Best Wishes

by Edith Layton

 

“I wish I’d never laid eyes on you!”

His head shot up. “Indeed?”

The nostrils on his long elegant nose pinched. That was the only outward sign of any emotion. His lean face was expressionless. He put his book down on the coverlet and stared at her.

“I might say the same, my dear,” he said after a second, picking up his book again. “But I am not histrionic. And I believe this is a tempest in a teapot. I think if you considered it, you would agree.”

All she could think was that he ought to be glad she didn’t have that teapot the tempest was in at hand. She’d throw it right at his head.

“I have thought about it,” she cried, stamping her foot. “It is not a tempest, it’s a reasonable request.”

He looked down and pretended to be reading again. She knew it. How could he read when she was standing by the bed, screaming at him? He was probably shamming it just because she was screaming, she realized. He never shouted and so doubtless thought she was beneath his contempt for raging the way she was. But the fact that he just sat there in bed, holding the cursed book, seemingly calm and deaf to her arguments, made her even wilder. He could at least tell her how shocked and disappointed he was with her. Then she could tell him exactly how shocked and disappointed she was in him.

She fought for composure.

“I do not wish to go to the Fanshawes’ for Christmas,” she said again, only this time woodenly. “I do not like them. I do not like their friends. And I do not want to spend my holidays with them.”

He turned a page. “We are promised to them.”

“You are promised to them!” she shouted, losing all pretense of composure. “And what’s more, I believe because you probably promised far more to her! I don’t want to go and I won’t. I will not!”

She thought she saw him wince, but it was likely only an illusion from the flaring of the lamplight. It was probably feeling a draft. She’d shouted loudly enough to crack the glass that sat over the candle.

“You are my wife. I have given my word. We are going,” he said, and turned the page again.

She was pleased to see that the pages were turning like leaves in a storm, and he didn’t seem to notice. That was the only thing that pleased her. She wondered if she’d actually have to throw something at him to get any other reaction. It was like fighting with a damp feather pillow. If he’d raise his voice, she’d know what he was really thinking. But he was too civilized. The hotter she got, the colder he grew. It just made her more frustrated, and so even angrier.

This was only the third fight they’d had. The first two had been so foolish she thought they’d fought only to be able to make up again, as they had, delightfully. They’d been married three months now and she’d never been angry with him before. Not really. Oh, she hadn’t liked little things he did here and there, now and again, but she never mentioned them. They were, after all, trivial and no one was perfect. For example, he ate kippers for breakfast and the scent made her ill at any time but especially made her breakfasts unpleasant; he didn’t love music as much as she did, so they didn’t go to as many concerts as she’d like; he kept dogs but not cats. And he never raised his voice, even when he was annoyed.

These were, admittedly, little things. Doubtless he’d had the same sorts of minor complaints about her.

But this was enormous, in her eyes. Worse, she suddenly realized he did have minor complaints about her, but he told her about them and they laughed over them together. She’d never complained about him, to him. Until now. But now she had a lot to complain about and could not let it go.

She straightened her back. She was very angry, and if he was surprised she was capable of such fury, it was only his own fault. There were many things she felt deeply about, and if he’d known her longer he’d have seen evidence of them before this. Her family was not a fractious one, but they had words, and sometimes those words were loud. It helped clear the air. The air in here was getting heavy and thick with unspoken resentment. She didn’t know how to fight with raised eyebrows and curling smiles, the way he and his set did. She wanted to have it all out in the open. But he didn’t know that. How could he? It wasn’t her fault they hadn’t disagreed about anything before they were married. They’d married so quickly.

He was the one who had wanted an immediate wedding. She’d only instantly agreed. They’d met in May and married in September. True love, their friends said, such love needed consummation, not more time to come to fruition. It had seemed so at the time.

She’d had some reservations, but they never gave her more than a moment’s pause. He was eight years her senior. But her own father was that much older than her mama, and they had a wonderful marriage.

Jonathan was so clever and worldly wise, and she had only book knowledge of the world. But she was as smart as he was, or at least she always felt she had a great deal of knowledge, if not experience. Also true, and most significant, her new husband, Jonathan, Viscount Rexford, was a reserved fellow, distant, even with her.

But that was an essential part of his charm. He was the very paragon of a perfect gentleman. Handsome in classic fashion, he was tall, lean, and elegant, a study in dark and light with his inky close-cropped hair and steady slate eyes. He was sophisticated, with a famous dry wit and a signature style that was cool and reserved. His smile was hard-won, but once won, unforgettable in its warmth and charm.

Everyone said they were surprised to see him tumble into love with a pretty little thing from the countryside. She knew they always said, “Good family” when they talked about her behind their hands, but she also knew they then added, “ . . . of no particular distinction.”

“She was new to town, and fresh as the morning,” she’d overheard one buck say about her to another just the other week at the theater, when they didn’t know she was behind them. “That’s what probably accounted for that surprising marriage. Damned pretty filly, though, with such a sweet little ars . . .” He’d stopped talking abruptly when he’d seen Jonathan’s eyes on him.

Well, she’d thought, who wouldn’t freeze under that stare? Such cool gray eyes Jonathan had, they were what first attracted her to him—when she’d seen them light with silver when he laughed. Tonight, as that night at the theater when he’d overheard the improper remark, those gray eyes were flinty, cold as the surface of an icebound lake. The foolish young buck who had been overheard had turned pale and quaked, before he’d fled. But she was too angry to be afraid.

“I won’t go,” she said again.

She stood at the foot of their bed, staring, sure her eyes were burning holes in the back of the book he still held.

He put a long finger into the book to keep his place—if he even remembered what book he was reading now, she thought spitefully.

“I see. Am I to assume you are going back on your word?”

“I never gave my word. I don’t remember being asked.”

“I remember telling you.”

“Aha!” she cried. “There it is! There you are! You told me. You never asked.”

Was that a shadow of surprise she saw on his face? It was gone before she could tell.

“I recall our discussing it.”

“So do I. We discussed it. We did not decide it, or anything. I read you Mama’s letter asking if we were coming home for Christmas. I told you how much fun it was and how much you’d enjoy our traditions. You mentioned your invitations, including the one to the Fanshawes’. I made a terrible face. You laughed. We talked about other things. So, where is the word I gave, eh?” She tossed up her head, triumphant.

There was a silence.

He turned to his book again. “I said we were going. I assumed you agreed . . .”

“You had no right!” she cried.

“Pamela,” he said, snapping his book shut and putting it down with finality. “Whether or not I asked—and I do recall asking, but if you don’t it is possible there was a misunderstanding—the point is that I wrote to accept and said we were going. And so that is the end of that. Now, are you coming to bed?”

She stared. He’d said that in a conciliatory tone, in the deep smooth voice she’d fallen in love with. And he lay in their bed, waiting for her. The room was strikingly chill now that the fire in the hearth was dying, and the great bed was covered with a huge, plump, feather-filled silken coverlet that warmed a person within minutes. His body would be even warmer and would heat her even faster. It did even now, just thinking of it. She knew the warmth of the man behind that cool façade and knew that the slender body under those heavy coverlets was all supple well-knit, smooth, hard muscle. She knew how clever those long sensitive hands could be on a woman’s body, and knew very well the sighs he could win from her with them.

But she also wished she could see that strong handsome body of his better; she often wished she weren’t still so shy with him. She wished she could bring herself to ask him to leave the lamp on sometimes. He was a wonderful lover. At least, since she’d had no other, she believed him to be so, because he drove her mad with desire and pleased her very much. But she sometimes wondered if he could please her a little more. She dearly wished she could ask him, sometimes, to do that more, or this a bit less, and could she do that to him . . .?

The truth was that she was still reticent with him about their lovemaking, as well as other things, and unsure of herself with him and his world. She’d thought that in time . . .

But now this! Her anger flared again.

“I will go to bed,” she said stonily. “But not with you, thank you very much.”

His eyebrow rose in his signature expression of surprise. She wished she could say something to make both of them fly up. “Indeed?” he asked, and now his nostrils flared.

Too sad, she thought angrily, that his nose was his most expressive feature tonight.

“Indeed!” she said, and hesitated.

Because she didn’t know where she could sleep if she didn’t go to bed with him.

They shared a bedchamber, rare for a couple of their noble standing. She’d loved the closeness of sleeping beside him through the night and waking with him in the morning. Because of that, she couldn’t leave the room tonight. That would be an irrevocable declaration of war to the world. She was of good birth, but didn’t come from a high-nosed, care-for-nothing family with centuries of aristocratic training; she cared about what servants thought. If she now left this room to go to any one of the dozen other bedrooms in this great house of his, all his servants would know it.

She didn’t think she could bear the speculation in everyone’s eyes tomorrow morning. And that would be literally everyone in the immediate vicinity, because she knew how servants loved to gossip about their masters. Even at home, let Papa and Mama have a shouting match and the whole neighborhood knew about it the next day.

So where could she go now?

He realized her problem, of course. She thought she saw a ghost of a smile on his lips. That decided her.

There was the dressing room. It was small, but there was enough space for a person to sleep. Unfortunately, she remembered, there was no cot or couch to sleep on. She glanced at him. The smile looked larger. It looked a great deal like a dawning gloat. She’d rather sleep on the floor than near him tonight.

She walked toward the bed. The smile on his face grew warm and welcoming.

She grabbed the bottom of the silken coverlet in both hands and pulled, dragging it from the bed. It slid off into her hands before he could snatch it back. His eyes widened, and she wondered if he would try—but realized he probably believed fighting for his covers was beneath his dignity. That might have turned into a tug-of-war, which could have turned into . . . anything. No matter, she had it all. She gathered up the coverlet, turned, and marched toward the dressing room, trailing it behind her. Then, with the swirl of red silk half enveloping her, she turned around and faced him again. She held her head high.

“I will sleep in there,” she announced. “And there I will sleep every night henceforth. I will not spend Christmas with your mistress. Bad enough I must know of her.”

“My ex-mistress,” he said through clenched teeth. “My one time, a long-time-ago mistress, and I wish no one had ever told you about her. She is entirely respectable now.”

“Unlike your other ex-mistresses?” she asked sweetly.

“I was not aware you wanted a husband straight from a monastery.”

“I wanted one with a bit of discretion. I think it is the outside of enough that you still wish to share your holidays with her. And God knows what else.”

“Only the holiday,” he said with outsized patience. “She has not been anything but a friend to me for over a decade. So why are you distressed? A decade ago you were too young for my attentions,” he added with a faint, amused smile.

“I wonder if I am not still too young for you now,” she said, just to erase that supercilious smile, “or at least not jaded enough to appreciate your dissolute ways.”

“You did not think so last night.”

She flushed. “I did not know you were planning to run to your mistress for the holidays then.”

“I am not running to her,” he said in bored tones. “We will take the traveling coach and arrive in slow and splendid style. Come, what is your real objection?”

