Under The Mistletoe (28 page)

Her eyes were sparkling up at him.

“But, Papa,” Dora wailed. “The mistletoe.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said, “the mistletoe. I shall go and get some. You all start back to the house.” But she was loaded down. She would never get back without being scratched to death. “Better still, drop your load, Lilias, and show me where this mistletoe is. You children, on your way. We will catch up to you.”

God, he thought, turning cold as she did what she had been told—considering her load, she had had little choice—he had called her
Lilias.
The witch!
Her wiles were working themselves beneath his guard despite himself. His jaw hardened again.

She led him around past the thicket of holly bushes, past the old oaks, to the mistletoe, which he had forgotten about. The old oaks! He had climbed them with her, to sit in the lower branches, staring at the sky and dreaming aloud with her. He could remember lifting her down from the lowest branch of one—he could not remember which—and kissing her, her body pressed against the great old trunk, her hands spread on either side of her head, palm to palm against his. He could remember laughing at her confusion because he had traced the line of her lips with his tongue.

“It was all a long time ago,” he said abruptly, and felt remarkably foolish as soon as the words were spoken. As if he had expected her to follow his train of thought.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

He gave her the mistletoe to carry, being very careful not to lift it above the level of her head as he handed it to her. And on the way back he took the large bundle of holly into his own arms, against her protests, to carry to the house.

“My coat and my gloves are heavier than yours,” he said.

She brushed her face against the mistletoe as they walked.

“I suppose,” he said harshly after a few silent minutes, “you do not get enough to eat.”

She looked up at him, startled. “My lord?” she said.

“Your brother and sister do not look undernourished,” he said. “I suppose you give all your food to them.”

Her flush was noticeable even beneath the rosiness that the wind and cold had whipped into her cheeks.

“What a ridiculous notion,” she said. “I would have starved to death.”

“And have been doing almost that, by the look of you,” he said, appalled at his own lack of breeding and good manners.

“What I do is my own business, I thank you, my lord,” she said. Her voice was as chill as his own, he realized. “I do not choose to discuss either my appetite or my means with you.”

“You were quite willing to do so a few days ago,” he said.

“Only enough to explain why I had to bring up the matter of that old debt,” she said. “And I take it unkindly in you to refer again to a topic I confided only with embarrassment and reluctance.”

He strode on, knowing that he was walking too fast for her, but doing nothing to slacken his pace.

“Stephen,” she said. She sounded close to tears. “Why do you hate me?”

Stephen. No one had called him by his given name for years, it seemed. Lorraine had never called him anything but Bedford. He slackened his pace so that she was no longer forced almost to run at his side.

It was clever. Very clever. It almost unnerved him. It was too clever. She had overplayed her hand.

“I do not hate you, ma'am,” he said, thankful to see the house close by. The children must be inside already. “What possible reason would I have to hate you?”

“I don't know,” she said.

He gritted his teeth against the trembling of her voice. It was too overdone. Too contrived.

Lilias,
he thought, and remembered the oak trees. And remembered Lorraine and dozens of admiring female eyes and more dozens of obsequious hangers-on. All with their various wiles and arts, and not a few of them with their sad stories and their outstretched hands.

Life might have been so different if only Claude had not died, he thought bitterly, standing aside so that Lilias might precede him up the steps and through the doors into the hallway of his home.

 

Lilias was putting the final stitches in a strip of faded blue cloth for Mary's robe while Megan was painstakingly lining the manger with straw. Andrew was whittling away at a sheep that insisted on looking more like a fox, he complained, a deep frown between his eyes.

“But Joseph is quite splendid, Drew,” Megan said loyally. “He looks quite like a real man.”

“And how lovely it will be,” Lilias said, “to have our own Nativity scene when everyone else has to go to church to see one. What shall we sing?”

“ ‘Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,' ” Megan began to sing, and Lilias joined her, while Andrew held his sheep at arm's length and regarded it with half-closed eyes.

They all stopped what they were doing when there was a knock at the door. Lilias rose to answer it.

Lady Dora West was dressed in dark blue velvet this time, in a small but dashing riding outfit. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed with color. She was clutching her father's hand as she had two days before.

“We rode here on Pegasus,” she announced as soon as the door was opened, and Lilias could see beyond her a magnificent black stallion tethered to the fence. “Papa said we might call and see your decorations and see Joseph if he is finished.”

“I do beg your pardon if you are busy.” The Marquess of Bedford was looking at her with hooded and wary eyes, Lilias saw when she lifted her own reluctantly to his face.

Why had he come? The afternoon before had been unspeakably embarrassing, especially after her outburst, when she had called him by his given name and asked him such a foolish question. Instead of sitting in the drawing room after tea while the children ran excitedly about first that room and then the nursery, placing the holly, and giggling over where to hang the mistletoe, they had trailed almost silently after. Afraid to be alone together.

She had not expected to see him again.

“Dora has quite taken to your brother and sister,” he said. “She can derive no excitement from her nurse's company or from mine. She will be satisfied with ten minutes, I believe.”

But by the time he entered the cottage, Dora had already thrown aside her hat and riding jacket and had run into the kitchen to lift from a hook behind the door the pinafore she had worn the last time.

“Oh, the holly,” she cried. “It looks so lovely in here because the room is small. And the mistletoe is right in the center.” She stood beneath it and chuckled. “Kiss me, Papa.”

He did so, bending from his great height to take the upturned face between his hands and kiss the puckered mouth. Lilias turned away, a curious churning in her stomach.

