Under The Mistletoe (20 page)

“Good night, my lord,” she said, her eyes on a level with his neckcloth. And she moved hastily into the dressing room and closed the door behind her even as he prepared to take her hand to raise to his lips.

He was glad then that she had not given him a chance to do it. She was, after all, merely a servant. What was her first name? he wondered. He hoped it was something more fortunate than her surname. Though it was of no concern to him. He would never have reason either to know it or to use it.

 

Jane helped Veronica get dressed the following morning and brushed her curls into a pretty style while the child sat very still on a stool, her legs dangling over its edge. They were breakfasting together in the nursery when Mrs. Dexter, the viscount's housekeeper, arrived there to ask Miss Craggs what her orders were regarding the Christmas baking and cooking.

“What my orders are?” Jane asked, bewildered. “Should you not be consulting his lordship, Mrs. Dexter?”

“He said I should come to you, miss,” the housekeeper said, looking somewhat dubious. “He said that whatever you wanted was to be supplied.”

Oh, dear.
He really meant what he had said last night, then. She was to do whatever she wanted to celebrate Christmas. The thought was dizzying when at the age of three-and-twenty she never had celebrated the season. She was to have a free hand?

“Where is his lordship?” she asked.

“He has gone visiting with Miss Deborah, miss,” the housekeeper said. “He said you were to wait until this afternoon to gather greenery so that he can help you carry it.”

“Oh, dear,” Jane said. “What is usually cooked for Christmas, Mrs. Dexter?”

The housekeeper raised her eyebrows. “Anything that will not remind his lordship that it is Christmas,” she said. “The cook threatens every year to resign, miss, but she stays on. It is unnatural not to have a goose and mince pies, at the very least.”

Goose and mince pies. The very thought of them was enough to set Jane's mouth to watering. “Perhaps,” she said, “I should go down to the kitchen and consult the cook.”

“Yes, miss,” Mrs. Dexter said. But she paused as she was about to leave the room. “It is time Christmas came back to this house. It has been too long gone. And it needs to be celebrated when there is a child in the house, poor little mite.” She nodded in Veronica's direction.

Jane wondered what had happened to banish Christmas from Cosway. She could not imagine anyone's deliberately deciding not to celebrate it. She looked at Veronica and smiled.

“Shall we go down to the kitchen and talk to Cook?” she asked.

The child nodded and got down from her stool to hold out her hand for Jane's. Jane, taking it in hers and feeling its soft smallness, wondered if there could be a greater happiness in life.

The cook was so overjoyed at the prospect of Christmas baking
that Jane found she did not need to make any suggestions at all. She merely sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and approved every suggestion made. The cook lifted Veronica to the table, placed a large, shiny apple in her hand, and clucked over her and talked about the delight of having a child in the house again.

“I do not care what side of the blanket she was born on, if you take my meaning, miss,” she said to Jane. “She is a child, and children have a right to a home and a right to be loved. Chew carefully, ducky. You do not want to choke on a piece.”

Veronica obediently chewed carefully.

“It will do his heart good to have her here,” the cook said, jerking her head toward the ceiling. “He does not love easy, miss, and when he do, his heart is easy to break.”

Jane could not resist. “Was his heart broken once?” she asked.

The cook clucked her tongue. “By his childhood sweetheart,” she said. “You never saw a man so besotted, miss, though she were a flighty piece, if you was to ask me. Their betrothal was to be announced on Christmas Day here at a big party. A big secret it was supposed to be, but we all knew it, miss. And then halfway through the evening, just when his lordship were excited enough to burst, a stranger who had come home with her brother a month before stood up and announced
his
betrothal to her. And she smiled at him as sweet as you please without so much as a guilty glance at our boy—or at her papa, who was as weak as water, as far as she was concerned. Six years ago it was, miss. His heart don't heal easy. But this is one to mend any heart.”

She nodded at Veronica, who had spotted a cat curled beside the fire and had wriggled off the table to go and kneel beside it and reach out gingerly to pat its fur. The cut purred with contentment.

“A blessed Christmas gift she is for any man,” the cook said.

Yes.
Jane remembered sitting alone with him in the library last evening. She alone with a man! And talking with him. Being consulted on what he should do with his daughter. And having the temerity to give her opinion and her suggestions. She would have expected to have been quite tongue-tied in a man's presence. But she had made a discovery about this particular man. He was not the infallible figure of authority she had thought all men were. He was an ordinary human being who did not have all of life's answers or even the most obvious of them.

He did not know that all his child needed—all!—was love. The love of her father. And he did not know that good, docile behavior in
a child did not necessarily denote a happy child. He had turned to her, Jane, for help. Even a man could need her in some small way for one small moment of time.

It was the thought she had hugged to herself in bed. And also the memory of how it had felt to touch him. To feel his strongly muscled, unmistakably male arm with her own. To smell the unfamiliar odor of male cologne. To feel the body heat of a man only inches away from her own body. And to know that the yearning she had suffered and suppressed in herself for years had a definite cause. It was the yearning for a man, for his approval and his support and companionship. And for something else, too. She did not know quite what that something else was except that outside her dressing room, when he had stopped and thanked her for coming and for giving her attention to Veronica, she had felt suffocated. She had felt that there was no air in the corridor.

She had felt the yearning for . . . for
him.
She still could not express the need less vaguely than that.

And so she had fled into her room like a frightened rabbit.

“And there.” The cook's hand patting her shoulder felt strangely comforting. There had been so few physical touches in her life. “He would be a blessed Christmas gift for some lady too, missy.”

