A Christmas Promise

by Mary Balogh

  And the warmth and magic of Christmas, which perhaps he had come almost to believe in that day, were all illusion. It was no longer Christmas that was decorating his house but merely plants that would have to be taken down and somehow disposed of in a few days’ time. And what were they doing anyway, celebrating Christmas with her father dead less than two months? Should they not still be in deepest mourning? He and she and her whole family?

  They were singing again inside the drawing room, he could hear. Or some of them were. There were also voices talking and laughing. All the signs of high spirits that he had thought until half an hour before that he might perhaps after all enter into. But they were from a different world, her people. A world that was closed to him because of his background and upbringing. And because he had taken one of its members as his wife and destroyed her chances of happiness in so doing. Or had she destroyed his? He could not be sure which. Perhaps both.

  He opened the door of the drawing room and stood aside to allow his wife to precede him inside.

  SHE WARMED HER HANDS before the fire and stared into the flames and felt like crying. Not that she would cry, of course. She could not do so. She had been unable to cry since before Papa died. And she would not cry anyway when he would be coming into her room at any moment.

  Christmas was going to escape her this year, she thought. Oh, it had seemed all day as if it was to be there with all the joy and wonder and magic that it usually offered. But it was not to be so. The decorations had failed to warm her heart on her return to the drawing room from the library, and the Christmas carols had failed to make her remember Bethlehem and a stable and a child and the meaning of it all. She had suddenly, with a great stabbing of grief, missed her father—and wished that he had not made her promise to enjoy Christmas for him. How could one force oneself to enjoy Christmas?

  Her family’s teasing had failed to amuse her. Uncle Sam had wanted to know, in a voice that had drawn the attention of everyone in the room, where they had been, and the witticisms had flown from Uncle Sam to Uncle Ben to Uncle Harry, and Aunt Eunice and Aunt Irene had advised the two of them to take no notice, and Aunt Ruth and Muriel and Susan had blushed. And then Tom had noticed where she was standing and pointed out the fact to her husband, laughing.

  So he had been forced to join her beneath the kissing bough and set his hands on her shoulders and kiss her on the lips, while the teasing and affectionate jokes had resumed and Aunt Ruth had blessed her soul.

  Eleanor shivered. There was to be no happy Christmas after all. And yet she had promised Papa.

  Quite by accident she had met Wilfred’s eyes across the room when the kiss was over. He had not even been disguising the look of desperate unhappiness on his face.

  And now her husband was coming to her, she thought, shivering again. Because his pride had been hurt. Because he had realized that she had never wanted his precious title and was not groveling at his feet with gratitude. Because he felt the need to make her his possession and destroy her own pride.

  But she did not want it like this. She had been fooling herself since their arrival in the country. Not imagining that he loved her or even felt any real affection for her—no, definitely nothing as fanciful as that. But hoping perhaps that there could be peace, respect, even a mild friendship between them. But that hope was all destroyed now because he had found out about her feelings for Wilfred.

  Wilfred! But she could not spare thoughts for him now. She would not. She had married someone else and there was only her marriage now. There was no point in pining for a love that could never flourish again.

  And then he was in her room, without even the courtesy of a knock. She turned from the fire to look at him. He was wearing only a nightshirt. He looked grim. Not as if he were coming into his wife’s room to make love to her.

  She should fight him again, she thought as he crossed the room to her. But she did not feel like fighting. She had done so on her wedding night only because she had been terrified. She was not terrified now. Only very depressed because she did not want it this way. Not in coldness and anger. She pushed a stray lock of hair back over her shoulder.

  Say something, she begged as his hands reached out to undo the buttons of her nightgown. But her plea came from so deep inside herself that it did not even reach her eyes, into which he was looking. Kiss me. Let there at least be some pretense of tenderness. But he said nothing and she stood still and impassive as he pushed the nightgown off her shoulders and it fell all the way to the floor.

  He stood and watched her, waiting perhaps for her to do what she had done on their wedding night. Perhaps he expected her to undress him. She stood still, making no attempt to cover herself with her hands or to move closer to him so that he would not see her.

  “Lie down,” he said, and she turned to the bed and did as she was told.

  She stared up at him as he pulled his nightshirt over his head and dropped it to the floor. Please, she begged him. Oh, please, not like this. But what did she want? Warm words? From him? Tenderness? Why should there be tenderness between them? But please, she begged nevertheless as she stared impassively up.

  He came down directly on top of her and pushed her thighs wide with his knees and came deep inside her. She inhaled sharply, but there was no pain. She stared past his head to the canopy of her bed. Dull gold silk, heavily pleated, a large gold rose in the center. The candlelight was shimmering off some of the pleats. She waited for him to start moving in her.

  And then his face was between her line of vision and the canopy. He had lifted himself onto his elbows. She looked calmly into his eyes and begged him silently.

  “This is what it means to be my wife, my lady—Eleanor,” he said, saying her name from between his teeth. “It does not mean holding me on the fringes of your life while you continue the way you have always lived. It means this. Intimacy. Constant nightly intimacy. And daily too, perhaps, when we no longer have guests to entertain.” To cater to my pleasure. He might as well have said those words too, though he did not. “Do you understand that?” He began to move in her, very slowly.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have always been here, my lord. Every night. And every day. I have never denied you.”

