1

While precariously perched on the highest rung of a six-foot ladder, attempting to fasten the end of a long festoon of evergreens to the top of a twelve-foot-high window, Elinor Selby sneezed. It was an ordinary sneeze, only mildly explosive and accompanied by the slightest bodily tremor, but it set off an ever-widening ripple of reactions that affected not only the entire Christmas celebration but the whole direction of Elinor’s life.

The sneeze occurred on a Tuesday, five days before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 1816, in the large, high-ceilinged but otherwise unpretentious (some called it shabby) drawing room of Selby Manor, Leyburn, North Riding. It was early afternoon, and from the tall windows one could see a light snow falling from a luminously gray sky. But the two occupants of the room were too busy hanging the festoon (intricately fashioned of interwoven juniper branches) between the pair of windows to take much note of the weather or the landscape that was slowly being covered with a thin veneer of winter white.

Elinor stood at the top of the ladder on tiptoe, stretching out her arms to their fullest extent in her attempt to nail one end of the festoon to the far corner of the window’s cornice. Across the room at the other window, her cousin Felicia held the other end, waiting. “Oh, dear,” Elinor said, pausing in the act of reaching out, “I think I’m going to … to … ah … ah … CHOO!”

The first effect of Elinor’s sneeze was to make the ladder wobble under her. This, in turn, caused one delicately shod foot to slip from the step. For a frozen moment Elinor, arms outstretched, stood poised on the toes of her other foot like a bird about to take flight. But the ladder, refusing to right itself, swung crazily to the left, and Elinor’s tentative foothold was disastrously undone.

The ladder wavered for a moment before collapsing noisily to the floor. Felicia tried to scream as Elinor flapped her arms helplessly in the air. The younger girl watched in wide-eyed horror, utterly bereft of the ability to move during that time-stopping moment before the inevitable pull of gravity would bring her cousin crashing down. Everything, even her scream, froze in that breath of time just before catastrophe.

At that very instant, however, a broad-shouldered gentleman appeared in the doorway. Though he wore no hat, he’d obviously come in from outdoors, for his hair and the shoulders of his coat were spattered with snowflakes, and a long muffler was wound about his neck. In his hand he carried a basket loaded with eggs. He’d come through his home woods and across the Selbys’ east lawn on foot—in complete disregard of the light snow—to deliver them. He’d been striding past the drawing-room door on his way to the back stairs when the sound of the collapsing ladder struck his ears.

He did not freeze. Immediately perceiving the situation, the gentleman took one quick leap over the threshold in Elinor’s direction and, dropping his eggs, reached out and caught her in his arms. “Elinor!” he croaked, tottering under her weight. “Good God!”

Felicia’s momentarily frozen scream now rent the air. The gentleman, unable to keep his balance under the unexpected force of Elinor’s fall, toppled to his knees. But this time he succeeded in doing what he’d failed to do with the eggs; he did not drop her. Instead, he managed to ease her gently to the floor in front of him, his arms still supporting her back and legs.

“Miles!” Elinor clutched him about the neck. “Are you all right?”

“My condition is not the question,” he responded curtly, although the eyes he’d fixed on hers showed real concern. “Yours is.”

Elinor released her hold on him, her face turning pink in embarrassment. “I’m fine, thanks to you.”

Miles Endicott nodded, a frown hiding his relief. He got to his feet and helped Elinor to hers. He was the Selbys’ closest neighbor, a bachelor of seven-and-thirty years, stockily built, with powerful shoulders and strong hands. His short-cropped, grizzled hair, back-belted tweed coat, and squared-toed boots made him appear to be a country squire, which indeed he was. But while country squires were usually expected to be jolly fellows, ruddy-faced, and ever ready for a chuckle, Miles Endicott could not be so described. The sardonic look in his dark eyes and a certain worldly disillusionment in the twist of his mouth gave him the appearance of a blasé London cosmopolite, despite his country clothes.

“Oh, Miles,” Elinor pressed anxiously, “are you certain I didn’t injure you?”

“Quite certain,” he said, frowning at her, “though no thanks to you. I fail to understand why you must climb ladders and risk life and limb when your mother has a perfectly adequate staff to do such things for you.”

“Miles, don’t scold. You know I always do the Christmas decorating myself.”

“You do everything yourself. You’re the only young lady of my acquaintance who won’t have an abigail to dress her.”

“What need has a country girl like me for an abigail? Stop glaring at me, Miles. Since neither one of us is hurt, no harm’s done.”

“Some harm, I’m afraid,” he said, looking down at the contents of his basket, which were now sprawled on the carpet. “The eggs I was bringing to your mother have suffered massive contusions.”

“Oh, pooh, who cares about eggs!” exclaimed Cousin Felicia, dashing across the room. Felicia Fordyce was a lively girl of nineteen, with auburn curls framing a face whose perfect features and delicate coloring glowed with youth and spirit. “Oh, Mr. Endicott, you were magnificent!” she cried. “Your quick thinking saved the day!”