But you are not a lady, Craggs.
She heard again the words that had been spoken in the homework room just two days before. No, she was no lady. She smiled and got to her feet.

“You are going to be busy if you are to make everything you have suggested,” she said. “Oh, I can hardly wait for all the smells and all the tastes. I can hardly wait for Christmas.”

The cook chuckled. “It will come, miss, as it always does,” she said.

But it had never come before. This would be her first-ever Christmas. She could scarcely wait. At the same time, she wanted to savor every moment as it came. They were to gather greenery during the afternoon, she and Veronica and perhaps Deborah. And Lord Buckley was to come to help carry the loads.

Veronica was sitting cross-legged on the stone floor, smoothing the cat's fur.

 

He could not quite believe that this was himself. Himself up a tree, balanced precariously on a branch, feeling hot and disheveled and dusty. His boots, he was sure, though he did not look down at them, must be in a condition to give his valet heart palpitations. Below him Miss Craggs stood with arms partly spread as if to catch him if he fell,
Deborah had her hands to her mouth and was alternately squealing and giggling, and Veronica was gazing gravely upward.

“Miss Craggs believes that in addition to all the holly we have gathered and all the pine boughs we have cut down we need some mistletoe,” he had said to his daughter a short while before. “What do you think, Veronica? Do we need mistletoe?”

“Yes, please, Papa,” she had said.

And Deborah had giggled—she had started giggling during their morning visits and had scarcely stopped since—and had added her voice to everyone else's. It just would not be Christmas, it seemed, unless there was some mistletoe hanging in strategic places so that one might be caught beneath it accidentally on purpose.

She here he was up a tree.

And then down with a sizable armful of mistletoe and a tear on the back of one kid glove and a scrape so deep on the inside of his left boot that it would never be the same again.

And all in the name of Christmas.

“Do you know why I have risked life and limb just to gather this?” he asked Veronica, frowning.

“Because Miss Jane wanted it?” she asked.

Jane.
He might have guessed that she would have such a name. And yet it suited her. It was quietly, discreetly pretty.

“Not at all,” he said. “This is what it is used for.” He held one sprig above the absurd hat, which Nancy had doubtless thought suitably flamboyant for the daughter of an actress, stooped down, and kissed her soft, cold little cheek. And took himself quite by surprise. Now why had he done that?

“Any gentleman has the right to kiss any lady he catches beneath the mistletoe,” he said, “without fear of having his face slapped. It is a Christmas custom. You see?” And he straightened up and repeated the action with Deborah, who giggled. “Now we have to carry all this greenery back to the house.”

“What about Miss Jane?” a grave little voice asked him.

And he knew he was caught. Caught in the act of maneuvering. For when he had demonstrated the use of mistletoe on his daughter and his niece, he had really wanted to use Miss Craggs as his model. Even though she was prim and gray and every inch the schoolteacher. Though that was not the whole truth this afternoon. Since they had left the house there had been a light in her eyes that had touched him. She was enjoying all this just like a child.

“Oh, it works with Miss Craggs, too,” he said, turning to her and
raising his sprig of mistletoe again. And he felt suddenly and stupidly breathless. She was standing very still and wide-eyed.

He kissed her lightly and briefly, as he had kissed the other two. Except that foolishly he kissed her on the lips. And ended up feeling even hotter than his excursion up the tree had made him.

She turned hurriedly away before their eyes could meet and began energetically arranging the heap of holly they had gathered into three bundles.

“Here, Veronica,” he said, “you may carry the mistletoe, since it will not prick you all to pieces. Deborah, take that bundle of holly. I'll take this one.”

His hand brushed Miss Craggs's as he gathered up the largest bundle and belatedly their eyes met. Her own were still large and bright. Brighter. Was it the cold that had brought the tears there? Or was it the kiss? Surely she had been kissed before. Surely that had not been her first kiss.

Had it? Once again he wondered about her past, about her life. Impoverished parents and the need to go out and make her own living? But she had not been planning to go home for Christmas.

“I will send someone back with a wagon for the pine boughs,” he said.

“ ‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly,' ” Deborah sang suddenly with loud enthusiasm and no musical talent whatsoever.

“ ‘Fa la la la la la la la la,' ” Miss Craggs sang with her in a rather lovely contralto voice.

“ ‘Tis the season to be jolly.' ” He joined his tenor voice to their singing and looked down at Veronica.

“ ‘Fa la la la la la la la la.' ” She piped up with them, off-key.

“ ‘Don we now our gay apparel.' ” Three of them sang out lustily while the fourth continued with the fa-la-las.

And the damned thing was, Viscount Buckley thought, that it could grab at one quite unawares. Christmas, that was.

 

Jane had never been very assertive, even as a teacher. She had never been the type who liked to boss and organize people. And yet over the next couple of days she seemed to be transformed into a wholly different person.

It was she who directed the decorating of the house—of drawing room, staircase, and hall. The viscount had suggested that the servants could do it, but she had exclaimed in horror and disappointment before she could stop herself, and he had meekly agreed that perhaps they could do it themselves, the four of them.

“But I have no eye for design, Miss Craggs,” he had told her. “You will have to tell us what you want.”

And she had told them. She stood in the middle of the drawing room giving orders like a sergeant with a company of soldiers. Boughs and sprigs and wreaths were hung exactly where and exactly how she directed, and if she did not like the look of them when the deed was done, then she directed their replacement. And everyone obeyed, even the viscount, who was given all the climbing to do. He balanced on chairs and tables and ladders in his shirtsleeves, decking out pictures and mirrors and door frames while she stood critically below him, head to one side, examining the effects of his handiwork and criticizing any slight error on his part.