  “You are denying me now,” he said. “The marble statue, as you were earlier in the library. But it will no longer suffice to hold me off, Eleanor. From now ours will be a real marriage whether you like it or not.”

  “I like it,” she said, and she could feel anger rising to her rescue to push back the dreadful depression that had made her so lethargic. She slid her feet up the bed on either side of his legs so that her knees were bent, so that she could feel him more deeply inside her. And she lifted her arms from the bed and twined them about his waist. “Do you think I have wanted a marriage without this? How else am I to have children?”

  He held still in her. “You want children?” he asked her, and for a moment there was a look in his eyes that turned her heart over.

  “Of course I want children,” she said scornfully. “Who else am I to love?”

  The look was gone from his eyes almost as if she had slapped his face. “Who, indeed?” he said. “Well, then, it seems that I do not have to feel apologetic for asserting my rights. We can derive mutual satisfaction from our encounters.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He lowered himself onto her again and set his head close beside hers, his face turned away from her, buried in her hair. He did not talk again or kiss her. She closed her eyes and kept her arms clasped about him and concentrated on what was happening between them. She was not terrified or in pain or in a frenzy as she had been the first time.

  It was pleasant, she thought in some surprise after a while, after dryness had given place to wetness and heat. It was not at all painful and surprisingly not at all humiliating. It brought a pleasant sort of ache that surged into her breasts, tightening them, and made her want it to go on for a long time.

  She tightened her hold on him and raised he
r knees until they hugged his hips. And she wished there was love, or affection at least. It was so very intimate, this joining of their bodies, and so very pleasurable. But there should be more. There should be whispered words and kisses and tender hands. There should be a union of selves as well as of bodies.

  She held him and felt him and smelled the cologne he had worn that evening. But in the most intimate embrace of all with her husband, she felt suddenly lonely. And close to tears again.

  “Please.” She turned her head to press her cheek against his hair.

  He lifted his head immediately and looked down into her face. “What is it?”

  She shook her head. Had she spoken? Cried out? “Nothing.”

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He watched her eyes as the pleasure to her body and the pain to her soul continued. “Eleanor,” he whispered, “you are my wife.”

  “Yes.” She did not know what he meant. An apology, perhaps? She did not think it was a reprimand. She liked being called Eleanor. No one had called her by her full name before. Kiss me, she begged him silently. Please kiss me. Please, I need tenderness.

  And then he stilled in her and she felt the extra warmth of his seed deep within and he lowered his head to sigh against the side of her face.

  She would be with child soon, she told herself, sliding her feet back down the bed and relaxing beneath his weight. Then nine months later she would have someone to hold and to kiss and to love. By next Christmas, perhaps. But that seemed an eternity away. Though, of course, there would be all the months of feeling life grow and move inside her. Life that he had put there and she had nurtured.

  He rolled off her and pulled the blankets up over her shoulders. And he leaned across her to blow out the candles that burned on the table beside the bed. In the sudden darkness she could feel him settling beside her and realized in some astonishment that he was not going to return to his room immediately.

  Her cheek was almost brushing his arm. She could feel the heat from it. And from the rest of his body. She felt warm and comfortable and relaxed from head to toe. She refused to think any further. Tomorrow she would think. She let herself slide into sleep.

  10

  PERHAPS HE COULD PERSUADE SOME OF THE MEN to go shooting today, he thought, staring up at the darkened canopy above his head. The room was actually surprisingly light though not yet with daylight. He suspected that there must have been more snow during the night. And he remembered the snowball fight that had started the day before and smiled at how incongruous its gaiety and spontaneity had seemed on the terrace of Grenfell Park. And how delightful, though he had not admitted that to himself at the time.

  Certainly his own friends would go shooting. That was why they had come. Perhaps George Gullis would care to go too, and Tom Transome. His mind touched on Wilfred Ellis and slid away again. There was a cloud of depression associated with that name.

  He needed to get away from the house with his friends and perhaps just one or two of the other guests. He needed to touch sanity and normalcy again. He recalled hearing the evening before that his wife and some of the other ladies were going on a visit to the school and the rectory during the afternoon to make final arrangements for the children’s concert. So when he was arriving home, she would be leaving. Perhaps it was as well that way. Perhaps that was how they would achieve peace in the future—keeping apart as much as possible. Until the year was over, of course, and they could live permanently apart. Somehow neither thought was particularly cheering.

  He turned his head to look at his wife, who was asleep on her side, facing him. Except at night for what remained of the year, he thought. He had resumed their marriage the night before and he intended to visit her bed regularly from now on. It was enough that they were estranged in every other way. He felt a sudden and unexpected wave of sadness. There was so much love and joy in her family, boisterous and almost overwhelming though they were. He had never known that kind of warmth and love. His grandmother would have called it vulgar. But it was not that. It was something … desirable.