“Nonsense, child,” the squire said snappishly, “don’t make a to-do!” There was something about Felicia’s enthusiasm that always made him testy. Although Martha Selby, Elinor’s mother, had often remarked that Felicia and her daughter Elinor were as alike as two peas—“Almost like sisters in their looks,” she was wont to exclaim—Endicott did not see the resemblance. Similar they might be in features and coloring, but their personalities were completely at variance. To him, Elinor had the subtlety and refinement of a Mozartean sonata, while Felicia was nothing more than a country dance played in a public house.

Elinor knelt down and, not noticing that her skirt brushed over a badly smashed egg that was oozing yellow liquid, began to gather up the still-whole eggs that had rolled hither and yon across the floor. “The contusions are not so massive,” she said, looking up at her savior with a grin. “Only three have actually cracked open.”

Mr. Endicott knelt beside her. “But I see that several others are showings signs of at least partial damage. Your mother will surely take me to task for—” He suddenly peered at Elinor closely. “Good God, girl, you are dreadfully pale. The fall must have upset you. Leave this clearing-up to the housemaids and lie down on the sofa at once!”

“No, truly, I’m fine,” she insisted.

But he refused to pay attention to her words. Over her repeated objections he lifted her in his arms once again and carried her to the sofa. “You do not look at all well,” he told her bluntly as he laid her down.

Felicia took a stand beside him and peered down at Elinor as he was doing. “Mr. Endicott is right, Elinor. You do not look well. And, you know, you did sneeze.”

Elinor sighed. She knew she was looking peaked. Her appetite had not been good lately, and she’d noted when she’d glanced into the mirror that morning that her nose was red and her cheeks sunken and pale. But she knew she’d recover in a day or two. There was nothing at all to make a fuss over. “It’s only a mild case of the sniffles,” she insisted, sitting up. “I’ve had it for a few days, but I’m quite over it now.”

The squire pushed her back down and eyed her dubiously. He’d known Elinor Selby since birth, and he could see she was worn out. There was too much company at Selby Manor, that was the trouble. Her cousin Felicia, with her parents, her twelve-year-old sister, and her two little brothers (aged ten and eight), had come up to North Riding from London for the Christmas holidays, and the visit was probably more burdensome to Elinor than to anyone else in the Selby household. Elinor was “giving”—that was the word people used to describe her. She could never refuse to do a favor or to help someone who needed it. Generosity was a fine thing, Endicott thought, but even good qualities can be overdone.

The Fordyces, all six of them, had arrived a few days before, and the squire knew upon whom the care of the unruly youngsters had fallen. It irritated him to see Elinor used so. She was not a governess, after all! He would give her mother a piece of his mind at the first opportunity. Martha Selby should not permit her daughter to be taken advantage of. “You must have been overdoing things to have become so completely done in,” he scolded. “It’s less than a sennight since I last saw you, my girl, and at that time you were in your best looks.”

He did not exaggerate. He’d come upon her walking through the woods that edged the two estates, and he’d watched her appreciatively as she’d approached him, her pace unusually relaxed and unhurried. How beautiful she’d been that morning, smiling, at ease, and vibrant with life! Her full lips had been ripely red, and the wind had whipped bright color into her cheeks and torn her bonnet from her head so that it hung by its ribbons against her back. Her shiny brown hair had come loose from the knot in which it had been tied and had tumbled in tousled abandon about her shoulders. He remembered how long, wild strands of it had blown across her cheeks. But now that same hair was carelessly pinned back, and the few strands that had worked themselves loose in her fall hung lank and lackluster about her thin face. Even her lips were pale as death. Only her eyes—those bright, glowing eyes that always seemed to say more than her lips ever uttered—were unaffected by weariness.

“I say, Mr. Endicott,” Felicia spoke up in brave objection (for the glowering Squire Endicott was a formidable personage to oppose), “aren’t you being a little unkind about Elinor’s looks?”

“I am merely being honest,” Miles Endicott said coldly. “A little honesty never does ill.”

“Neither does a little kindness,” Felicia retorted.

“It’s all right, Felicia,” Elinor put in gently, surrendering to the squire’s urging and permitting herself this few moments of rest. “Miles is like an uncle to me, you know. He can speak truth to me, if anyone can.”

“Thank you for the permission,” the squire said dryly, turning away to evaluate the condition of his eggs, “but I’d speak my mind whether I had permission or not.”

He was like an uncle to her, he realized as he bent down to collect the eggs that were not actually leaking. Acting as her uncle was a position that he’d quite enjoyed over the years. He’d been looking after her in an avuncular way ever since her father had passed on, when the child was only ten. She was now twenty-six, however, and had been betrothed since her twenty-first year to the handsome Lord Lovebourne. Shortly after their betrothal, Julian Henshaw, Lord Lovebourne, had gone to the West Indies to manage his father’s estates. (It was another sign of Elinor’s generosity that she’d agreed to spend five precious years of her vanishing youth in a lonely wait for his return.) But Lovebourne’s five-year excursion would soon be over. Any day now he’d return and claim his bride, and when that happened, he, Endicott, would be a part of her life no longer. He was aware that this significant fact—this crucial circumstance that would deprive him of a prized relationship—had a depressing way of knotting up his stomach when he thought about it. It was, he supposed, how a father felt when giving up his daughter in marriage.

