself, but he was afraid even to touch him.

“He looks healthy enough,” he said.

Why was it that with Elizabeth words never came naturally to him, and that the ones he chose to speak were stiff and banal? They had never had a conversation. They had been bedfellows for two weeks he would prefer to forget—she had been a cold, unresponsive, sacrificial lamb beneath him on the bed each night—but they had remained awkward, near-silent strangers.

“You will wish to go to your room,” she informed him. “Will you join us for tea later?”

“I believe I will forgo the pleasure of meeting our guests until dinnertime,” he told her.

She nodded. Even through the cold impassivity of her face he thought he could detect her relief. He gestured to the door so that she would precede him. He did not offer his arm.

It had been a mistake to come—and that was a colossal understatement. He should have stayed in London, where he had had numerous invitations to spend the holiday with friends whose company he found congenial and in whose presence he could relax and be himself. But he had remembered his father and imagined how sad he would be if he could see his son apart from his wife and child at Christmas, just one year after the wedding that had brought all the elderly man's dreams to happy fulfillment.

 

Elizabeth, dressed with greater care than usual in an evening gown of pale blue, a color she knew became her well, went down early to the drawing room before dinner. Even so, Mr. Chambers was there before her, standing before the marble fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back, looking like the master of the house. She was relieved to see that he was clothed severely but immaculately in black and white. Had she expected otherwise? She had never seen him look slovenly or heard him speak in anything other than refined accents. He bowed formally to her and she curtsied. It seemed strange to realize that he had been her husband for longer than a year—and that this was his home.

They had no chance for conversation. The door opened again to admit Lord and Lady Templar and Elizabeth's Aunt Martha and Uncle Randolph.

“Ma'am. Sir,” Mr. Chambers said in greeting to his parents-in-law, bowing courteously. “How do you do?”

“Mr. Chambers,” Lady Templar said with distant hauteur, her hair plumes nodding as she inclined her head. “I trust you are well?”

Elizabeth introduced her aunt and uncle, and Mr. Chambers greeted them with a bow.

“Welcome to Wyldwood,” he said to them. “I am delighted you were able to join Elizabeth and me here for Christmas.”

It was a sentiment he repeated over and over again during the next half hour as the rest of the family came down for dinner. Elizabeth stood beside him, making the introductions and feeling enormous relief. She had feared that he would allow himself to be dominated by her mother, that he would allow her to treat him as a guest—an inferior, uninvited guest. How humiliating that would have been.

He was to be put to a further test, though.

When the butler came to announce that dinner was served, Lord and Lady Templar were close to the door and proceeded to the dining room without delay. Everyone else held back until Mr. Chambers had offered his arm to Aunt Martha and followed them. Elizabeth, on Uncle Randolph's arm, cringed at the discourtesy of her parents' preceding a man in his own home, and hoped there was to be no unpleasant scene.

“Perhaps, sir,” Mr. Chambers said with quiet deference when they entered the dining room, addressing his father-in-law, “you would care to take the place at Elizabeth's right hand at the foot of the table.
Ma'am,” he added, addressing Elizabeth's mother, “will you honor me by sitting to my right at the head of the table?”

With the rest of the family crowding into the room behind them, Elizabeth looked fearfully at her mother, whose bosom was swelling with outrage.

“Lizzie,” she said, ignoring Mr. Chambers, “your papa is the gentleman of highest rank here, and he is head of our family.”

But not of Mr. Chambers's family,
Elizabeth might have pointed out, and perhaps would have if her father had not saved her by exerting his authority—a rare occurrence.

“Take a damper, Gertrude,” he said, and moved off toward the foot of the table.

Lady Templar had no choice then but to proceed in the opposite direction, from which vantage point she displayed her displeasure by ignoring her son-in-law all through dinner and conversing with gracious warmth with Uncle Oswald on her other side. Mr. Chambers conversed with Aunt Martha and Bertie beyond her and looked perfectly composed and agreeable, as if entertaining a tableful of members of the
ton
were something he did every evening of his life.

Had she expected him to be gauche? Certainly she had feared that he might.

He also looked gloriously handsome. Elizabeth, playing the unaccustomed role of hostess in her own home, was nevertheless distracted by the sight of her husband and by the disturbing memories of their two weeks together last year, and wished he had not come to spoil her Christmas and everyone else's—including his own, she did not doubt. At the same time, she regretted the sudden death of his father, whom she had liked. Had he lived, she and Mr. Chambers would very likely not have lived separately for the past year. Perhaps they would have made something workable out of their marriage. She had been quite prepared to make it work. Indeed, she had been eager to move away from her mother's often burdensome influence in order to become mistress of her own home.

And she had fallen in love with Mr. Chambers on sight.

Lady Templar was still bristling with indignation when the ladies withdrew to the drawing room after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their port.

“Well!” she exclaimed. “Of all the impertinence! I must say I am surprised, Lizzie, that you would stand by and watch your father humiliated by a man very far beneath our touch without uttering one word of protest.”

“Shhh, Mama,” Elizabeth said, mortified, since the words had been overheard by her sister-in-law and by all her cousins and aunts. “This
is
Mr. Chambers's own home.” And the man very far beneath their touch was her husband.

“Lizzie!” Her mother's voice quavered with indignation. “Never did I think to live to see the day when you would tell your own mother to hush. And
did
you see what happened, Martha? Did you, Beatrice? When I would have stood, as was perfectly proper given my rank and position in this family, to lead the ladies from the dining room, that man had the effrontery to set four fingers on my arm and nod at
Lizzie
to give the signal.”

Elizabeth was both mortified and distressed. She had never been able to stand up to her mother—not even when informed that she was to be sacrificed in matrimony to a wealthy cit in order to recoup the family fortunes. But Mr. Chambers was her
husband,
and she owed him loyalty more than she did anyone else—including her mother.