A Homespun Regency Christmas

Dawn was just beginning to break over the landscape with the palest pinks, lavenders, and oranges when Antoinette made her slow, careful way out of Mark’s cottage door. She leaned on his arm, steadying herself against residual waves of dizziness. Mark had wanted to carry her out, tried to scoop her up out of her chair into his arms. She laughingly resisted, insisting that she was not an invalid. She had been sorely tempted to give in, though. To feel his arms about her one more time, holding her safe above the earth and all its mundane cares.

It was a most extraordinary night that had just passed, she thought, as she moved slowly down the uneven stone walkway to where Mark’s saddled horse waited. They had talked for hours, of nothing in particular. She told him stories of the Leighton children’s antics, the beauties of her island home, the books on herbals she wrote, and the lotions and soaps she made for stores in the village and in London. He related tales of his years at sea and all of the exotic lands he had seen. But only light tales he thought might amuse her, make her laugh; nothing of what had caused his scars, what had driven him from a life of seafaring adventure he obviously loved to one of isolation in Cornwall. Nothing more about his family.

She wanted so much to know all those things, to know everything about this intriguing man. But she did not want to press, and ruin this lovely night they shared. For it had been a lovely night indeed, filled with talk and tea and firelight. She had not felt so—so light in a very long time.

‘‘I thought the saying was ‘red sky at morning, sailors take warning,’ ’’ she answered, remembering a little rhyme her mother had sometimes recited. ‘‘Can we look for new storms?’’

‘‘Ah, but that is not quite red, is it? More like—pinkish.’’ His strong hands came around her waist, lifting her carefully and easily into the saddle. All too briefly, his warm touch, soothing and incredibly exciting at the same moment, landed on her leg, smoothing the silk of her robe. ‘‘If it is clear tonight, will you go back out to the cliffs to finish what you began last night, Miss Duvall?’’

Antoinette turned her face up to the glories of the sunrise. Last night, when she ran out to the cliffs in a dark fit of loneliness, seemed so very far away now in this new dawn. She went there wanting to find something—what, she knew not. She relied on her book and her herbs to send her an answer.

She began to think now that they had done just that, though in a manner she could not have predicted. She felt so strange, so uncertain—so tired.

‘‘I thought I asked you to call me Antoinette. And I do not know,’’ she answered him. ‘‘I rarely go walking along those cliffs at midnight, though I often do so in the early evenings. There is no one about then, and the sounds of the sea and the birds are very peaceful.’’

‘‘Perhaps we shall.’’ Mark swung himself up into the saddle behind Antoinette, his arms coming around her to take the reins. She leaned back against him, savoring that sensation of warm safety. His breath was cool, scented of the spice from their tea, as it brushed against her temple and stirred her hair. ‘‘Now, Miss Duvall—Antoinette. Would you be so kind as to give me the direction to your home?’’

Mark stood outside the garden gate of Antoinette Duvall’s cottage long after she disappeared through the door, turning to give him a wave and a smile before the red painted wood closed behind her. The draperies at the old-fashioned mullioned windows never opened, but in good time a plume of silver-gray smoke rose up from the chimney.

He knew he should rush back to his hideaway before the countryside stirred to life and someone saw him lurking there. Her maid would be coming in soon, or a woodsman might pass by on the way to his morning’s task. Even worse, Antoinette herself might glance out of the window and see him still there, and wonder with growing horror just what sort of shambling beast she had let into her life.

But he found he could not leave. Not yet. He felt like a beggar child, gazing longingly into the window of a warm bakery. There were delights of all sorts there—comfort, beauty, good humor, intrigue. But not for the likes of him.

Antoinette’s cottage looked much like his own—small, square, built of rough gray stone. There the resemblance ended. Where his garden was wild and overgrown, hers was trim and perfectly ordered, with beds outlined in red brick. It was cut back for the winter, but in the summer it would be a riotous glory of color and scent. Her walls were free of choking ivy, her gate neatly painted and oiled.

He wondered what she would do if he walked up to her door, knocked on it, and begged admittance as he longed to do. He even took one step forward, his hand reaching for the latch on her gate, before he remembered himself and fell back. She was exhausted. She needed to sleep and recover from her fall—a fall he had caused—not to be pestered by a retired sailor begging for just another moment in her company.

In the firelight he could pretend she could not see him clearly, that he was as he had been eleven years ago. In the daylight, his flaws were all too obvious.

Mark swung back up into the saddle and turned the horse toward home. Yes, indeed—firelight and shadows could conceal much, could even allow a foolish man to pretend he was not as he was. Those long hours of night had been a precious time out of time, where he could enjoy the company and the laughter of a beautiful woman. He told her half-forgotten tales of the sea and basked in the musical cadence of her voice as she told him stories of her own.

Stories that were funny, and interesting, and even a bit eerie, as when she related ghost stories from her homeland. But nothing that told him what she had been doing on the cliffs last night, what she thought of her life in England. It could not be easy for her. Her skin marked her as an outsider, just as his scars marked him. There was only the merest trace of that in her wide smile, in the dark pools of her eyes.

He had the sense, though, that she would understand about his own life, his own pain. She would listen, and know. If he could just tell her, which of course he could not. He didn’t even have the words to explain it to himself. Long years in the navy had frozen off that part of himself, and not even Antoinette Duvall’s Jamaican sun could thaw it.

He liked conversing with her, though. He liked looking at her, at her exotic beauty and the elegance of her long hands. She never glanced away from him uneasily, as everyone else did, as Elizabeth did. Antoinette watched his face as they conversed, touched his damaged left hand as he lifted her from the horse. It was as if she noticed not a thing amiss. They were merely two neighbors, sharing an amiable chat and a pot of tea by the fire.

And perhaps he would not. For Mark Payne, who had faced the French navy and fierce squalls at sea without flinching, found he was an abject coward before a beautiful woman.