What a Lady Needs for Christmas (21 page)

“Which brings us back to our first order of business,” Mary Ellen said. “You’re getting married in a week’s time, and everybody will come up from Edinburgh to look over this Mr. Hartwell. You’ll need a dress.”

Joan thought of her lucky dress, the one she’d designed and designed. The one she sketched in low moments, the one she saved for thinking about on bleak days and in black moods.

“There isn’t time to make up something new,” she said. “One of the qualities I treasure most about Mr. Hartwell is that he understands appearances for what they are—stage trappings rather than substance.”

“Please don’t inform Mama that appearances are of no consequence,” Dora said. “She’s confused on the matter. Mary Ellen’s right, though. On your wedding day, you need a dress. For Mr. Hartwell’s sake if not your own.”

Dora, blast her, was not wrong.

“You need a dress,” Dora reiterated, grinning, “and we’re your sisters. You have to let us help you make it.”

“Both of us,” Mary Ellen said. “We’ll forbid Dora to go near the coffeepot, and have Lady Balfour muster reinforcements if we need them. Hester would help, and Lady Balfour might as well. Between the ladies assembled here, we could sew you anything your heart desired.”

How happy Mary Ellen was to contemplate this project.

And despite Joan’s anxiety over the marriage, her fury at Edward, and her contempt for her own behavior—also her worry over the wedding night—how relieved Joan was to have her sisters’ support.

Though for once, her heart’s desire had nothing to do with sewing or fabric.

“I have some ideas, but they need refining.”

“Come here, Mary El.” Dora patted the bed. “I excel at refining.”

“And so modest,” Mary Ellen said, climbing onto the bed. Joan scooted to the foot of the bed, back supported by a bedpost, sketch pad open on her lap. They spent an hour strategizing, until Dora threw the first pillow, and the second.

Before the room was coated in feathers—as had once happened when Joan was eleven—Joan had come up with a lovely, simple gown that could be made up in the time remaining. She sent her sisters on their way, tidied up the bed, and tried to calculate the fabric estimates, but made little progress.

Tears, it seemed, were also to be her newfound companions. Joan had just balled up Edward’s infernal note, intent on pitching it into the fire, when a quiet knock sounded at her door.

Ten

“Let’s be honest, Margs,” Hector said. “If you don’t want to spend time in my company, then I’ll take one of the nursery maids along when the children and I fetch the post tomorrow.”

His casual suggestion had Margaret bolting off the sofa as if a ghost had joined her in the library.

“Good evening, Hector.” She’d been embroidering, peacocks or doves, something pretty and shimmery. By firelight, her birds seemed to flutter amid leafy green silk-thread boughs.

“Shall I light you to your bedroom, Margaret?” He’d had to lie in wait among the gentlemen in the parlor before tracking her here when the rest of the house was abed. For that much effort, a man deserved some reward.

“No, thank you. Would you rather I sent a nursery maid with the children to the village?”

He’d rather she left the children at home, rather she didn’t sit them between the adults every damned time Hector took the sleigh to the posting inn, rather she didn’t hover by the couch like a hare ready to bolt from cover when the hounds came too close.

“You should do as you please, Margaret. That was the point of my comment.”

The point of his comment had been to provoke her into assuring him she loved spending time with him and wished he’d go into the village every day rather than every other.

When pigs danced the Highland fling.

She drew in a breath, which did agreeable things to her bodice. “The children benefit from—”

Hector took four steps closer, close enough to see the fatigue in Margaret’s eyes. Firelight was usually flattering to women, softening signs of age, but the flickering shadows made Margaret look more like a shade than herself.

“You’re up early with the weans each morning,” he said, “then you put yourself at Lady Balfour’s beck and call. At meals you barely say anything, and in the afternoons, you pretend you have correspondence to tend to if I don’t get you out of this monument to dead pine boughs and holiday cheer. You’re miserable, Margaret Hartwell, and I cannot abide that. If I’m making you more miserable, then you must say so.”