  But he would never know it. He would never really be a part of her family. She despised him and loved someone else. And he? Well, he had not chosen her and had found her cold and unappealing. Though he could no longer call her either. Even so, the greatest closeness he could expect them to achieve was the physical union his marriage to her entitled him to in bed.

  It must be morning, he thought. He must get up or at least return to his own room. He wanted her again. But she was sleeping deeply and peacefully and he had already given her a disturbed enough night. He had woken her twice during the night in order to make love to her again, or to assert his rights and make something normal of his marriage, as he had explained it to himself each time.

  And yet each time he had known that there was more to it than that. And he was still not quite sure what. Was it perhaps that he really wanted to make a marriage of it? Was it that he wanted the physical closeness to her in the hope that it would bring some emotional closeness too?

  Good Lord, no, he thought as his mind moved one question further on. She was the cit’s daughter he had been forced into marrying. He deliberately remembered his first meeting with her. He deliberately thought of Dorothea. And of Wilfred Ellis and what he had inadvertently overheard in the library the night before.

  No, definitely not that, he thought. All he wanted was some peace, some workable way to live through the next ten and a half months. At Grenfell he would have his duties to perform during the day and she would have hers. At night he would take pleasure from coupling with her and she would take pleasure from receiving his seed. It could be an amicable arrangement. Nothing more or less meaningful than that.

  And when she had a child, she would have someone to love, he thought, remembering her words of the night before with a stab of pain—with the same pain he had felt when she had said them. Did she not have him to love? he had thought then. A foolish thought, as he had realized at the time and realized afresh now. She despised him as she despised his whole class. And he did not want her love.

  He must get up. He turned his head to look at her again, and she stirred and opened her eyes, almost as if she had felt his on her. She looked bewildered.

  “Oh,” she said, “what time is it?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “Close to morning, I would guess.”

  And because she was awake and looked sleepy and warm and rumpled and because she was his wife, he lifted the blankets away from her and moved across to take their place and loved her once more before covering her against the morning chill and swinging his legs over the side of the bed and feeling for his nightshirt.

  He could feel her gaze following him from the room, though she said nothing.

  THE MORNING PASSED FAIRLY quietly. Her husband had gone shooting with his four friends and Uncle Harry and Tom. The other men were in the billiard room. Bessie and Aunt Eunice had taken the children and two sleds out to the hills to take advantage of the fresh layer of snow that had fallen during the night. Eleanor spent an hour belowstairs, talking with the housekeeper, consulting the cook on the Christmas menu, enjoying the atmosphere of the large, warm kitchen and the spicy smells of baking that were already filling it.

  It would be a day spent with the women, she told herself as she came back upstairs and joined aunts and cousins in the morning room. The men would doubtless be gone all day. She would perhaps not even see her husband until dinnertime. And then there would be whatever evening entertainment was decided upon—and the night again. He would come again. He had told her that she must expect him every night. Would he stay all night again? she wondered. He had taken her four times the night before. Four times! She felt a deep throbbing where he had been.

  “Ellie, dear,” Aunt Catherine was saying, “you are in a dream.”

  “What?” she said, staring at her aunt vacantly. “Oh, I am so sorry. I am a little tired. I did not sleep too much last night.�
�� And then she lowered her head to her embroidery, flushing with mortification.

  “We were all remarking on the splendor of the house,” Aunt Catherine said, “and you were not responding at all to the compliments.”

  “Oh.” Eleanor laughed. “Thank you.”

  “And his lordship, Ellie,” Aunt Ruth said. “I cannot bring myself to call him Randy no matter what Eunice says. He is a very courteous gentleman, dear.”

  Eleanor smiled at her.

  “And so handsome, Ellie,” Susan said. “Far more handsome than Wilfred. Oh!” She flushed and looked uneasily at her mother. “I’m sorry.”

  “You must be very happy, Ellie,” Rachel said.

  “Yes.” Eleanor smiled again. “I am.”

  She tested the idea in her head and realized in some surprise that she was not entirely lying. Of course she was not exactly happy. How could she be with Wilfred in the house? And how could she be when she was married to a man she could not respect, a man who was a spendthrift and a gambler and a womanizer? Although, she thought, she did not have any evidence that he had been either gambling or reckless with his money since their marriage. Perhaps he had turned over a new leaf. Perhaps she should give him a chance to reform. He had given up his mistress, had he not? She felt a fresh twinge of pain as she thought of him doing with his mistress what he had done with her the night before—and doing it since his marriage. But he had given the woman up and begged her pardon.

  Perhaps she should give him a chance, she thought. Perhaps she should give her marriage a chance since there was nothing she could now do to change the fact of the marriage. And perhaps there was another night like last night to look forward to. She liked being in bed with him. She liked what he did to her. And she felt guilty at the realization since there was nothing else between them except that, and that should not be good when divorced from tender feelings. Should it?

  There was a burst of laughter. “She is in a dream again,” Aunt Beryl said, clucking her tongue. “I have almost forgotten what it is like to be a new bride, Ellie. But it is good to see, dear. I was afraid that perhaps it had been an arranged match, knowing how ambitious Joseph always was for you, but I can see that it is more than that. We were asking how many people can be squeezed into the sleighs this afternoon.”