“But that is supposed to be just for Christmas,” he said. “Not for another two days, poppet.”

Listening to his voice as he spoke to the child, not seeing him, she thought he sounded like Stephen. But no, she would not think that. It was not true.

Dora was soon exclaiming over Joseph and laughing delightedly over the sheep when Andrew told her that it looked like a fox. She noticed Mary, who was already dressed in her blue robe.

“Oh, pretty,” she said, fingering it.

Bedford seated himself, uninvited, his eyes on his daughter.

“We were singing when you came,” Megan said, and began singing the same carol that had been interrupted by the arrival of their guests. Dora smiled and stroked Mary's robe. “You sing too, Lilias.”

Lilias flushed. “Later, Megan,” she said, and glanced in some
embarrassment at the marquess, whose eyes had shifted to her. His expression was unfathomable.

“You used to sing,” he said. “All the time.”

She smiled fleetingly and wished she still had Mary's robe to stitch at. She had not yet started Joseph's.

“You used to go caroling,” he said, frowning as if the memory had only just come back to him. “On Christmas Eve. We all used to go—Claude, Philip, Susan and Henrietta Price, the Hendays. But you used to lead the singing.”

Lilias bit her lip. “We still go,” she said. “Some of the villagers and I. The children too. We go around the village before church at eleven, and out to some of the cottages too if we know that someone is too unwell to come to church.”

“Tomorrow night,” Andrew said, looking up briefly from his work. “We had great fun last year. Mr. Campbell gave us all hot cider before he realized that some of us were children and ought not to be drinking it.”

Megan giggled. Then she looked up, arrested by some bright thought. “You ought to come too this year,” she said. “Dora can come. I will hold her hand. And you too, sir,” she added magnanimously.

“May I, Papa?” Dora had leaped to her feet. She looked definitely pretty, Lilias thought, untidy hair and faded pinafore notwithstanding. “May we?” She danced up and down on the spot in an agony when he did not answer immediately. “Oh, please, please, Papa, may we?”

“You do not know any of the carols, poppet,” he said. “And it will be too late for you. It will be past your bedtime.”

“But Megan will teach me,” she said. “Won't you, Megan? And Miss Angove. Won't you, Miss Angove? And I will go to sleep tomorrow afternoon, Papa, and sleep all afternoon and be very good. Oh, may we go too? Please.”

“We will have to talk about it further,” he said stiffly. He looked almost angry, Lilias saw at a glance. “Right now we are interrupting work, Dora. And I have some errands to run in the village.”

“But I don't want to go,” she said. “You will stop to talk to people, Papa, and I will be dull. You go and do your errands and I will stay here. Miss Angove will teach me the carols.”

The marquess stood up resolutely. “Put your pinafore away where you found it, now,” he said, “and I shall help you on with your coat.”

She stared at him, her lower lip protruding beyond the upper.

“We will be very happy to have her stay, if you will agree,” Lilias said softly. “It is good to have children here at Christmastime.”

His eyes turned on her, hooded, inscrutable. He inclined his head. “Very well, then, ma'am,” he said. He turned back to his daughter. “You may stay for an hour, Dora,” he said. “But you must come without protest when I return.”

Megan and Dora clapped their hands. Even Andrew looked pleased.

Lilias, standing at the door a minute later, watching the marquess swing himself into the saddle of his horse and proceed along the village street, was not sure if she had done the right thing or not, interfering between a father and his daughter. He had paused in the doorway and looked down at her.

“Another debt to call in?” he had said softly and icily.

She had not comprehended his meaning until he was riding down the pathway to the gate, and even then she was not sure he had meant what she thought he had meant. She hoped he had not. And she wondered again, though she wished with all her heart that she had not asked it, why he hated her.

They sang for almost the whole hour, sometimes the same carol over and over, while Andrew tackled the final feature of the Nativity scene, the baby Jesus, and Megan arranged and rearranged the items already completed. Dora first helped and then stood at Lilias's elbow, staring fascinated at the tiny robe for Joseph that she was making.

Lilias smiled at her after a few minutes, when they were between carols. “Why don't you pull up that stool?” she said.

“Papa told me the story,” Dora said when she was seated. “About the baby and the stable and the manger and the smothering clothes.”

“The swaddling clothes,” Lilias said with a smile. “That is what I will be making next.”

“He is going to tell me again tonight,” Dora said. “I like that story. I am going to learn to sew next year when I am five.”

“Are you?” Lilias smiled again. “Will you like that?”

“Nurse is to teach me,” Dora said. “But I am going to ask Papa if you can teach me instead. It would be fun with you.”

Megan began singing another carol.

 

The caroling was not the only part of Christmas he had forgotten, Bedford discovered the following morning. And he really had forgotten that. He had always remembered Christmas as a white and outdoor affair. Everything else had become hazy in memory.

But there had always been the caroling and the lanterns and the rosy cheeks and laughter, and the glasses of cider and wassail until
not one of them had been quite sober by the time they got to church. None of them had ever been precisely drunk—just smiling and warm and happy. How could he have forgotten? And how everyone had wanted to stand next to Lilias because she had such a sweet voice and such perfect pitch. He had won almost all of those battles.

Dora, restless in the morning because it seemed such a long wait until the evening—he had promised her the night before, much against his better judgment, that they would join the carolers—wandered down to the kitchen to watch the cook roll the pastry for the mince pies. And she fell into conversation with Mrs. Morgan, who was delighted to have a child in the house again.