He glanced over the floor to see what eggs were left. “So … your mother is expecting a crowd for Christmas?” he asked absently. “Who’s coming? In addition to the six Fordyces, of course.”

Elinor shut her eyes, enjoying this moment of relaxation. “Mama and I make eight, and you, of course, make nine,” she murmured. “And Mama sent an invitation to Julian’s parents. They’ll be here by tomorrow evening, so we shall be eleven at table.”

“Julian’s parents?” Miles looked up at the girl curiously. “Does that mean that Julian himself will be back for the holiday?”

“No, not for Christmas”—Elinor sighed—“but in his last letter he said he hoped to be back within a month of the new year.”

Felicia, leaning over the back of the sofa, squealed excitedly. “Really, Elinor? Are you saying he’ll be here in just a few weeks?”

Elinor opened her eyes and smiled up at her younger cousin. “Yes. Just a few weeks more.”

“Well, that must cheer you,” Miles said, reaching for the last two eggs and placing them gingerly into his basket. “And all the more reason for you not to exert yourself in the next few weeks. With so much excitement ahead, you can’t afford to be under the weather.”

“You are being much too motherly, Miles.” Elinor threw him a smile that washed away some of the weariness in her face. “Hanging a few Christmas decorations cannot be called exertion.”

But Miles could not agree. “Blast the decorations!” he barked in annoyance. Getting to his feet, he frowned down at the fallen festoon. “Can’t we have Christmas without them?”

“No, we can’t,” Elinor said firmly, pulling herself up to a sitting position and swinging her legs to the floor with determined energy, “any more than we can do without the plum pudding or the wreaths or the mistletoe.”

He glared at her. “Balderdash! I can do without any of them. But very well, if you insist on the importance of such folderol, I’ll put up the deuced festoon for you myself … just as soon as I deliver what’s left of these eggs to the kitchen. Your mother sent a message telling me that her need for eggs was urgent.”

“Yes, Cook has run out of them, I hear. Our hens, it seems, have not been productive this month, just when Mama needs them most.”

Miles picked up his basket and started toward the door. “I’ll ask one of the housemaids to clean up the broken ones,” he said, glancing back at her over his shoulder. “Meanwhile, promise me you’ll not climb the ladder until I return.”

Elinor nodded. “I promise.”

But before Miles could leave, Perkins, the butler, appeared in the doorway. “Miss Elinor,” he announced in tones of hushed surprise, “you’ve a caller. It’s Lord Lovebourne!”

The squire stopped in his tracks, his face stiffening in shock.

Elinor stared at the butler in confusion.

Felicia gave a delighted gurgle in her throat. “Do you mean Julian?’ she cried.

“No, of course he doesn’t.” Elinor rose slowly to her feet, her eyes wide. “It must be Julian’s father. You do mean the Earl, don’t you, Perkins?”

“No, miss,” the butler said with barely concealed excitement. “It’s the junior Lord Lovebourne. Says he docked yesterday and came straight here from Liverpool.”

Cousin Felicia clapped her hands delightedly. “But I thought he was not expected until January!”

A pulse began to pound in Elinor’s ears. “So did I!”

The words were hardly out of her mouth when Julian Henshaw himself loomed up in the doorway. The man was so tall that his head almost touched the top of the doorframe. Felicia, who’d not met him before, blinked at the sight of him. She’d never seen anyone so handsome. From the top of his sun-streaked brown curls (now incongruously sparkling with snowflakes) to the tip of his dashing Hussar boots, the man was impressive. His skin was tanned from the sun, and his light eyes twinkled. His shoulders, wide to begin with, were emphasized by the capes of a magnificent greatcoat that hung open and revealed a figure of wiry strength. To Felicia, he seemed to have walked right out of a romance. She could not help but gasp.

Elinor, however, could not gasp. Surprise had frozen her breath in her chest. But her heart pounded wildly, and her head swam in bewildered delight. For five long years she’d waited for this moment, and now all she could do was gape at him, dazed.

Endicott, too, gaped at the traveler, having forgotten what a handsome specimen the fellow was. It was no wonder Elinor had fallen in love with him. The squire supposed that there wasn’t a girl alive who could resist a man so consumately dashing.

Thus the only one who uttered a sound was the spirited Felicia. “Oh, my!” she breathed, awestruck.

Julian Henshaw, Lord Lovebourne, who’d been surveying the room from the threshold (taking only slight note of a country fellow holding a basket of cracked eggs and a disheveled woman with lank hair and a red nose), was somewhat bemused at seeing a fallen ladder and several broken eggs on the floor. But Felicia’s gasp caught his attention, and he turned his eyes in the direction of the sound. His face brightened perceptibly at the sight of Elinor’s lovely young cousin. “Good God!” he exclaimed. Skillfully avoiding stepping on eggs, he strode across the room to her. “I’d forgotten how very lovely you are, Elinor!”

“But I’m not—” Felicia began.

Julian didn’t heed. Sweeping the astonished Felicia into his arms, he fixed his lips firmly on hers. “Elinor, my love,” he murmured against her mouth, “I’ve missed you so!”