A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau (59 page)

Judith returned her attention gratefully to her breakfast and excused herself soon afterward to go to the children in the nursery. They were not at all pleased at the prospect of going home that day. But children were resilient. They would be happy again once they were back in London.

“Papa was the best whip in London,” Rupert told her. “And everybody at Gentleman Jackson’s was afraid to spar with him because he was so handy with his fives.”

Judith smiled. “Mr. Rundle told you a great deal yesterday,” she said.

“No,” he said, “it was not Mr. Rundle who told me. It was Lord Denbigh.”

Judith gave him her full attention.

“Last night,” he said. “He was in here. I was having that dream about Papa. But I won’t be afraid of it anymore, Mama. He says I am to tell those people that the Marquess of Denbigh knew Papa very well indeed and wishes he could have knocked sixes like Papa did. He said you would be asleep.”

“Did he?” Judith said. “And you did not dream anymore afterward?”

Rupert shook his head. “I don’t remember his going,” he said.

Judith had been relieved to find that he was not at breakfast. But she hoped he would not be gone all morning. She wanted to be on her way. She wanted to start on the rest of her life. She hoped that Amy would not be gone long. Or else she hoped that Amy would be gone forever. She had guessed her sister-in-law’s errand from the set look on her face that morning.

If only Amy could come to an understanding with Mr. Cornwell, then something good would have come out of this Christmas after all. And Amy deserved happiness
more than anyone else in the world. More than Judith did. Far more than she did.

She went into her bedchamber and summoned a maid. She sent the girl with a message requesting a private word with his lordship at his convenience. And she sat down in the windowseat, heart thumping, to wait.

O
VER AN HOUR
passed before the summons came. It was amazing, Judith thought as she descended the staircase, shoulders held firmly back, chin high, how resolution could falter in the course of an hour and how knees could weaken and heartbeat accelerate. She had not exchanged a word directly with him since before getting out of his bed at the cottage the afternoon before.

She stepped inside the library and stood still while the footman who had admitted her closed the doors behind her. And her resolution almost fled entirely. He was the Viscount Evendon as she had known him eight years before and the Marquess of Denbigh as she had known him in London a few weeks before. He stood before the fire, one elbow propped on the high mantel, one Hessian boot crossed over the other. His face was harsh, thin-lipped. He looked at her steadily from keen and hooded eyes.

I have summoned the carriage for noon
. Her mouth opened to speak the unplanned words and closed again, the words unsaid.

“It was not a Christmas flirtation,” she said. “It was revenge.”

He said nothing.

“I have asked myself,” she said, “why you would wish to take revenge. Because you were the Viscount Evendon and heir to the Marquess of Denbigh and very high in the instep? But such a man would plan some public humiliation, would he not? You will not be able to boast
of this particular triumph. So your plan for revenge must have had a more personal motive.”

He turned his head sideways to look across the room away from her.

“I think,” she said, “that I must have hurt you. Did I?”

His jaw hardened. He said nothing, though she waited for several silent seconds.

“Whether I did or not,” she said, “I behaved very badly. And that understates the case. I behaved abominably. I could not bring myself to face you at the time because I feared you and because—oh, because everyone under such circumstances, I suppose, is tempted to play the coward and I gave in to the temptation. And I have never been able to face you since over that particular matter, though the guilt has always gnawed at me. I suppose I have persuaded myself that what happened was of no great significance to you.”

She found herself being regarded suddenly by those steel-gray eyes again.

“After yesterday,” she said, “I know that I was wrong. I have come to beg your pardon, inadequate as the words are.”

He laughed, though there was no amusement in the sound. “You still have the power to amaze me,” he said. “I expected that you were coming here to rave at me and accuse, perhaps to demand that I do the decent thing. You ask my forgiveness after what I did to you yesterday?”

“I am right, am I not?” she said. “I did hurt you?”

“I loved you,” he said. “Does it surprise you that a man who had none of the charm or easy manner of an Andrew Easton could love? And feel the pain of rejection? And try for a whole year literally to outrun his pain?”

She swallowed and closed her eyes. “I did not know, Max,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“You are forgiven,” he said shortly. “There, does that make you feel better? Now what must I do to win
your
forgiveness? Marry you? I owe you that after yesterday. Is there a chance that you are with child? Should I summon the rector here to speak with both of us? Or should I ride in to the village alone after luncheon?”

“Max,” she said, “don’t.”

“My apologies,” he said. “You are a romantic, I suppose. You want sweet words and bended knee? Well, you can have them if you wish, Judith.”

She took several steps toward him across the room. “I did not sleep last night,” she said. “I don’t think you did either. Certainly you were awake and not even in your room when Rupert awoke with his usual dream. I did a great deal of thinking last night.”

“You need not have worried,” he said. “I am giving in, you see, without even a fight.”

“I hated you when I left you yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I thought it had all been a plot of revenge. I thought it had all been cold calculation. I thought I had been right about you from the start. But I was wrong. You still love me, don’t you?” She could feel herself flushing, but he was not looking at her. He had turned his head away again and set his forefinger against his mouth.

“Perhaps you did not hear my words,” he said, “or fully comprehend their true meaning.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Loud and clear. But they were just words, spoken at the end of it all. I think perhaps they were what you had planned to say and so you said them. But what happened before you spoke those words was not part of your plan, Max.”

He laughed again. “That good, was it?” he said.