“My real objection?” she asked, incredulous. “Apart from the fact that I wanted to be with my family, aside from the fact that I never said yes to your plan? Or that I wonder how you can want to take your new wife to celebrate Christmas, of all holidays, with a woman you used to make love to? Or that I am aghast at the thought that you can wish to sit at a holiday table beside two women you have bedded? Do you want to compare how we each responded to your touch, your kisses? I find that . . . loathsome.”

He sat frozen. Before he could answer, she went on, unsuccessfully trying to keep her voice from breaking. “I don’t understand you or that set of your friends, my lord. I thought you’d be done with such when we married. But to go to a house party with such people! From what I hear, half of them will spend half their nights in the wrong beds; the other half will spend the next day making jokes about it. That is not my idea of Christmas.”

“Well,” he said in a hard, cold voice, “there you are. You obviously don’t understand, and clearly pay undiscriminating attention to foolish gossip as well. We are not going to an orgy. They are just my friends. That is all I am to Marianna Fanshawe now. And no, I do not compare—the very idea is repellent. I would never have thought of doing so. Ten years is an eternity.” He added, very much on his highest ropes, “The thought of such comparisons or activities is absurd. I am looking forward to intelligent conversation with old friends, and thought you might like to get to know some of the kingdom’s finest minds.”

“And bodies?” she asked sweetly.

“I would not have married you if I wished to share you,” he said icily. Seeing her hesitate, he added, “I thought you’d enjoy it. Yet here you are, acting like an outraged virgin invited to a Roman revel. At least I considered your feelings. I wonder if you considered mine at all? You think passing the holidays in a merry round of sticky sweets and stickier infants, discussing the childhood colics of all your assorted nieces and nephews, as well as rehashing all the childhood pranks of your brothers and sisters, would be ‘great fun,’ as you described it, for me?”

She sucked in a harsh breath. “I tell you what,” she said, holding her head even higher so the tears wouldn’t slide down her cheeks to betray her. “You go to her for Christmas, and make merry, or whatever else you want to make with her. And I will go home.”

“This is your home,” he said, but she slammed the dressing-room door behind her, and he wasn’t sure she heard him.

He was sure he was cold, though, through and through, body and soul. She’d taken more than the coverlet with her.

He looked down at his toes. They looked very foolish sticking up, big, and bare, and doubtless turning blue. He probably looked like a fool altogether, he thought bitterly, lying on a big empty bed in nothing but a thin dressing gown on this cold December night. He’d been planning to surprise her the moment she got into bed by shucking out of his dressing gown and taking her in his arms so they could set fire to the night. She’d turned the tables on him, carrying on like a fishwife cheated of a penny. His soft-spoken shy bride? He never knew she could screech like a murdered cat.

He muttered a curse, drew up knees, and turned on his side. The dressing gown fell open. He shivered and pulled it closed again. That didn’t help. The room was cold. The feathers beneath him were warmer than the air around him. He’d slept on the ground in Spain when he’d been with the troops, and had slept like a dead man every night. But he’d been younger then, and full of courage—exhausted every night as well, and probably too full of patriotic fervor, fellowship, and good red wine to notice things like temperature. Besides, Spain had been warmer.

He was sure there was another coverlet somewhere nearby, but he couldn’t call the housekeeper or his valet to get it or tell him where it was. He stepped out of bed and went to the dressing room to get a greatcoat or such to fling over himself, and stopped at the door. She was in there. He’d be damned if he’d give her that satisfaction. Especially when he’d been cheated of the satisfaction he’d wanted to give her.

He stormed back to the great bed, until he realized she could probably hear him, and then he went soft-footed. He crept into bed and curled up in a knot. Damn. He wished he knew what had set her off.

She’d known they were going to the Fanshawes’, he’d swear to it. And why should she carry on, even if she hadn’t? He hadn’t slept with Marianna for a decade, and didn’t want to again. She’d been a fascinating older woman then; she was just a jolly old friend now. Compare her to his bride? That was obscene. He was outraged at his wife’s accusation—but then he stilled. In truth, when he’d been younger, he supposed he had compared his intimate experiences of women, at least in his own mind, rating them, grading then, remembering them when he’d see them again. It was inevitable, it had been eventually depressing.

In the old days, in the days he now considered his cold days, he sometimes might find himself at a social affair with one or more women he’d bedded too. At first, he’d been appalled by the unforeseen occurrence, almost as much so as his bride had just been. But in time, he admitted, he’d felt a frisson of pride. It had shocked and disappointed him, making him aware that he was in danger of becoming someone he didn’t care for.

That was one of the reasons why he’d been so eager to marry Pamela. One look at Miss Pamela Anne Arthur and he knew he had met his match. The daughter of a country squire, she was young, but had two seasons and so was not an infant. He’d been out of town for her first season and the moment they’d met he’d been determined that she not spend another in London without him at her side, and in her bed.

She was well born but not infatuated with her heritage, as he’d found too many other young women in the ton to be. She was educated, but neither a bluestocking nor a pedant. She was fresh and unspoiled, candid and honest, nothing like any woman he’d ever known. Since he married her he’d discovered she was nothing like any woman he’d ever had and he’d known how right he’d been to hasten her into marriage. Because he’d never want any woman but her again.

Or so he’d thought, before tonight.

But damn it, she was wrong about this. He didn’t want Marianna anymore, and actually felt a little queasy remembering their intimate moments. They’d been hushed and rushed and though carnally fulfilling, totally unsatisfactory in all other ways. At least, so they seemed to him now. Now he was married to a female who thrilled him in ways he’d never dreamed about then.

Lord, but his wife was lovely! Even tonight, as she’d stood there screeching at him at the foot of his bed, backlit by the hearth fire, he’d seen her magnificent breasts heaving with distress and had a hard time remembering what she was so distressed about. A very hard time, literally.

She was as desirable in her fury as she was when she lay there smiling up at him with warm welcome. It went beyond beauty, though she had that in plenty. She had milk white skin and dark russet curls, and a shape to make Venus on that clamshell look like a dried-up winkle left on the shore. She was full-breasted, slim-waisted, with a firm pert bottom that could not be ignored. He’d have called out that young fool for talking about her adorable bottom the other day, but not only would that have made the remark famous, the truth was she had the best one he’d ever seen or been privileged to hold.

He’d known greater beauties whose faces hadn’t captivated him half as much, perhaps because they hadn’t held half as many expressions as her lovely face regularly showed. Pamela’s features were small and even, except for those huge brown-gold eyes of hers. And she had the most remarkable mouth, with a slight overbite that showed off that plump, tilted upper lip that drove him mad.

Above all, the woman who owned that beautiful face, the one who dwelled in that extraordinary body, was herself as remarkable: clever, intuitive, and, best of all, she could always make him laugh. He thought he had a fair sense of humor, he appreciated a good joke and could make clever comments. But he wasn’t a merry fellow, he knew that. He just wasn’t lighthearted. It would have been amazing if he were. Heir to an old title and considerable fortune, he’d been brought up to shoulder responsibilities, and was sent off early to all the proper schools by disinterested parents. Although he had a brother and a sister, he’d never really gotten to know them and still did not.

He’d always been drawn to laughter, as though he could warm himself at it. That was how he had found his bride. He’d been at some foolish affair in London, bored to extinction—until he’d heard a woman’s full, rippling laughter. He’d turned to see her, and been caught. She’d seemed like a bonfire, a beacon, a bright and shining, warm and giving lady. So she was, or had been, until tonight. She’d been a delight to talk to, a pleasure to make love to, a perfect bride, an astonishing lover, reserved until he touched her, and then turning to flame under his hands and lips.

Yet he sometimes wished she weren’t so very obliging with him. At times he caught a vagrant hint of some wish on her part that was unexpressed. She sighed and moaned most agreeably when they were making love, but never spoke. He didn’t know how to deal with someone so tender and untried, so he continued to be gentle and careful with her, hoping experience would tell him what she could not as yet. He felt time would loosen her lips.

It had, tonight, and with a vengeance.

Hesitant with him? Ha! he thought, flopping over to his other side. She’d pinned his ears back. Which was just as well, because if she hadn’t she’d have shattered his eardrums.

Jonathan, Viscount Rexford, lay alone in his great bed and shivered with the cold. He thumped over to his other side again to capture a hint of heat from the feathers he’d just deserted. He missed his wife for more than her warmth. They hadn’t spent a night apart since they’d married. Amazing how fast a fellow became accustomed to comfort and pleasure.

He was tempted to go to the dressing room, fling open the door, take her in his arms, carry her back to bed, and tell her to forget the plans to go to the Fanshawes’ for Christmas, before he made amazing love to her. He suspected all would be forgiven if he just capitulated.

But he wasn’t good at surrender. And he’d given his word. And she was his wife. And, damn it all, she was wrong. He turned again, and tried to think warm thoughts. But they were all about his wife, so he sought a solution to his insolvable problem instead.

 

His wife, in the dressing room, turned over again. She was very warm and comfortable, physically. The doubled silk of the great feather quilt upheld her, with enough left over to cover her. But she was cold to the heart. She missed her husband. She hated his being angry with her. She shivered at the thought of his disdain for her. She wished she could just get up, march into the bedchamber with the coverlet, throw it on the bed, along with herself, and beg for his forgiveness, his lips, and his love.

But he was wrong, and she had nothing to be sorry for. Except for her marriage, her disappointment with her husband, and Christmas, which had always been such a joy and might now become the ruination of all her dreams, and her love, and her lovely marriage.

 

Pamela woke yet again from the fitful slumber she’d finally fallen into before dawn. She hadn’t heard Jonathan moving around in the bedchamber, so she rose and slowly cracked open the dressing-room door to put an eye to it to see if he was still sleeping. The sun wasn’t full up yet. But in the night she’d realized how embarrassing it would be if her maid came in to bring her morning chocolate as usual, only to find her mistress sleeping on the dressing-room floor. She had to get back into bed before anyone realized where she’d passed the night, but not until after he’d left it.

The floor was cold under her bare feet, and her heart felt colder as she tried to see into the great bed. It was empty. As was the room. He was obviously already dressed and gone.

She quickly went into the room, threw the coverlet back on the bed, and scurried under it. She only meant to do it for appearances, but when her maid came to open the curtains at noon, she was still soundly asleep.

Pamela awoke, stretched and yawned . . . until she remembered the night and the nightmare that had not been a dream. Then she stared dully at the ceiling. She’d had an inspiration in the night, sometime between headache and turn over again. But she didn’t know if she had the courage to carry it out today. She’d dress and go downstairs. Then time would tell if she had found a solution, or would instead spend the Christmas holiday all by herself. That seemed to be her only option unless they came to some sort of resolution.

She couldn’t just capitulate, and of course he wouldn’t drag her along with him. He had far too much dignity. And she wouldn’t go home without him; she couldn’t bear the shame of it. So unless they spoke and worked it out, Christmas would be a disaster and likely the beginning of an unimaginably bigger one, one that might not ever be mended.

Pamela tried to swallow the lump in her throat, waved away her maid’s offer of morning chocolate, and slid out of bed to prepare to test her fate and her future.

 

He was in the breakfast room, looking as heavy-eyed as she felt.

She slipped into her chair and asked the footman for some tea and toast. She didn’t think she could pretend to eat anything else.