Women comfortable with their needle had a competence of the hands that fascinated Hector, as if they played a musical instrument, except the result was pretty colors instead of notes in the air. Margaret opened her embroidery hoop and anchored her needle in a corner of the fabric. She folded the peacocks and doves away in neat, precise movements, so all the lovely birds were hidden from view, and a confusion of colored threads showed on the back of the fabric.

“The children need to get outside,” she said. “Dante is busy wooing his investors and future in-laws, and I can barely keep straight the names of all the people we sit down to meals with.”

Hector took the cloth bag into which she’d stuffed her stitching, and set it on the desk behind him. “The children will be fine. What do
you
need?”

The question baffled her, and that drove him…that drove him to distraction. Margaret Hartwell, whether she knew it or not, was what had held Dante’s small family together in recent years. That she’d be uncertain in any regard was untenable.

“Dante is taking a wife,” Margaret said in the same tones she might have reported fading eyesight or the loss of some other precious faculty. “Lady Joan is wonderful with the children, and she’ll be a much better guide for Charlie than I could ever be. I like her, and she’ll be good for Dante.”

Insight struck, welcome and startling. “You want to hate Lady Joan. So do I.”

“Not hate her…only resent her. This is very bad of me, for Joan is a good woman.”

He’d come in here looking for a reckoning, and had found so much more—he’d found something he alone had in common with Margaret.

“You’re worried about your brother,” Hector said, taking Margaret by the hand and leading her to the desk. One didn’t sit on desks in the households of earls, but one didn’t stand on ceremony when wooing a lady, either. Hector hiked himself onto the desk, then patted the place on the blotter beside him.

For Margaret, the maneuver wasn’t exactly graceful—she was substantially shorter than Hector, but with his help, she managed.

“I
am
fretting about Dante,” Margaret said, studying her slippered feet. “I’m worried about the children, and I’m worried about
me
. I should not burden you with my silly anxieties.”

No honest, untitled Scot lived far from the fear of homelessness, but Margaret’s fears went deeper, and Hector hadn’t even suspected she harbored them.

Paper crackled under Hector’s kilt as he shifted two inches closer, though he cared not if he sat upon the Christmas Eve menu or a draft of somebody’s Last Will and Testament.

“You will always be welcome in your brother’s household, Margaret, welcome and loved.”

“So you say now, but soon Dante and Joan will start their own family, and dear old Aunt Margs will be towed along on family outings, invited to dinner parties at the last minute to make up the numbers. Who will speak to the women at the mills when they’re too shy to bring their concerns to Dante? Who will remind Dante that his children go for days without seeing him? Who will keep an eye on Charlie’s governesses and Phillip’s tutors? Lady Joan is all that is kind, but—”

“The women in the mills can talk to me.”

Though they typically did not. For the most part, Hector and the mill employees moved on opposite sides of the business’s owner, and kept a wary, respectful distance from one another.

“They won’t, though. Now that Dante has taken a wife, he will turn her loose on
me
. Joan will expect me to attend balls and teas, and wear fancy dresses, and Dante will be hopeful, when he recalls he has a sister, that Joan will succeed in making a lady of me. All for my sake, of course.”

Part of Hector wanted to slap a hand over her mouth and roar at her that she need put up with none of that, that she was a woman of dignity and substance, and could control her own fate.

The other part of him had seen enough negotiations to know a more subtle course was called for.

“If you’re confiding these worries to me, you must be very upset.”

He was upset too, because sooner or later, one of the prancing ninnies frequenting the Edinburgh ballrooms would see what a treasure Margaret Hartwell was. She had the gift of managing without being seen doing it. Her visits to the mills were to take Dante his lunch, to put a bouquet on his desk, to count the number of Christmas baskets needed for the employees each year.

And yet, she knew the names of many of the women and girls employed at the mills, knew who was cousin to whom, and who was walking to church with the tobacconist’s son. Hector had heard her passing along this information to her brother, making suggestions—suggestions only, of course—regarding promotions, and even which women would not work well together.

“I am upset,” Margaret said, “and I fear I’ve taken out some of my ill temper on you.”

Oh, he wanted to kiss her for that—he always wanted to kiss her, but particularly when she was being brave and honest, and
Margaret
.

