Nicola Cornick – The Heart Of Christmas: A Handful Of Gold / The Season for Suitors / This Wicked Gift (страница 11)

“I am going to make a kissing bough,” Debbie announced, looking almost animated. “We had kissing boughs to half fill the kitchen ceiling when I was a girl. Nobody escaped a few good bussings in our house. I had almost forgotten. Christmas was always a right grand time.”

“Yes, Mrs. Hollander,” Mrs. Moffatt said with a smile. “It is always a grand time, even when we are forced to spend it away from part of our families as I assume we are all doing this year. Your husband is being very kind to our boys. And yours, too, my lady.” She turned her smile on Verity. “They have been in the carriage all day and have a great deal of excess energy.”

“There will be no going into the village tonight or tomorrow morning if what you said is true, Lady Folingsby,” the Reverend Moffatt said. “You will be unable to attend church as I daresay you intended to do. I shall repay a small part of my debt to you, then. I shall conduct the Christmas service here. We will all take communion here together. With Mr. Hollander’s permission, of course.”

“What a splendid idea, Henry,” his wife said.

“Ee,” Debbie said, awed into near-silence.

Verity clasped her hands to her bosom and closed her eyes. She had a sudden image of the church at home on the evening before Christmas, the bells pealing out the news of the Christ child’s birth, the candles all ablaze, the carved Nativity scene carefully arranged before the altar, her father in his best vestments smiling down at the congregation. Christmas had always been his favorite time of the liturgical year.

“Oh, sir,” she said, opening her eyes again, “it is we who will be in your debt. Deeply in your debt.” She blinked away tears. “I would like it of all things. I am sure Mr. Hollander and Vi—and my husband will agree.”

“It is going to be a grand Christmas, Blanche,” Debbie said. “I did not expect it, lass. Not in this way, any road.”

“Sometimes we come to grace by unexpected paths,” the Reverend Moffatt commented.

“DO YOU EVER have the impression that events have galloped along somewhat out of your control, Jule?” Bertie asked his friend just before dinner was served and they stood together in the sitting room waiting for everyone else to join them. They were surrounded by the sights and smells of Christmas. There was greenery everywhere, artfully draped and colorfully decorated with red bows and streamers and silver bells. There was a huge and elaborate kissing bough suspended over the alcove to one side of the fireplace. There was a strong smell of pine, more powerful for the moment than the tantalizing aromas wafting up from the kitchen.

“And do you ever have the impression,” Julian asked without answering the question, which was doubtless rhetorical anyway, “that you ought not to simply label a woman as a certain type and expect her to behave accordingly?” Blanche, changing for dinner a few minutes before in the dressing room while he made do with the bedchamber, had informed him with bright enthusiasm that the Reverend Moffatt was planning to conduct a Christmas service in this very room sometime after dinner. And that the servants had asked to attend. And that they were going to have to see to it on the morrow that the little boys had a wonderful Christmas. If there was still plenty of snow, they could…

He had not listened to all the details. But Miss Blanche Heyward, opera dancer, would have made a superlative drill sergeant if she had just been a man, he had thought. Consider as a point in fact the way she had organized them all—all of them—over the decorations. They had rushed about and climbed and teetered and adjusted angles at her every bidding. She had been flushed and bright-eyed and beautiful.

On the whole, he concluded as an afterthought, he was glad she was not a man.

“And have you ever had a cook for all of three or four years, Jule,” Bertie continued, “and suddenly discovered that she could cook? Not that I have tasted any of the things that go with those smells yet, but if smell is anything to judge by…well, I ask you.”

The staff, it seemed, had been as busy belowstairs as all of them had been above. But their busyness had had the same instigator—Miss Blanche Heyward. Julian even wondered if somehow she had conjured up the clergyman and his family out of the blizzard. What a ghastly turn of events that had been.

“Do you suppose,” he asked, “anyone noticed the sudden appearance of rings on our women’s fingers, Bertie?”

But the door opened at that moment to admit their mistresses, who had come down together. Debbie clucked her tongue.