“Good morning, my dear,” her husband said in his normal cool accents.

“Good morning,” she said, looking at her plate.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He hesitated. “Nor I,” he said.

She looked up at him.

His smile was wan. “I had a thought in the night,” he said slowly. “Since we’ve received competing invitations for the holidays, promising diverse pleasures, what say we take advantage of both? That is to say: we spend half the holiday with my old friends, the Fanshawes, and the other half with your family?”

She blinked. “Why, yes,” she said, with rising enthusiasm. “That sounds equitable. The twelve days of Christmas divided. Six with your friends, and six at my family home. Oh, Jonathan, what a lovely idea!”

“Actually,” he said, smiling back at her, “five and five, because we need two days of travel to get from the Fanshawes to your family home.”

“Oh, Jonathan!” she cried. Forgetting the servants, she rose from her chair and rushed round the table to him—and into his opened arms.

But it was after they’d kissed and gone back to their places, with their servants still hiding their smiles, that she realized that still meant five days with his mistress.

And he remembered that an armistice was not exactly peace.

 

“Their manor is historic,” Jonathan said, looking out the window at the stark gray pile that was Fanshawe Manor as their coach went up the long and winding drive to the front door. “It dates from Charles II’s day.”

“Yes,” Pamela said in a pinched voice, looking down at her guidebook. “So it says here. Evidently Charles gave it to a mistress for services rendered. Interesting how heredity holds true.”

Jonathan’s lips thinned. “He gave it to a Fanshawe, not to one of Marianna’s ancestors,” he said patiently.

Pamela sniffed. Her husband chose to believe it was because the swansdown that trimmed her pretty bonnet had got up her nose, and not because of what he’d said.

Their coach rattled up the front drive. Jonathan tried to see the manor as it might look through his wife’s jaundiced eyes, and had to admit it didn’t seem to be the cheeriest place to spend a Christmas holiday. Fanshawe Manor was an ancient and impressive house, but the overall impression was stark and bare. It was a great box of a place perched on a sloping hilltop. Landscape was something that occurred miles behind it, like the background of a picture. Odd, but when he’d first seen the manor all those years ago, it had looked like a fine place to spend Christmas. That had been because it was his friend Tony’s ancestral seat, and being able to spend Christmas with a family had been a welcome new experience for him.

He hadn’t known that Tony’s widowed cousin Marianna would enliven the holiday for him in ways he couldn’t have foreseen. Much his senior, but still comely, jolly, plump, and pretty, the widow had given him several fine Christmas surprises, gifts of herself that she kept on giving well into the glad new year. They’d kept up their association until he’d had to go back to university. When summer came, he went off on his grand tour, with Wellington’s forces. While he was away, Marianna had become Tony’s uncle’s second wife, and a permanent resident of Fanshawe Manor.

Tony had fallen at Salamanca. But Jonathan had seen Marianna since, always with her husband. It was hard to avoid them if one was at large in London, and he’d never seen a reason to try to keep out of their way. The affair was ancient history, one he never gave a second thought. Both he and Marianna, and their world, had changed out of all recognition. Marianna and Fanshawe were a well-matched pair, of a similar age and easygoing disposition. It was true he didn’t pass much more than the time of the night whenever he met up with them when he was on the town, and further true that he hadn’t seen them for a while.

When their invitation had come he thought it a fine way to introduce himself and his bride as a couple to the ton. Where else could they have gone, after all? Christmas was a holiday meant for sharing, and he was now an orphan. His brother was abroad, his sister lived in the north, and nothing in either of their histories or attitudes made him think they wanted, much less required, his presence. His closest friends, those who had survived the wars, were war-weary and reclusive. His newest friend was his wife. Spending the holiday with her relatives did not appeal. They were a clannish bunch who only made him feel more of an outsider. But the Fanshawes, he remembered when he read the slip of vellum requesting the honor of his presence in their home for Christmas, knew everyone.

He’d married with haste and had a delicious protracted honeymoon with his bride. That had been wonderful, but when the invitation had come he realized she knew few people in London’s ton. What better way to remedy that than to take her to a hotbed of social activity for the holidays?

But now the word “hotbed” itself gave Jonathan a frisson of unease. The Fanshawes were part of a rackety, pleasure-loving set. Precisely because of that, they entertained some of the best minds in the land, from poets to politicians. Pleasure was a much sought-after commodity these days, the recent wars having left scars only pleasure seemed to heal.

Jonathan suddenly found himself hoping the Fanshawes and their friends wouldn’t leave any scars on his lovely bride’s tender, unsophisticated sensibilities. He’d just have to continue to keep close watch over her. At least that, he thought, glancing at his wife and remembering last night and their wonderful ongoing reconciliation, would be a pleasure.

The coach drew up at the bottom of a long wide fan of stairs. As a footman opened their coach door and Jonathan stepped out, the doors of the manor flew open.

“Coo-whee!” a voice sang out. “Look who’s here, Fuff!”

Pamela paused on the carriage stair and looked up, as did Jonathan. A plump old woman dressed in cerise, with a mop of hennaed hair festooned with plumes, stood at the front door of the manor, wreathed in smiles. A fat little gnome of a gentleman with a red waistcoat stood by her side.

Jonathan breathed a sigh of relief. The frumpy-looking female was the once-voluptuous Marianna Fanshawe. The fellow who resembled Father Christmas was Fanshawe himself. They’d both aged even more since he’d last seen them, and not well, except for Jonathan’s own purposes. They looked about as rackety as a pair of Christmas elves.

Jonathan looked at his wife and smiled. Now she’d see what he meant about a tempest in a teapot, and would be a little humble, perhaps, because of how she’d carried on.

“It’s Rexford and his new lady!” Marianna caroled in a voice that must have carried into the next county. “Now don’t be jealous, Fuff, my sweet. Remember, though he’s still handsome as he can stare, I gave him up years ago! Sorry, Rex, my old dear, but Fuff is a possessive fellow.”

“Yes, indeed,” Fanshawe said on a merry chuckle as he started down the stairs. “Welcome to my home, my lord. You’re welcome to anything in the house, old fellow—except for my lady wife, of course.”

 

“Senile, I suppose,” Jonathan said as he watched his wife pace furiously around the guest chamber they’d been shown to. “But we can’t just turn around and go, even if they are.”

“Not senile,” she said stormily. “Just careless. I wrote and asked my brother Charles. He knew about them. Careless of morals and manners, he says. Everyone says so.”

“Look, my dear,” he said in his best voice of reason, “you refine upon it too much. My association with the woman was over a decade ago. I imagine Marianna likes to remember our past association only because she hasn’t much else to cheer her these days . . . Now, wait!” He stepped back from the force of his wife’s outraged glare.

“You,” she said frigidly, glowering at him, “are as bad as she is. You made love to her.” She swallowed hard before she went on. Horrid to think that dreadful woman had kissed those firm lips of his, stroked that hard muscled back, delighted in his heat and strength, known the feeling of his most intimate embrace. What words of love had he whispered to her? She couldn’t bear it.

“You had biblical knowledge of her, and who knows what other kind,” she went on. “She remembers it fondly? And you? How do you remember it? Oh, I forgot, you’re too much of a gentleman to say, even to your wife. So what am I supposed to think? And what am I to do? Agree with her? I am appalled. I didn’t expect that you had no experience before we met. However, I didn’t expect to have to hear about that experience.”

“It means nothing,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. Tell her that he’d never made love to Marianna, or any woman, as he had to her? That aside from that, he’d been young and overeager, and so overwhelmed by what seemed like his incredible good luck that he’d only taken, and never tried to give pleasure? That they hadn’t shared anything but a pillow? That it was a wholly other experience from what he shared with his wife?

All of it was true. But the codes he lived by made it impossible for him to say any of it. A gentleman did not discuss previous lovers with anyone. A fellow did not discuss his sexual experience with his bride. And a man had to stand by his given word. “It meant nothing,” he repeated.

“It does to me,” she said. “And I don’t like her, or it, or you.”

“That,” he said, “is childish.”

“So be it. I want to leave.”

“We will, but for now, we cannot. It is only for five days.”

She turned her back on him.

 

There were twenty guests seated at the long dinner table in the grand dining room at Fanshawe Manor. Twelve of the guests Pamela, Lady Rexford, knew to be infamous. Thirteen, she thought, considering that her husband would have to be included now. Because Lord Treadwell, husband to a gaunt and raddled blonde of a certain age, had just informed her that his wife had also shared a bed with Jonathan, once upon a time.

Pamela now felt so justified, so right about her previous indignation and refusal to come here, that she wished she could find a lonely, windy moor where she could celebrate her glorious vindication.

“Your rib is some kind of bruiser!” the gentleman at her right side had just said with admiration, before Pamela could introduce herself to him. “A hard goer and a tireless one. At least, so m’wife says.”

“Indeed?” was all she said as she stared cold-eyed at the lady’s husband, taking a page from her own feckless husband’s book of callous noncommittal expressions.

“Right,” he said, and continued chewing whatever he’d pushed into his mouth right after he’d let out his killing words.

He had wide light blue eyes with scant lashes, which gave his round face a perennially surprised look. Otherwise, he looked like any number of other fattish, balding older gentlemen, except that he was sitting at this table, which meant he was both rich and titled. The fact that he liked to sprinkle his conversation with thieves cant, like a lad down from university, gave Pamela some clue to the weight of his mind.

“My rib and yours, y’see,” he went on after he swallowed. “Thick as inkle weavers that whole summer ten years past, the pair of ’em. She says she knew she’d have him in the hay and begging for mercy in an hour, and so she did.”

“And you’re pleased with that?” she exclaimed before she could stop herself.

“I should say!” he said. He pointed a fork at her to give weight to his point. “Not many chaps have a wife who can get ’round a young gent like my lady can. It ain’t all ancient history, neither. Wouldn’t be surprised if she gets him again this very night.”

Pamela sucked in a hard breath. There was now only one question in her mind. Should she get up and leave this place, and her marriage, immediately? Or wait until the company left the dinner table? She couldn’t believe Jonathan would be so lost to propriety that he’d take up with another woman under her very gaze. But she couldn’t believe what this fellow had just said either.

They didn’t look like a raffish crew. The lovely old manor was filled with merry guests. The younger ones were definitely fashionable, the older ones seemed unexceptional. It was true many of the ladies had improbably bright hair and cheeks that obviously owed their blushes to rabbits’ feet and not compliments. But most of the gentlemen seemed more interested in falling on their dinners than any other kind of flesh.

Yet, now this!

“You’re saying you think they’ll . . . do it again this very night?” Pamela found herself asking in a shocked whisper.

“No, didn’t mean to be so literal, milady. Not tonight, a’course,” the fellow said as he crammed in another forkful of food. “But I’ll wager a pony they’ll be at it by dawn.”

Pamela sat and stared at his working jaws.

“Likely, we will,” Jonathan commented from where he was seated at her other side.

She swung her head around and gaped at her husband.

He smiled. “If your lady is up to a dawn ride, I’m her man,” he told the gentleman. “I mean to get back my own this time.”