Hector tucked his hands under his thighs and hunched forward. “You’re right to be concerned for your brother, for your family. This marriage…”

Margaret hopped off the desk, which was probably prudent of her. “Dante is not in love, and while I’m sure Lady Joan deserves a man who loves her, Dante deserves a woman who loves him too. Rowena didn’t, not at first. He was her unpaid mill foreman, and a way to have children.”

Margaret had a temper, and Hector would love to see it unleashed someday—though not at him.

“They muddled along well enough, eventually.” Though Dante had confided that he’d been relieved when the children arrived, because Rowena’s expectations in the bedroom were no longer an issue in the marriage.

Rowena Shatner—Rowena Hartwell—had had inflexible notions about schedules, and about the universe running to the timetable she preferred.

“I didn’t blame Rowena, of course,” Margaret said softly. “If I could have a mill of my own and children, I’d marry a decent, hardworking man to get them.”

“You’re allowed to want those things, Margaret Hartwell.” Though the part about the mill came as a surprise. “I wish I could give them to you.”

She peered at him, as if somebody had misplaced the objectionable Hector, and some other fellow shared this late night tête-à-tête with her.

“You hide your sweetness almost as well as Dante does. I’m sorry I’ve been out of sorts.”

“You’ve been nearly panicked.” He couldn’t give her a mill, and without benefit of matrimony, he wouldn’t give her children.

But he
could
give her something to think about.

“When you go to bed tonight, consider what you want, Margaret Hartwell. You see your brother’s marriage as cutting you off from the role you’ve loved, but it also frees you to pursue those fellows who can give you mills and children.”

Which number did not include Hector. The pain of that should have been expected, and yet, it reverberated through him like the bells that would toll throughout the shire on Christmas morning.

For a long moment, Margaret studied the fire, saying nothing.

She was a pretty woman, though not in the striking, impressive manner of a Lady Joan. Margaret’s beauty was soft, sweet, and subtle, but it would age wonderfully.

“Off to bed with you, now,” Hector said, rising from the desk and joining her in the warmth nearer the hearth. “You’ll go with me on tomorrow’s jaunt into town?”

Because a doomed man was entitled to worship from whatever proximity he might torment himself with.

She nodded, and Hector ordered his feet to move. A fine old English tradition spared him the effort when Margaret left off studying the fire to peer up at him.

“Thank you, Hector, for listening to me. For not laughing, for not dismissing me.” She kissed him, a somewhat awkward undertaking, because he was a foot taller than she, and slow to appreciate his good fortune. Margaret had to haul herself up his chest by bracing one hand on his shoulder and anchoring the other at his nape.

Once she arrived to her destination, however, she at least permitted Hector time to be shocked and pleased, and—more important, to wrap his arms around her and kiss her back.

And then to kiss her back some more.

***

“Mr. Hartwell.” Lady Joan’s posture and tone suggested she was surprised to find Dante standing at her bedroom door. The peculiar shine in her eyes suggested she was also unhappy, maybe on the same general account.

Well, so was he. In three days’ time, they’d remove to Aberdeen, and the next day, they would marry. Tonight was possibly Dante’s last chance to be private with his intended before they took their vows.

If
they took them.

“May I come in? Should your brother find me lurking by your door, he’ll do me bodily injury at least, or worse, lecture me to death.”

“Tiberius believes in the proprieties,” Joan said, stepping back.

“He does,” Dante said as he slipped into her room, “unless he thinks he’s unobserved with his countess beneath the mistletoe.”

Then his lordship was a lusty English fiend—an encouraging revelation, that.

The door clicked closed behind him. “Does your call have a purpose, Mr. Hartwell?”

Mr. Hartwell. Something in Dante
wilted
at her crisp question. He took her hand—her fingers were cool—and tugged her over to the fainting couch.

“Yes, my visit has a purpose. We’re a courting couple. I have it on good authority that we’re entitled to sneak behind a few hedges as the nuptials approach, though hedges are in short supply at this time of year.”

And her infernal brother, her two sisters, or even her flighty mama seemed to lurk behind every one.