“Now did I do all that work on the kissing bough just to see it hang over there and you men stand here?” she asked. “Go and get yourself under it, Bertie, love, and be bussed.”

“Again?” he said, grinning and waggling his eyebrows and instantly obeying.

They had all sampled the pleasures of the kissing bough after it had been hung. Even the Reverend Moffatt had kissed his wife with hearty good humor and had pecked Debbie and Blanche respectfully on the cheek.

“Well, Blanche.” Julian looked her up and down. She was dressed in the dark green silk again. Her hair was neatly confined at the back of her head. She should have looked drably dreary but did not. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

Some of the sparkle that had been in her eyes faded as she looked back at him. “Only when I forget my purpose in being here,” she said. “I have already taken a great deal of money from you and have done nothing yet to earn it.”

“Perhaps I should be the judge of that,” he said.

“Perhaps tonight I can make some amends,” she said. “I have had a day in which to grow more accustomed to you. I may still be awkward—I daresay I will be because I am very ignorant of what happens, you know—but I will not be afraid and I will not act the martyr. Indeed, I believe I might even enjoy it. And it will be a relief to know that at last I have done something to earn my salary.”

If Bertie and Debbie, now laughing like a pair of children and making merry beneath the kissing bough, had been the only other occupants of the house apart from the servants, Julian thought he might have excused Blanche and himself from dinner and taken her up to bed without further ado. Despite the reference to earning salaries, he found her words arousing. He found her arousing. But there were other guests. Besides, he was not sure he would have done it anyway.

If this stay in Norfolkshire had proceeded according to plan, he would have enjoyed a largely sleepless night with Blanche last night. They would have stayed in bed until noon or later this morning. They would have returned to bed for much of the afternoon. By now he would have been wondering how long into the coming night his energies would sustain him. But there would have been all day tomorrow to look forward to—in bed.

The prospect had seemed appealing to him all last week and up until just last night. Longer than that. He had felt disgruntled and cheated all through the night and when he had woken this morning. Or when she had awoken him, rather, with her excited discovery that it had snowed during the night.

But surprisingly he had enjoyed the day just as it had turned out. And the kiss against the oak tree had seemed in some strange way as satisfying as a bedding might have been. There had been laughter as well as desire involved in that kiss. He had never before thought of laughter as a desirable component of a sexual experience.

“You are disappointed in me,” Blanche said now. “I am so sorry.”

“Not at all,” he told her, clasping his hands at his back. “How could I possibly be disappointed? Let me see. A night spent on the floor, an early wake-up call in the frigid dawn to watch snow falling, an expedition out into the storm in order to climb trees, murder my boots and risk my neck. The arrival of a clergyman as a houseguest, an hour spent finding occupation for two energetic infants, another hour of climbing on furniture and pinning up boughs only to move them again when it was discovered that they were half an inch out of place, a church service in the sitting room to look forward to. My dear Miss Heyward, what more could I have asked of Christmas?”

She was laughing. “I have the strangest feeling,” she said, “that you have enjoyed today.”

He raised his quizzing glass to his eye and regarded her through it. “And you believe that you might enjoy tonight,” he said. “We will see, Blanche, when tonight comes. But first of all, Bertie’s guests. I believe I hear the patter of little feet and the chatter of little voices approaching, as Debbie so poetically phrased it. I suppose we are to be subjected to their company as well as that of their mama and papa since there is no nursery and no nurse.”

“For all your expression and tone of voice,” Blanche said, “I do believe, my lord, you have an affection for those little boys. You do not deceive me.”

“Dear me,” Julian said faintly as the sitting room door opened again.

THERE WAS a spinet in one corner of the sitting room. Verity had eyed it a few times during the day with some longing, but its lid was locked, she had discovered. While the Reverend Moffatt was setting up the room after dinner for the Christmas service, his wife asked about the instrument. Mr. Hollander looked at it in some surprise, as if he were noticing it for the first time. He had no idea where the key was. It hardly mattered anyway unless someone was able to play it.