“Ha!” the fellow said happily. “Prepare to lose another monkey. Neck or nothin’, that’s her. She’ll be up and over any obstacle you name before the word’s out of your mouth. She said she’d fly over the old barn and so she did. Left you panting in the hay and that’s a fact, my lord. Bruising rider, that’s m’girl!”

“Oh . . . rider,” Pamela breathed.

“ ‘Oh, rider,’ indeed,” Jonathan said into her ear as he leaned to whisper to her, the smile in his voice palpable. “The lady is a steeplechase rider, and I don’t doubt she can still beat me at it. But I’m game to try again. Oh, ye of little faith. Honi soit qui mal y’ pense,” he added, and translated, “Evil is who evil thinks, my dear.”

And then, because it wasn’t polite to keep speaking to one’s own wife at a dinner party, he turned to the lady on his other side.

The raddled blond steeplechase rider leaned across her husband’s plate and gave Pamela a huge wink.

When the ladies left the room to give the gentlemen time to empty their bladders and fill them up again with port, the blond lady seized Pamela’s arm in her sinewy hand as they strolled into the salon.

“My husband gave you a turn, did he?” she laughed. “Don’t deny it. You went the color of whey. Thought I was after Rexford, did you? Well, I would be if I could be, but he never did take me up on anything but a race and he isn’t about to start now. Not when he has such as you on his arm.”

Pamela smiled, uneasily.

The lady patted her cheek. “Pretty as you can stare, and he keeps staring at you. Gather ye rosebuds, love. They don’t last long, you know.”

The evening went much better for Pamela after that.

 

“In fact,” she said as she brushed out her hair after she’d dismissed her maid later that night, “I actually had fun!” She saw Jonathan’s look of surprise. “Their jokes were old, and they were all so tipsy that they enjoyed those jokes more than anyone else did, but they were a jolly crew. They’ve known each other so long it’s almost as if they’re a big family. No wonder they like to spend the holidays together. The ones I got to know were delightful. Baron Oldcastle is a dear, and Mr. Vickery has such a sly sense of humor, and though Lady James is hard of hearing, she’s charming. Her risqué comments are adorable rather than shocking.”

Jonathan took the brush from her hand and leaned over her. “I’m glad you’ve reconsidered,” he said as he ran his lips along the line of her jaw. “But it’s early days. Reserve judgment. Oldcastle is more than a dear, and Lady James can be much less than charming. And more company will be coming. Now, as for the rest of tonight . . .”

“What a silly I was,” Pamela exclaimed, rising and wrapping her arms around his neck. “To make such a fuss about nothing. You were right . . . no!” she said, clapping a hand over his lips. “I’ll never say that again, so be still and treasure it. I think I was a bit inflexible. I did listen too much to gossip. I ought to have known you’d never do anything to expose me to embarrassment or humiliation. Your friends have been everything kind to me and have done all they can to make me feel at home.”

“I’m glad you’re having a good time now,” he murmured against her warm palm before he gently teased the fleshy base of her thumb with his teeth.

“Who wouldn’t?” she asked, with a delicious shiver at the feeling of his teeth nibbling at her palm. “Such friendly people. It’s true they don’t keep to any Christmas traditions that I know, so one would almost forget the holiday’s approaching. Although they are very fond of wassail.”

“Minx!” he said appreciatively as he dropped her hand and drew her closer. “You are doing well here. Perhaps too well. You’ve already learned to turn a compliment like a knife.”

“I almost regret having struck our bargain and leaving before Christmas itself,” she said with a sigh. “But I should like to see my family.”

He stilled. “And so you shall see them.” He hesitated. “Look, my love, there’s no need for utter surrender, you know . . . except to me, this way, at least.” And then he changed the subject, without saying a word.

 

The great dining room was full, all the guests had arrived. The conversation was loud and incessant, the toasts frequent, and even more so after the ladies had left the gentlemen to their port. That was why not a few of the gentlemen had to hold on to the wall in order to leave the room to join the ladies again.

But Jonathan had a hard head, and besides, he was not quite as merry as some of the company tonight.

“What? You’ve got the morning after headache already?” Sam Gregory, a fresh-faced young gentleman, asked when he noticed Jonathan’s faint frown. “Without even having had the pleasure of earning it?”

Jonathan smiled thinly. “No such luck, or bad luck. It is only that I had forgotten what these house parties were like. I’ve been abroad a long time, you see.”

“It’s not that,” Lord Montrose, a high-nosed worldly gentleman, commented softly as they watched some other guests staggering out into the hall. “I’ve never been to such a Christmas party myself. The jests are a bit warmer than one would expect to hear in mixed company,” he explained to puzzled young Sam Gregory as Jonathan nodded. “Indeed, the mixture of company itself is unusual. Some, quite comme il faut. Others? A trifle raffish, perhaps? Present company excepted, of course,” he added.

“So I thought,” Jonathan murmured.

“Not quite the thing, perhaps?” Lord Montrose went on. “At least, not mine for the Christmas holiday. It almost makes me wish I’d accepted my second cousin’s invitation. But the prospect of being entertained by their five lively infants dampened my holiday spirits somewhat.”

Jonathan laughed. “Understandable. I was hesitant to visit my wife’s family for the same reason. Still, we’re leaving here in a few days for just such romps.”

“I doubt it,” Lord Montrose said serenely. “My cousin’s also expecting another addition at any hour. Mind, I don’t mind having to boil water, but only to add to my punch.”

The men laughed, though the younger gentleman’s face flushed.

“Astonishing,” Lord Montrose said, raising his quizzing glass and peering at the younger man. “You color at a hint of a medical reference, and yet I didn’t see a trace of embarrassment when those questionable tales were being told tonight.”

“And those references,” Jonathan said, grinning, “all had to do with getting a female into such a situation in the first place.”

“Well, but one’s fun, and the other is . . .”

“Reality,” Lord Montrose said.

“At any rate,” Jonathan told Lord Montrose, “I’m glad it wasn’t only my perception. I mean, about this gathering. I did think it was getting rather warm in here tonight and have been wondering at the wisdom of my bringing my bride to such a gathering.”

“Take heart. It likely was an aberration, not due to the spirit of the holiday but rather due to the spirits of the season,” Lord Montrose said with an admirably straight face.

Jonathan smiled, as expected. But his smile didn’t reach his eyes.

 

“Tonight, my friends,” their hostess declared when all her guests had assembled again in the salon after dinner a few minutes later, “we’ll have a scavenger hunt! With prizes!”

The company gave out a ragged cheer. Pamela smiled. Last night, she’d won at charades. The night before, she’d won at cards. She shot Jonathan a smug look and sat up straight in her excitement.

He did not return her merry glance, but rather stroked his chin and looked thoughtful.

“Now,” Marianna said as she handed out slips of paper to her lounging guests, “here’s the list. Everyone must find the objects written on their list and return them here before cock’s crow, if not sooner. Now you must all choose a partner. No, no,” she said, shaking a plump beringed finger at Pamela, “not your own life’s partner, if you please. Wives and husbands know each other too well, and so work too well in tandem, giving the married couples an unfair advantage. So we will re-pair the company and have a more interesting hunt.” She told Pamela, “Now, you, my lady, will be partnered by . . .”

“Me,” ancient Baron Oldcastle called out. “I need a supple lass to help me bend and seek.”

“No, me,” Lord Ipcress cried. “The lady’s a winner, and my luck’s been out of late.”

“If you please, youth goes to youth, so it’s me,” handsome Mr. Burroughs insisted.

Other gentlemen put in their claims as Pamela blushed with pride. She’d always been good at games.

“It’s only right to handicap a constant winner,” Marianna said. “So she gets my dear Fuff, because there never was such a fellow for not finding his own nose in front of his face!”

A great many mock groans met this announcement. Lord Fanshawe, or “Fuff” as his friends called him, grinned and waved at his guests. Pamela smiled. The old fellow didn’t make much sense, but she could have gotten a worse partner. Though she liked most of her fellow guests, she had to admit she didn’t like the looks some of the gentlemen shot at her. She now thought that because she’d been so relieved not to find monsters of depravity at Fanshawe Manor, she’d perhaps been too hasty in her praise of her hosts and their company. She tried not to be a prude, but felt that a gentleman oughtn’t to look at a married lady with such naked assessment as she’d been treated to since she’d arrived at the manor. Her elderly host’s admiration, though apparent, was not objectionable.

“And I shall have Rexford,” Marianna announced, “which is very much like old times.” As Pamela blinked, she went on, “Now, as for the rest of you . . .”

Honi soit qui mal y pense, Pamela reminded herself. It wasn’t her hostess’s fault that she so resented her so much she could scarcely exchange a word with her. But however much she knew she had to try to be more flexible now that she was a married lady, and even if her hostess was now somewhat the worse for years, still Pamela couldn’t get over the fact that the woman had been her husband’s lover. She didn’t know if she ever could. The best part was that she didn’t have to. Two more days and she’d be gone from here. It was good to see she had no dragons to fight after all, but she didn’t think she’d ever care to return. And from what she could see, neither would Jonathan. He might consider these people his friends, but she noticed he’d spent all of his time with her.

“And, Montrose, you go with Lady Simmons,” Marianna said as she continued pairing up her guests. “My lord Oldcastle, you have Miss Chudleigh—oh, very well, don’t start complaining. Miss Chudleigh may go with Lord Dearborne, and you will be partnered by her friend Mr. Barrow. Happy now? Very good. And my lord Billings . . .”

“Off we go then, eh?” Lord Fanshawe said from the vicinity of Pamela’s elbow.

She looked down at him. “Not yet,” she said, showing him the list. “First we have to see what we’re looking for, then plan how to get them.” She frowned. “The thing is that I don’t know if this is fair. I’ll still have the advantage. After all, you know where everything is.”

“Consummately unfair,” Lord Ipcress commented from where he stood behind them, watching.

“All’s fair in love and war,” Marianna Fanshawe said on a laugh, taking Jonathan’s arm. “Now, let’s get on with it, there’s darkness being wasted.”

Jonathan didn’t budge. He stood watching Pamela peruse the list as the other guests formed pairs and began to leave the salon.

“A painted thimble,” Pamela told Lord Fanshawe. “Let’s start with that. We just have to go to the housekeeper, don’t we?”

He nodded. “Very, yes, indeed, that’s the ticket. Off to the housekeeper then, shall we?”

“Yes, but then we have to get a rag doll,” Pamela said as she started to leave the room with her host.

“In due time,” he said, taking her hand in his plump little paw. “First things first. This will be fun, what?”

The manor was a rabbit warren of rooms, and Pamela found herself utterly lost as her sprightly little host pulled her along dark corridors. It was a warm, crowded darkness, because the old place was furnished with what seemed to be the relics of a dozen generations of Fanshawes. Her host held one of her hands. Pamela kept the other stretched out in front of her so she wouldn’t bump into bureaus, tables, chairs, or walls. That way she didn’t collide with them all, just most of them.