“You know it was,” she said. “And thinking about it last night and remembering, I knew that I could not have been mistaken. I could not have been. Even if I had
had no experience with such matters I would know beyond any doubt that I was not mistaken. But I have had experience. I was married for almost seven years. I have been made love to many times. But yesterday you were not making love to me or I to you. We were making love with each other. That has never happened to me before, and I could not possibly be mistaken. It was no game you were playing, Max. It was love. I know it.”

“So.” He turned his head to look at her, and his eyes were weary, bleak. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Forgive me in your heart as well as with your mouth. Forgive yourself. Let go of all the bitterness. Move on into the future. There is so much goodness in your life. I will be gone within the hour. Let me go—right out of your life. Start again.”

He stared at her, nodding his head slowly. “And you?” he said. “You will move on, too?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And if you are with child?”

“I will know,” she said. “Whatever you may say, I will know that the child was begotten and conceived out of love. That is all that will matter. I do love you, you know, and it will always hurt me to know that I was pain and shadow and darkness in your life for eight years. But you can be free of me now, partly because you got even, but more importantly because you have forgiven me. And I you.”

“Judith,” he said. “We have given each other so much pain. That can have nothing to do with love, surely?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “It obviously has a great deal to do with life.”

He reached out his free hand toward her and she took a few steps closer to him until she could set her own in it. He drew her closer until she was against him, and his
arms closed loosely about her and hers about him. She turned her head to lay against his chest and closed her eyes.

They stood thus for many minutes, comforting each other wordlessly for pain and guilt and for all that might have been.

“And so,” he said finally, “in one hour’s time you will be gone and we can both start to reconstruct our lives.”

“Forgiven and forgiving,” she said.

“Pardon and peace,” he said.

“Yes.”

His cheek rested against the top of her head briefly. “It cannot be done together, Judith? Is it too late for us?”

She heard a gulp of a sob suddenly and realized in some horror that it had come from her. “I don’t know,” she said, and she tried to push away from him.

But she was pulled back against him by arms that were suddenly as hard as steel bands and when she raised her face to avoid suffocation against his neckcloth it was to look into eyes that were themselves brimming with tears. He lowered his head and kissed her fiercely, a wet and breathless kiss.

“Let us do it, Judith,” he said. “Let us give life and love and peace a chance together, shall we? I cannot contemplate any of the three of them without you. Not again. I don’t have the strength to do it again. I love you. Is that what I told you with my body yesterday? Did you recognize the language? I am telling you with words now. I love you. I always have.”

He took one of her hands and held the palm to his mouth. She stood smiling up at him until gradually he relaxed and smiled back.

“I think we had better get married and be done with it,” he said. “Don’t you?”

Her smile deepened.

“You are holding out for the poetic speech and the down-on-one-knee business, aren’t you?” he said.

But before her smile could give place to laughter they were interrupted. One of the doors opened slightly and two little figures appeared around it.

“Mama,” Rupert said, “Aunt Amy is not back yet and it is beginning to snow again and Mr. Rockford said he would take us sledding if we had nothing else to do. May we stay?”

“The dog was sick all over the floor,” Kate said.

“Oh, dear,” the marquess said, keeping his arms firmly about Judith when she would have pulled away. “You must have been feeding him muffins again, were you?”

“And toast,” Kate said.

“May we, Mama?” Rupert asked.

“How would you like to stay forever and a day?” the marquess asked. “If your mama would just consent to marry me, you know, you could do so. And go sledding and skating and have plenty of company from the children in the village. And I could teach you to ride a real horse, Rupert, and to play cricket as well as your papa. And Kate could see the puppies when they are born in the spring and train one to sleep on her bed all night without once wetting the blankets or being sick all over the floor.”

“Ye-es!” Rupert yelled. “Famous. Will you, Mama?”

Kate had crossed the room and was clinging to a tassel of the marquess’s Hessian. “A black puppy?” she asked. “All black?”

“I shall see what I can arrange,” he said.

“Will you, Mama?” Dark and pleading eyes gazed up at her from beneath soft auburn curls.

“Will you, Judith?” Lord Denbigh’s eyes smiled into hers. “Will you make it unanimous? It is already three against one.”

“One thing I have noticed about you from the start,”
she said, “is that you will quite unscrupulously get to me through my children.”

“Guilty,” he said.

“And it works every time,” she said.

“Does it?”

“Yes.”

“This time, too?”

“Yes.”

“You will marry me?”

She smiled broadly at him.

He sighed. “Kate,” he said. “Stand back if you will. And watch carefully. This is going to happen to you one day. And you watch, too, Rupert, my lad. You are going to have to do this one of these fine days. I am about to get down on one knee to propose to your mama.”

“My Christmas beau,” Judith said fondly, smiling down at him as he suited action to words.

G
WENDOLINE
G
RAYSON
, L
ADY
M
UIR, HUNCHED HER
shoulders and drew her cloak more snugly about her. It was a brisk, blustery March day, made chillier by the fact that she was standing down at the fishing harbor below the village where she was staying. It was low tide, and a number of fishing boats lay half keeled over on the wet sand, waiting for the water to return and float them upright again.

She should go back to the house. She had been out for longer than an hour, and part of her longed for the warmth of a fire and the comfort of a steaming cup of tea. Unfortunately, though, Vera Parkinson’s home was not hers, only the house where she was staying for a month. And she and Vera had just quarreled—or at least, Vera had quarreled with
her
and upset her. She was not ready to go back yet. She would rather endure the elements.

She could not walk to her left. A jutting headland barred her way. To the right, though, a pebbled beach beneath high cliffs stretched into the distance. It would be several hours yet before the tide came up high enough to cover it.