One would think they’d light more lamps for the scavenger hunt, she thought as she nearly missed colliding with another armoire. She was sure she’d show bruises on her shins in the morning, and wondered how the other guests, who didn’t have the help of a resident of the manor, would ever get back to the main salon when they were done.

“Here!” Lord Fanshawe finally chortled, and abruptly stopped.

Pamela looked around. They stood in a dimly lit room filled with massive pieces of furniture. Most notably, an enormous canopied bed.

“The housekeeper lives here?” she asked in confusion.

“Hee hee,” her host chortled, tugging on her hand. “We can forget that air of innocence now, what?” He grabbed her and tried to drag her closer to his portly little person.

Pamela was as furious as appalled by her host’s sudden display of grappling arms, and soon made even angrier by the wet kiss that slid along her chin as she struggled with him. But she didn’t struggle long. She was country bred, and came from a large family with protective brothers eager to share their knowledge of self-defense with an adored little sister.

“Stop that!” Pamela puffed, and shoved him hard. It was like trying to shove one of the armoires she’d careened into earlier in their journey through the manor. He was old and fat and short, but sturdy as a tree trunk. She didn’t want to kill the old fellow, but she did mean to disable him. So she stomped on his foot and hooked an ankle around the other one that he immediately hopped to, and then she pushed him hard again. This time, he toppled.

“Outrageous!” she huffed. Leaving him sitting on the floor, she turned on her own heel to find her way back from what she now realized must be her host’s bedchamber.

She stormed out into the hall, and straight into another pair of arms and a hard chest.

“I thought you’d give him the slip,” Lord Ipcress said on a laugh as he wrapped her in an embrace. “Old fool, to think a prize like you would dally with him. I saw where you were really looking.”

This gentleman was wearing boots instead of evening slippers, so he didn’t even notice a foot slammed down on top of his. He was too close for a raised knee to do anything but encourage him, and not only was he able to catch her flailing hands, but he stood some inches taller than Pamela and had impressive muscles. So she resorted to throwing back her head and letting out a fearsome screech. It made Lord Ipcress wince, which made him close his eyes, which also meant that he didn’t see the fist that connected with his jaw.

“Get up so I can knock you down again,” Jonathan said through clenched teeth.

Lord Ipcress either didn’t hear him or decided to let things literally lay where they were for the moment.

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan told Pamela as he drew her close. “I didn’t know and didn’t believe what I thought I began to see. We’ll leave at first light. Pamela, I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be,” she said breathlessly.

“Of course I need be,” he said impatiently. “I wish I’d listened to your fears and given them more credence, instead of assuming I knew best. By God!” he said with an angry look at the man who lay at their feet. “I’d no idea of what passed for amusement in this set; my experience of these people was out of date. When I saw the way the guests were being paired off, and how they reacted, I remembered your suspicions, and followed. Where’s that wretched Fanshawe?”

“I knocked him down,” she said.

“Too bad. I’d have liked to do it.”

“Where’s . . . Marianna?” she asked.

“God knows,” he said bitterly, “and only He cares.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said again. He stared out the coach window as they drove down the frosty country lane toward the main highway again. “What a ghastly way to start a Christmas holiday. Forgive me.”

“They all weren’t awful,” Pamela said generously. “I quite liked some of them. The Whitleys and the Gordons, and Mr. Ames and Lord Montrose also left this morning, you know.”

“Yes, and Sam Gregory as well,” he said. “But that only means we weren’t the only ones foolish enough not to look before we leaped.” He avoided her eyes and cleared his throat, very glad that he’d sent her maid with his valet ahead in another coach.

“I spoke to Lady Fanshawe this morning,” he said. “We’ll never see them again. I can only think that losing her looks made her also lose her good sense. Although, now in retrospect, I have to admit that a grown woman who found it amusing to seduce a green lad never really had good sense. What could I have been thinking? There was gossip, but I discounted it in my eagerness to see you established in the social whirl. I’ve been away at the wars too long, Pamela. I’d forgot not only who was important in the social world, but also my own good sense. Forgive me. We’ll make new friends, decent friends, together. I’ll not impose my preferences on you either.”

She nodded, and smiled widely. He was anxious to win her over, but he was only human. She was drinking in every penitent word, and he supposed she had the right. But he was tired of apologizing.

“Do you think our arriving days early will upset your family’s plans?” he suddenly asked.

“I think they will be ecstatic,” she said.

She thought she heard him sigh. So she moved close to him and rested her head on his shoulder. “We’ll have a happy Christmas,” she said. “You’ll see.”

He took her hand. “I hope we shall. I only wish my part of it had turned out differently.”

She didn’t like her new husband when he was arrogant. But she discovered she didn’t like him when he was this repentant, either. So she kissed him, and they forgot sadness and apologies, and Christmas itself, for a while.

 

Jonathan smiled. His wife had her nose pressed to the carriage window, like a child at a sweet shop.

“It looks just the same!” she caroled as she stared out at the old farmhouse they were approaching. “Oh! But I’ve so missed this place.”

Her husband’s smile slipped.

“London is wonderful,” she went on, “but this is home!”

“Indeed,” he said. He had a home in the Cotswolds as well as the one in London, an ancient manor house that his wife had said was lovely, the one and only time they’d visited it. His estate was older, more beautiful and historic than the house they approached. But she’d never greeted it with half so much pleasure as she now showed as they neared her parents’ rambling country home.

“Oh—there’s Papa!” she cried as the coach slowed in the front drive. “And Mama! And Bobby and Elizabeth—and Cousin George! That means that Mary must have had the baby. And that little love with the basket of holly must be Harriet’s youngest, only look at her curls. Oh, my, how lovely, all the children standing waiting for us, isn’t that sweet? They’ve grown so much I vow I can’t tell whose child is which. Look! There’s Kit and Harry with different hairstyles! Oh, good, they must have finally grown up and decided being the terrible Arthur twins is passé. And could that be Cecil? No! But it is! He’s home from the sea at last. Oh, Jonathan,” she cried, turning to give him a quick hug, “we’re here! I’m home!”

There was nothing he could say. No one would have heard him anyway. The coach slowed, and the door was pulled open, and his wife flew into the many welcoming arms of her enormous family.

“Rexford,” a tall, thin, dour gentleman said when he saw Jonathan descending from the carriage.

“Laughton,” Jonathan said, acknowledging his wife’s brother-in-law with a nod. He watched as her adoring relatives engulfed his wife. “Been here long?”

“A week,” Laughton said glumly. “You’re just in time. You missed the traditional family musicale, where the children show off their progress on the flute, pianoforte, and harp. Tonight they’re holding the traditional charades party. The costumed pantomime’s tomorrow night. Got an evening of dancing set for after that. Parties every night until Christmas, and then there’s the round of visiting to be done.”

“Yes, I see. So Pamela said it would be.” Jonathan didn’t have time to say more. His wife flew out of the pack of her relatives, grabbed his hand, and dragged him to them in order to reintroduce him to everyone he hadn’t seen since his wedding. With her six siblings and their spouses, their children, a covey of cousins, aunts and uncles, and old family friends to be greeted, it was snowing heavily by the time the introductions were done. No one but Jonathan seemed to notice.

 

“And you’ll be my king,” Pamela said as she adjusted her paste tiara.

“I should rather not,” Jonathan said, picking up his pasteboard crown and staring at it. “That is to say, I’m really not very good at pantomimes.”

“You must,” she said firmly. “Everyone will be in costume . . .” Her eyes grew wide. “I mean, I wish you would try. Please do put it on. You don’t have to act in the pantomime but you do have to look as though you’d take part.” She raised the crown and set it lightly on his head, then tilted it so it sat rakishly on his close-cropped curls. “Oh, don’t you look regal! Far better than any of the Hanovers.”

He smiled. “That’s not much of a compliment.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “It means so much to Mama. If you don’t, she’ll take it as further evidence that you don’t like her. Try as I might, I can’t convince her that is just your way.”

“What is just my way?”

“You know,” she said, twitching a shoulder, making the filmy gauze of her princess’s costume seem to float around her, “your reserved manner. We’re a convivial group, and she thinks anyone who doesn’t talk sixteen to the dozen is disapproving.” She glanced up at his reflection in the mirror before her. “You don’t disapprove, do you?”

He put his hands on her shoulders and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. “No, I do not. What is there to disapprove of? All right, I’ll be a king. And I’ll try to talk more. Are you happy?”

She spun around and hugged him. “Oh, so very happy now, my dear! Isn’t this the best Christmas?”

He didn’t answer. It was not. It was very far from it, at least for him. But she was ecstatic, and that actually made him even less happy. This was their second day at her parents’ home, and she’d been busy from morning to evening, visiting with her family. There was room for all of them, and it was a huge family. The manor was a rambling old house, made up of rooms that had been cobbled together by her ancestors as the spirit moved them and their family increased. They had been fruitful and so the house had multiplied, until now it was a welter of styles. It was not, Jonathan supposed, uncomfortable. But neither was it the sort of place that he had ever called home, or wanted to. It lacked grace and style, both of which were things he always sought.

Though his wife was clearly thrilled to be there, Jonathan felt severely out of place. He often found himself wondering how such a bright and lovely person as his bride could have sprung from such beginnings. This made him feel guilty, because he didn’t like to think of himself as stiff, or cold, or an elitist, and everything in this house made him feel more like one.

Viscount Rexford knew he was a man of consequence, but also knew that it was a damnable thing to be aware of that consequence. So he tried to fit in, but the longer he stayed at his in-laws’ home, the more of a stranger he felt. He didn’t mind the myriad sticky-fingered infants, and actually enjoyed the time he passed with the older children. But there were so many of them, and they had so many activities and friends present, that he didn’t see them that often or for that long. Which was too bad, because they were the only ones here he could have a good conversation with, or at least conversations that didn’t involve something that had happened the last time Christmas had come to the squire’s home. And his wife had no time for him at all.

He didn’t even have the solace of her company. When they chanced to be in the same room, she was lost in conversations with this brother or that sister, or was busily trading stories with one old friend or another. When he didn’t see her surrounded by laughing men, he saw her giggling with women, or cuddling a baby, or kneeling to have earnest discussion with a toddler. And not one of those conversations was one he could share.

He hated to be selfish, or at least to be aware that he was, but he sometimes wondered if she remembered he was there at all. Then he reminded himself that he’d brought her to the Fanshawes’ over her objections, hadn’t he? And she’d been molested there. He owed her more than courtesy in this. After all, the most dire thing that could happen to him here was to be bored to death.

And it was only three more days. He paused. Damnation! No, it would be five more days, because they’d come early when they’d escaped from the blasted Fanshawes. He picked up the ancient moth-eaten robes that a generation of his wife’s ancestors had worn at their Christmas pantomime, repressed a shudder, and prepared to be king for a night.

 

“She was the sweetest babe,” the old woman dressed up as a fortune teller told Jonathan. “Never a cry out of her. Why, didn’t Betty, she who was wet nurse for both Pamela and Eugene, didn’t she say that sweet Pamela could be stuck with a pin and she wouldn’t cry?”

“No, I don’t think so,” the other wizened old woman she was sitting with said. This one was dressed in so many shawls Jonathan couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be a mummy, or was actually an invalid. “It wasn’t Betty who nursed Eugene, Elizabeth,” she said thoughtfully. “It was that Tolliver woman from Frick’s farm.”

“I think not!” the fortune teller said on a laugh. “I’d forget my own name before I’d forget that. It wasn’t that Tolliver woman. She had a wart on her chin. Remember, it frightened young Arthur and made him cry? He said she was a witch, and wasn’t there a fuss when Mary found out about that! She never was one to let the children be impudent to the servants. No, I believe it was Betty. Here, Mary?” she called, snatching out at a nearby shepherdess’s gown. “Wasn’t it Betty who nursed Eugene?”

Pamela’s mother left off talking to one of her daughters. She went over to where her two old aunts were entertaining her new son-in-law.

“Why no,” she said. “It was Mrs. Fairchild, from Hilde-brandt’s farm.”

“So it was!” the fortune teller exclaimed. “She was the one with the mole. Mrs. Tolliver had the crooked teeth. Where is my head? So, she was the one who was Pamela’s nurse too.”

“Oh, no,” Pamela’s mother said. “That was Betty. She nursed Pamela.”

“How fascinating for Rexford,” a slender young gentleman dressed as a devil said with a laugh. “Regaling him with wet-nurse tales. Fie, Mama! Trying to bore your new son-in-law to extinction? Come along, my lord, we’ve some hot punch and a few warm tales for you.”

“Very well,” Pamela’s mama said. “Take him and entertain him royally. But be back for the pantomime, if you please.”

“You must think we’re a pack of regular country bumpkins, a pack of Johnny Raws,” the young man said as he bore Jonathan off to join a group of costumed men standing by a punch bowl in the corner of the room. “I’ll wager they’ve filled your head with baby stories until you’re ready to howl like a babe yourself. Here, gents, I’ve rescued our new relative.”

Jonathan was handed a cup of punch. “More in this than a stick of cinnamon,” Pamela’s father, dressed as a Roman senator, said with a wink. “So, tell us, Rexford. What’s new in London?”

“Town was pretty thin of company with Christmas coming,” Jonathan said, searching for a subject that would interest his host. He scarcely knew the man, but remembered Pamela said he was an ardent sportsman. He himself didn’t hunt, and only fished in order to find solitude. Although he had plans to raise horses now that he was married and ready to live at his country estate, he didn’t wager on them. He cudgeled his brain to think of something that might interest his father-in-law. He did fence, but didn’t think that would fascinate a country squire. He did spar at Gentleman Jackson’s salon! “Ah, yes,” he said, “the latest rumor is that Cribb is going to fight Molyneaux again in the new year.”

“I doubt it!” his father-in-law exclaimed. “Twice was enough, I’d think. At any rate, Molyneaux had his jaw broken by the Champion in September, and I daresay that will take a while to heal. Don’t know if the Moor would care for another taste of that kind of punishment, either.”

“Were you there?” Jonathan asked.

“No, but I’d have given a pretty penny to have been! I did see Molyneaux destroy Rimmer, though, earlier in the year. Now, there was a match to remember.”

“Aye,” another noble Roman said, “so you said. And you told me that I had something of the Champion’s style when Nick and I went at it that time after I thought he’d insulted that barmaid in town, you remember, the one I fancied.”

“Ho!” Pamela’s father said. “But you fancied every barmaid, Charles.”

The men laughed. Charles smiled. “So I did. Wasn’t she the wench though? Lord! She had half the boys in the district sniffing after her. When they weren’t fighting over her, they were planning on how they could snare her. She finally ran off with young Fairchild, didn’t she?”

“Her? No,” a fellow clad as a Gypsy put in. “She ran off with a tinker, I heard.”

“Heard wrong,” another gentleman, this one in motley pirate’s garb, protested. “She never. Harry here had the right of it. She run off with young Fairchild, and his father had to pay a pretty penny to be rid of her. Almost got to Gretna too.”

“No, that was Fairchild and Dylan’s daughter who got intercepted on the road to Gretna,” Pamela’s brother Kit said.

“Aye, that’s right,” a man got up as a harlequin in patches said. “And then they up and ran to Scotland, and never looked back. Anyone hear what happened to them?”

“You ask every year, Godfrey,” another man said. “And no one ever knows. Did you fancy her yourself?”

“Why, so I did. Who wouldn’t?”

“There’s truth in that, she was a pippin. But then what happened to the bar wench Nick fought over?”

“She went to London by herself,” the harlequin said. “What happened after that, I don’t know, but that I do remember.”

“I remember that you fancied her too,” the Roman said slyly.

That evening Jonathan also learned, yet again, that it was possible for a man to sleep standing up, with his eyes open, and without falling down.

 

He opened his eyes. Now that he was finally in bed, Jonathan couldn’t sleep.

“Can’t sleep?” his wife asked from the next pillow.

“How did you know?”

“I can’t either,” she said.

“Well, as it happens, you lucky lady, I happen to have a cure for that,” he said softly, and reached for her.

She scooted back and sat up against her pillow.

“What’s this?” he asked on a laugh, drawing back. “I bathed and cleaned my teeth.” He raised his arm and pretended to sniff at his underarm. “I’m fragrant as a rose.”

She said nothing.

His voice became tender. “I’m sorry. Are you unwell?”

“No,” she said tersely.

He was still for a moment. He’d been pleased to find her awake in the deep of this lonely night and had looked forward to her intimate company. He’d been willing to settle for good conversation. But though he’d only been married three months, he wasn’t slow at recognizing storm signals flying.

“I see,” he said slowly. “So, what is it then?”

“You,” she said deliberately. “I believe you are the one who can tell me what it is.”

“I can?”

“You ought to,” she said. Like steam escaping from a kettle her words rushed out. “You should! I mean to say, why else would a man stand mute as a clam all night, if he didn’t have some issue or another that was bedeviling him?”

He was honestly perplexed.

“You did not say two words together to anyone tonight!” she cried. “Not to my mother or father, or any of my sisters or brothers. You stood like some . . . icy paragon, looking down your long nose at my family!”

He tried to remember just whom he had conversation with. “I wasn’t looking down at anyone,” he said defensively. “There was just nothing for me to say.”

“Nothing to say!” she echoed with vast frustration in her voice. “You, who reads every news sheet and magazine, and keeps up on politics and literature, theater and . . . and everything going on around you, had nothing to say to my family? I think not, and I tell you that I take it badly. If I could go to those frightful Fanshawes and pretend to be enchanted by their dissolute and vulgar company, the least you could do was to pretend to be entertained by my family. But I suppose they are too decent for you.”

His head went up, and now he did look down his long nose at her. It was just too bad, he thought, that she probably couldn’t see it in the darkness. “My friends let you speak,” he said icily. “I, on the other hand, had no chance to say anything. My friends included you in their conversations and their games . . .”

He belatedly realized his misstatement. He almost heard her mute satisfaction with his poor choice of words, and hurried on the attack. “But no one here pays the least attention to me,” he said. “Since I did not have the same wet nurse as anyone present, or the same nursery maid, nor shared in any of those interminable convoluted escapades your family never tires of repeating, they had no interest in anything I had to say.”

His voice, she noted with interest, was growing loud. That was something she hadn’t heard before. It pleased her. “I don’t believe you tried, my lord,” she said with haughty disdain. “You didn’t even speak with Laughton and he is the most congenial chap. Nor can you accuse him of rehashing old tales. He couldn’t. He’s only been married to my sister for a year.”

“He collects beetles,” Jonathan said with weary patience. “He earnestly collects them. There is not much else I can bring to a conversation that might interest him.”

“I do not believe you tried,” she said again.

“I see,” he said. “And you know because you were at my side every moment? How very odd that I didn’t see you there. Dear me, can I be growing shortsighted?” he asked with a curling lip. “But how is that possible? I clearly saw you across the room, giggling with your sisters and friends; I saw you dandling every infant in the county on your knee at one time or another during the interminable evening, I saw you swapping those same shared tales with your brothers and cousins. I did not see you with your husband, though. In fact, if one were a visitor here, one would be hard-pressed to realize you were married. I remind you that I never left your side when we were at Fanshawe Manor.”

She was still, because she was stung. What he said was true, and the realization hurt. She had neglected him. She opened her lips to murmur an apology. But he sensed his victory, and spoke too soon.

“A very jolly Christmas this is turning out to be for me,” he said loftily. “I might as well have stayed at home by myself with a good book, and shared a toast to the season with the butler. He, at least, knows who his master is.”

“His master!” she cried, pouncing on the word.

He realized his error, and winced.

“Well, I take leave to tell you that you are not my master,” she raged. “You are my husband, and I also tell you that I have never so regretted it!” She rose from the bed, and stepped down to the floor. “Nor will I sleep next to either my master or my husband tonight! After all, a master does not wish his servant in his bed and I do not believe a husband who deems himself my master deserves me at his side!”

Once again he realized her predicament before she did, and watched with interest.

She understood a second later, and stood irresolute. If she left the room, her family would be scandalized. They’d want to know the reason for any discord. They’d take sides and the quarrel would become everyone’s entertainment, and the bane of her existence however it turned out. She knew this house like the back of her hand and yet knew she could not step out the door. And this bedchamber did not have a dressing room.

It did, however, have a chaise in the corner, against the wall. She stormed over to a chest under the window, flung it open, pulled out a blanket, flung herself on the chaise, and dragged the blanket over herself.

The room was still.

She heard a sigh, and saw his outline as he rose from bed. He walked over to her. She froze, and held her breath. She doubted he meant to do her an injury. But what would she do if he dared embrace her? Could she return his kisses? No, she thought with a kind of thrilled panic, she didn’t think she could. So, what should she do?

He leaned over her and her breath caught in her chest. He reached down, picked her up, and carried her to the bed in a few swift strides. He deposited her there and in one swift movement stripped the blanket from her, causing her to roll right out of it. Then, as she lay tumbled, watching him in newborn fear and vast surprise, he marched back to the chaise, lay down, and covered himself with the blanket he had taken.

“Good night,” he said, and turned his back to her.

He’d won, she realized. Being a gentleman had utterly trumped her. That rankled. But that wasn’t what kept her up half the night. What did, was the slow dawning realization that he’d had a point.

He stayed awake awhile, feeling very ill-used. But he knew he’d won, and also that whatever else his wife was, she was fair-minded. And so he finally fell asleep with a smile on his lips, wondering what the devil she’d do in the morning. His bride might not be reasonable, he thought as he drifted off, but by God, she was interesting! He hadn’t felt so alive in years.

 

“I apologize,” Pamela said.

Jonathan opened his eyes all the way, and saw her seated at the dressing table.

“I should not have left your side last night,” she said, looking at his reflection in her mirror. She’d been waiting for him to wake up and had spoken the minute she’d seen those thick eyelashes of his flutter and open. “I suppose I was just so pleased to be with my family again that I forgot it was my duty to make sure you were as comfortable as I was. Forgive me for that.”

He sat up. Holding his blanket over his naked body, he rose and came to stand beside her. “I do,” he said, gazing down at her. “And I earnestly ask you to forgive me for my poor choice of words. I never want to be your master. But I do wish I could have you as my partner in this new life of ours.”

His blanket was not very securely held. They were late for breakfast.

 

They came down the stairs to see the manor had been transformed in the night. Evergreen branches were swagged over every mantel, and were twined around the chandeliers. The staircase was decorated with ropes of rosemary and pine, enlivened by strings of nuts and bright winter berries.

“Greetings!” her father called when they entered the dining room. “We’ve been at work for hours, sleepy heads.”

There were a few murmured comments about newlyweds from among the others in the room that made Pamela’s cheeks grow as rosy as her much kissed lips.

“Did you forget, puss?” her father asked.

She frowned in incomprehension as she took a seat at the table.

“Marriage has addled your wits.” Her brother Kit laughed. “We always get up at dawn to start decorating the old place on Christmas Eve. Remember?”

“Oh!” she said, round-eyed. “Is it the twenty-fourth today?”

“Aye. But don’t worry, we haven’t hauled in the Yule log yet.”

“Not that we haven’t picked it out,” her sister Rosemary said. “Father has had his eye on it for months. And the children are on tenterhooks, waiting for us to finish breakfast so we can go out with them and help them bring in the rest of the bunting. We still have yards of holly and ivy, to say nothing of mistletoe, to harvest.”

“Not that those two need any mistletoe,” a cousin called out, and made everyone laugh.

“We can’t put any holly, ivy, or mistletoe up until tonight,” her mother cautioned them, unnecessarily, because they all knew it so well. “Bad luck to set so much as a pinch of any of them inside until dark. But we can and will collect it today. First, we’ll go watch you gents cut the Yule log. Then, while you haul it home, we’ll get our holly and ivy. You men can come help us pull down the mistletoe. We’re all ready to go, so finish your breakfast and we can get started,” she told Pamela. “But be sure to eat enough to keep you warm, it’s very cold today. We can have another cup of tea while we wait. We didn’t want to start out without you. It would be a hard thing to have you to come all this way and miss all our fun.”

“I’ll say!” Pamela’s brother Harry exclaimed. “Remember how vexed Charles got that year when he overslept and missed dragging the Yule log back?”

“Didn’t I just?” Charles declared. “I still get hot when I think about it. How could you let me sleep past that? I was looking forward to it, and only overslept because I was so overactive the day before. Remember? We had that horse race and a foot race, and I was so tired I couldn’t wait to fall into bed. I still believe it was because I was the one who found the log that year, and not Kit, that he deliberately let me oversleep.”

“Hardly,” Kit said. “You were overactive at the punch bowl the night before, if you remember.”

“Me?” Charles laughed. “And what about you and your friend Wilson? Didn’t I hear something about the flask he enlivened the punch bowl with that night? Or don’t you remember?”

There was much laughter, and soon others at the crowded table began to offer other versions of the reason why Charles had missed dragging home the Yule log that year. Then they started to talk about the year before, when they’d chopped the chosen log only to find it rotted at the heart and how they’d had to scurry to find a new one.

Pamela laughed as she remembered. Wanting to share the fun, she looked at her husband, at her side. He sat with a faint, agreeable smile on his lips. But his eyes were glazing over. She shot a glance at Laughton, her sister’s husband, and saw a similar expression in his mild brown eyes. Her own widened as she realized every second word she was hearing was “remember?”

“Come now!” she said into the first moment of silence that presented itself. “This is hardly fair! Neither Rexford nor Laughton was here then, and they can’t help but be bored to flinders by our reminiscences.”

Her sister shot her a grateful look. But her brothers jeered.

“What?” Harry asked, incredulous. “Speak for yourself, sweetings. Who could resist that tale?”

“And we tell it so well they’d have to see the point. Don’t you, my lord?” George asked. “And you, Laughton?”

“Indeed,” Jonathan said as Laughton also hastily agreed.

“You just don’t want us telling them about that time you ate the mistletoe berries instead of chucking them over your shoulder when you made a wish, as you were supposed to do, Pam. Gad!” Kit said with a shudder. “I’ll never forget how sick you were. Not from the berries, I doubt they had time to sit in your stomach long enough. But from that brew Mama kept pouring into you to get you to relinquish them.”

“Now, now,” his father admonished him, “no more of that, sir, if you please. Some of us are still eating breakfast.”

“What?” Kit cried. “And you with an iron stomach? Taking her part, are you, Father? Don’t you want Rexford to hear what Pam said to Mama—when she could speak again, that is. Well, I remember. She said she never knew she was supposed to pluck them after a kiss, she thought it was after a wish!”

“Worse than that,” Harry said with a grin, “she thought she was supposed to eat them, not toss them over her shoulder.”

“She never could resist a berry,” Kit laughingly agreed. “We told her they were poisonous, but would she listen? Never. Remember?”

“I remembered,” his mother said, shaking her head. “That’s why I told Dr. Foster to check her ears as well as her stomach when he got here.”

The company roared at the old familiar story and Pamela smiled at the memory in spite of herself. She was relieved to see that her husband seemed genuinely amused as well. She was grateful, though she felt uncomfortable now. Her unease wasn’t about any embarrassing tales her loving family could tell him, but because she finally realized what a dead bore he must find them all.

Now that she was aware of the problem, her joy in the day was ruined. The situation didn’t improve as the day went on.

The trip in the sleigh to get the Yule log was enlivened by stories of every other such trip they’d ever taken, back to the first Arthur ancestor who ever strode over English soil, or so Pamela thought in despair. The ho ho ho’s were louder than the thuds of the axe as the Yule log was cut, as the merry company remembered the time Grandfather almost lost his thumb at the same task, and what he said in his own defense.

She and her sisters and the children went on to cut mistletoe, and she had to hear the story of her unfortunate taste in berries again. She was sure someone was telling it to Jonathan too. Then, when the men rejoined them, after they’d hauled the log into the front hall and wrestled it into the hearth in the main salon, she had to watch him endure the stories about how Percival had fallen out of the oak that year when he’d reached for an elusive strand of mistletoe. Then he was regaled with tales of little Cousin Orwell and the mishap in the holly bush, young Mary and her strange reaction to the ivy crown she’d insisted on wearing, and yet again, the story of how her mama and father had met under a ball of mistletoe at a local dance. The story still brought a fond smile to her lips, but she couldn’t help realizing it might not be as fascinating to her husband.

How tedious and unsophisticated he must think her family, she thought sadly as she watched her husband smile at a story her father was telling. Jonathan was so urbane that her father would have no idea that his listener was being bored to flinders. She herself would not have known if he hadn’t told her. She might get angry when her husband responded to anger with that insufferable icy calm, but now she realized concealing his emotions was a gift as well as a powerful weapon. She felt hopelessly outclassed. How could she ever measure up to him?

How unfair he must believe her to be as well, she thought. And with good cause. She resented his highhandedness in forcing her to share the holiday with a previous lover. But here she was, insisting that he pass the holiday with her family, being regaled with stories of family and simple country folk he didn’t have a thing in common with. She’d trimmed his hair because she’d had to endure those nights with the Fanshawes, even before they behaved so badly. He hadn’t said a word of criticism of her family, except in his own defense.

Pamela was subdued as she dressed for dinner that night. Her maid had been given the night off to celebrate with the other servants, and so Pamela frowned as she tried to anchor a rosy camellia in her curls, to top off her holiday garb.

“Why are you scowling?” Jonathan asked as he came into the room. “You look lovely. No, better than that. You look like the very spirit of Christmas.”

She wore a simple green silk gown with a golden stole, and looked so fresh and lovely, so innocent and yet desirable that he caught his breath. But they had such problems of late that he was reluctant to drop a kiss on her bare shoulder as he longed to do—as he would once have done without thinking.

She shrugged, causing her breasts to rise and fall, along with his pulse. “I always wear green and gold at Christmas,” she said diffidently.

She glanced at him from under her lashes. He looked elegant tonight, as always. He wore a gray jacket and slate unmentionables, both matching his cool steady eyes. His waistcoat was a symphony of burgundy and green. He looked so handsome, yet so immaculate and untouchable, that she wanted to weep.

“What?” he said quickly, and took her in his arms.

She shook her head, unable to speak. It suddenly was too much. She couldn’t go on like this. He was so near and yet so far, and growing further away from her every hour. Bad as it would be at any time, the comparison of all her past happy Christmas memories and the awful reality of this sudden impasse with the man she loved most was simply unendurable. She needed joy now, at this important time of year. She needed closeness, and love, and him. The only thing left to do was to offer him the only thing she could give him: truth.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she sighed against his chest. “I feel so . . . I have to apologize to you,” she said, pushing him away, and holding him literally at arm’s length. “I carried on like a shrew because you took me to the Fanshawes’.”

“You were right to do so,” he said, frowning because of the tears he saw starting in her eyes.

“Well, yes, and no,” she said. “Later, in retrospect, I suppose I was. But not at first. At first, they couldn’t be nicer to me. And yet I carried on like a madwoman before I even found out what they were like, without giving them a chance. But you! Here you are, in the heart of nowhere, bored to bits by my family, and you haven’t said a word. Not one word of complaint, not once wished to go home.”

“Yes, I have,” he said. “And yes I did.”

“Well, yes,” she conceded. “But only after I attacked you. In retaliation, I’m sure. I think you’d have borne it all in silence, otherwise. I’m glad you didn’t, because otherwise I wouldn’t have seen it. I’m so sorry I didn’t pay attention to you. But the truth is that when you’re so polite when I get angry, it only makes me madder.”

“In future, I’ll try to bluster, shout, and scream,” he said humbly.

“Would you?” she asked.

“If you wish.”

“I do!” she said. “When you’re so quiet it just makes me want to stick you with a pin. I’m not used to silence.”

“I grew up with nothing else. I promise I will shout the house down the next time you vex me,” he vowed.

She giggled. “I can’t imagine that! But I wish you’d try. Then I’d know where I stand. Please, let me get on with my apology. Because if carrying on is necessary for me to clear the air, and it is, you must understand that a total apology is as important to me in order to make amends. It’s what I’m accustomed to. We are a very dramatic family, you see.”

“I begin to understand,” he said with an admirably straight face. “Carry on. Literally or figuratively. I am at your command.”

“Well,” she said, “only today did I allow myself to see what you have suffered since you got here. You’re far too polite! I let you know how I hated being at the Fanshawes’ immediately, even before I got there.”

“I should have listened to you, and we would never have gone there.”

She shook that off. “It doesn’t signify. At least, maybe it does, but that’s not what I’m speaking about now. You see, it was only after we were here that you showed me your discontent with being here at all.”

“No, that’s not true. I didn’t want to come here.”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “And I do think that was wrong of you. Even so, we are here, and you suffer. I know that’s so,” she added before he could speak. “My family means well, but we don’t consider what it is to be an outsider, and I suspect that even though we’re married it will take some time before you’re part of our inner circle. That is, if you even wish to be.”

“I do,” he said, as solemnly as any bridegroom.

“Thank you. I don’t know why you should! Now I see that whenever we get together, and at Christmas, especially, the same stories get told, the same things are done. It’s comforting for us, but you must be at wits’ end! I know we couldn’t have stayed at the Fanshawes’, but surely, this isn’t much better for you than their house was for me. Well, safer, of course,” she said thoughtfully. “But not better. My family forgets everything and everyone but their own history, and if you weren’t there when it happened, hearing it retold cannot be a treat. And that is mostly what we do. You must have felt so alone. Even when I was so misused by the Fanshawes, I had you as my ally. Your only ally here has been my beetle-loving brother-in-law. Perhaps as the others marry it will get better, but as for now? I do apologize.”

He smiled. “Don’t,” he said. “It was churlish of me to complain. I think I only did so in order to have my own back at you. Because you were so very right, and it’s hard for me to admit I was wrong. Listen, my love,” he said, his hands on her shoulders as he looked down into her eyes. “There’s not a thing wrong with your family. I didn’t really have one, not as such, and so I didn’t understand. I wasn’t hatched from an egg, but what I grew up with was nothing like this! I had nurses and governesses, and then I was sent to school. When I came home for the holidays—if I came home for the holidays—it was to be left by myself in the nursery.

“Your family is a tightly knit group of people who dearly love each other,” he said. His gray eyes warmed to the color of a summer’s fog as he smiled. “That’s both wonderful and remarkable to me. I can only hope that in time I do something foolish enough, or downright stupid enough, to be included in your family’s ongoing chronicles.”

His voice became slow and serious, and his eyes searched hers. “You wouldn’t be as bright and open as you are if you’d come from a family like mine. I thank your mother and father for nurturing you the way they have done. You screeched at me the other day, and I admit, I was appalled. At least I was until I realized it was because I never learned to love loudly enough. Don’t apologize for your family, be proud of them. I wish we could create the same sort of family together, you and I. I think we only need time enough to do so. Time and love and caring enough. Then, eventually, we will have our own myths and legends and lore to bore our children’s spouses with. If, that is, you’ll bear with me long enough?”

“Oh, Jonathan,” she cried, and went into his opened arms. She hugged him, hard. “I so wish I hadn’t been such a fool.”

“I’m so glad you were,” he said against her hair.

She reared back and glowered at him. “You don’t have to agree!”

He laughed. “Yes, I do. Shall we have another fight? Where will you sleep tonight? You’re running out of sanctuaries, you know, and December is such a cold month. Now, there’s the stuff of stories to keep telling our descendants!”

She smiled. “Yes. True. Jonathan?”

“Mmm,” he said as he dragged her close again and inhaled the camellia she’d pinned in her hair.

“I wish we hadn’t argued.”

“If we had not, how would we have come to this?”

“What have we come to?”

“A beginning,” he said. “I now understand that I must roar at you when I am cross with you, which I imagine I shall be again, in due time. You now know that I freeze solid when I am most upset. Fire and ice. We are a perfect December match, you and I, the very spirit of a wonderful Christmas night—if we can just remember to always add faith and love and joy. We can learn to live with each other, my love. We will.” He bent his head to see her expression. “What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “We must. For I do love you so much that I cannot bear it when we are at odds.”

“So we shall,” he said. “And as for now? We’ll spend this Christmas with your family, and then, next year, we’ll have them all come and start a new tradition with ours. What do you think?”

She nodded. “I think that’s a grand idea. But it will take more than one new baby to make them give up their traditions. I think we’ll have to come here next year and add to their tradition. All three of us.”

She felt his breath catch.

“It’s so?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, keeping her head down so he couldn’t see her smile. “It might be. It could be. I do wish it would be.”

They were late to dinner.

But they didn’t waste the mistletoe. And this time she used it just as she should, for kisses and wishes. He was delighted to share them with her.

 

They were both smiling when they finally went to dinner. But Pamela found her spirits sinking as she came down the stairs. It was one thing to say she understood her husband’s feelings, because now she did. It was quite another to actually have to watch her family ignoring him, as well as to see how he bore up under it, however stoically.

“Here they are!” one of her cousins trumpeted as they went into the salon.

“Now we can get on with it!” her father said.

“Oh, sorry we’re late,” Pamela said, feeling her color rise. “But you didn’t have to wait for us. Though it was kind, because I did want Jonathan to see how we light the Yule log.”

“Couldn’t start without you,” her brother Kit answered. “We need the newest member of our family to help light it, remember?”

“What?” Pamela asked. “But why us? Little Gwyneth is our latest addition, she’s only been with us for two months,” she added, smiling at Gwyneth’s proud new mama.

“They refused to wake her for our pyrotechnics,” Kit’s twin, Harry, explained, laughing. “That leaves Rexford.”

“Surely not,” Pamela said in confusion. “That leaves Laughton.”

“Not I,” that gentleman said quickly. “I had the honor last year, remember?”

She hadn’t. But that wasn’t why she looked distressed. It was because that was still another “remember” that her husband did not.

“And weren’t you wary of doing it?” Charles asked Laughton.

“Aye!” Cousin Godfrey agreed merrily. “I think it was because he was afraid he’d set fire to one of his little friends. But so he did. Remember how many of the little beasties came scurrying out of that log as soon as it started blazing?”

Laughton smiled as everyone laughed, even Jonathan. Though he hadn’t been there, he knew his brother-in-law’s penchant for beetles.

“I didn’t see one rare specimen in the scramble,” Laughton said good-naturedly. “And so I didn’t mind the mad fandango you did on the escapees when they came near you either, Godfrey.”

“Yes, it’s Rexford’s turn,” his father-in-law said over the laughter that filled the room. “And high time he had a turn at something. Sad stuff this Christmas must be for you, my lord,” he told Jonathan. “We all go through our paces every year like trained ponies, doing what we always do, and enjoying it for just that reason. It has to be a dead bore for you, though. I know, you’re far too polite to agree. But now you get a chance to add your own bit and become part of our pageant. Then next year, you can share your experiences with the next in line.”

His voice became solemn. “Lighting the Yule log is very important for good luck in the new year,” he told Jonathan. “Now. I shall light the last bit of last year’s log that I saved for this year. And then you start us off anew.”

He took a thick charred stick of wood from where it had been propped at the side of the hearth, and ceremoniously lit it. Once he got it burning like a taper, he held it high to show the assembled company, and then solemnly handed it to his new son-in-law.

Jonathan took the glowing brand and bent to the hearth. He knelt, and set the blazing stick to the tinder surrounding the new Yule log, touching it in several places so that it would catch evenly all round the log. He blew on the tiny flames, fanning them until the tinder was burning brightly.

But the log wasn’t. It was huge, dark, and sullen-looking, a great brown lump surrounded by masses of easily leaping flames that were quickly consuming the tinder. Jonathan thought he’d never seen a less combustible piece of wood. It looked like it would never catch. The watching company seemed to hold their breath just as he was doing. Fine thing, he thought nervously, if the damned thing didn’t catch fire. What would that mean to his wife’s family? That he’d ruined their luck in the new year? Would he be the first new addition to their family in all its long history to be unable to light their new Yule log? Gads! What would poor Pamela think of him? It was a greater responsibility than he’d guessed. Was it a test? He reached for the bellows . . .

And then he saw a single sheet of flame flare up on the right side of the log. Then another erupted from the middle of the log, along with a thin plume of smoke that went straight up the flue. The log was suddenly surrounded by a flickering transparent blue aura. Then, with a loud snap, blue and orange flames began licking up and down the length and width of the great log. It popped, it hissed, it flared. The log was definitely on fire.

A crackling blaze roared in the hearth, and Jonathan’s face, illuminated by its ruddy light, showed a relieved smile. When he finally straightened he felt that he’d accomplished something, and grinned as he bowed to the company’s loud cheers and applause.

“That’s a relief. Your face when it just sat there smoldering, Rexford!” Cousin William said. “A study in frustration. Can’t blame you, indeed I felt for you. You did far better than I did. Remember the night I tried to light it?” he asked the company.

There was much laughter. “Not your fault, old fellow,” Kit said, clapping William on the back. “Don’t you remember? No one realized the log had been sitting in the damp for weeks. Couldn’t have lit that blasted thing with a torch!”

“Well, how was I to know the window the log had been stored under had been broken and the rain the night before had got in and made the thing damp as a moat?” Pamela’s father asked. “We were lucky. We used another and no harm befell us. This year we have nothing to worry about. It was touch and go there for a while, but the log is lit, and burning brightly.”

Jonathan felt relief and amusement as he realized his own story was now doubtless part of the family chronicles.

“Yes!” His wife suggested, “The Yule log is lit. Come, let’s move on!”

Jonathan’s new relatives burst into song. He went to stand by his wife, put his arm around her, and joined in. He knew the tune. It was a traditional one. Pamela looked up at him and smiled as he added his deep, true baritone harmony to her clear soprano.

The front door was opened and the neighbors who had been waiting on the steps trooped in, singing the same song, as they did every year.

The wassail was brought in by a pair of beaming servants, straining under the weight of the great basin filled with hot punch that they carried. It was carefully placed on an ancient trundle table. Cups were dipped in and toasts were raised to good health, good luck, and happiness. The house smelled of fresh pine and wood smoke, candle tallow, rum, cinnamon, and the various heady scents of roasting meat, poultry, and pies, the whole laced with gusts of cold clean air from the opened door. Then the door was closed and more toasts made, more food brought in, and more carols sung.

His father-in-law introduced Jonathan to the neighbors. Pamela’s brothers whispered the latest, as well as the oldest gossip about each one of them to Jonathan after each passed along to greet other guests. Jonathan soon knew that Mrs. Tansy liked the rum punch a jot too much, or at least she had last year. Mr. Fairbanks liked his dinner too much too, because he was at least a stone heavier than he’d ever been. And his wife liked that too little, just get her started on the subject—or rather, don’t, Jonathan was warned.

Jonathan learned that the vicar was afraid of dogs and the baker’s wife, of thunderstorms. He heard stories about every member of the increasingly merry party, and by the time the neighbors and townsfolk trooped out again, he felt as though he’d known them for years and, moreover, was interested in them and their future as well as their past.

Jonathan realized he was actually enjoying himself.

Was it that he was now ready to meet his new family? he wondered. Or was it that they realized it was time to truly admit him to their ranks?

He never knew.

He only knew that the dinner was sumptuous and the company warm, welcoming, and delightful. When he finally went to bed, and at last was able to hold his dear wife close in his arms, he went to sleep with only one wish in his heart for the holiday: that every one from now on would be as merry and bright as this one had been.

Pamela smiled in her sleep, and curled closer to him with a sigh. She’d made the same wish, and believed it would come true.

It did. For them, at least.

 

The story of their first Christmas, when suitably edited, made a wonderful story with which they regaled their increasingly enormous family on every Christmas Day. Of course they were to fight again on each and every one of those holidays, but always with as much joy and zest as love and laughter. Which was to say, a very great deal of it, for all their happy Christmases ever after.