A Duke for Christmas

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  At ease, he asked himself what more any man could need than a comfortable chair, an excellent glass of wine, and a good friend. A scratch and whine at the door made him peer around the swooping arm of his chair. The door swung open and a black dog with a milk-white tip to his long tail trotted in, a bright inquiry in his eye as if asking if he, too, might sit in the bow window at White’s.

  “Down, Tip,” Ken said as the dog came forward to take a fascinated sniff at Dom’s hand.

  “He’s a nice old chap, isn’t he?” Dom said, reaching around lazily to tug at a silky ear, giving much gratification to its owner.

  “Not good for much, I’m afraid,” Kenton said. “Maris spoils him, and I’ve seen the servants slipping him bits of bacon when nobody’s looking.” Tip went to his master and lay down, his paws delicately crossed at the wrists.

  Dom relaxed once more into the embrace of his most comfortable chair. The firelight flickered on the mellow leather spines of old books. The mulberry red curtains blocked the cold so well that one could almost forget the whiter. Both men and dog sighed with bone-deep contentment.

  “Now you can tell me the truth,” Ken said. “Was it a very difficult trip?”

  “I told you the truth already. There was nothing to it. Sophie fell in with whatever I suggested and never

  complained about a thing.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t, would she? Not with you playing King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid over every mile. Good God, man, you bought her a horse!”

  “For my pleasure. If you had seen her eyes when she talked about how long it had been...”

  “I don’t doubt the necessity. I’m only at a loss to know how to convince you to let me reimburse you for it.”

  Dominic chuckled. “I’ll cut the cards with you later. High card pays.”

  “Done. I’ll keep her here for Sophie. The stables at Finchley Old Place are rather a disgrace. One couldn’t put a well-bred little mare like that in such a place.”

  “Well, repair them. You are the landlord.”

  “Only at a peppercorn rent. I don’t fancy charging my mother-in-law for the whole amount.”

  “No, indeed. She might choose to save the rent by moving in here.”

  “She’ll be here often enough once the baby comes. Maybe we should ask her to make her home here. Then I could rent Finchley Old Place to some new tenants.”

  “Or to Sophie.”

  “Sophie? It’s a thought.”

  “No more money for you, though she might pay you out of pride. She is proud.”

  “It runs in the family,” Kenton said with a reminiscent smile. “It can work in your favor if you know what to do.”

  “Oh, indeed?” came a woman’s voice, full of both pride and laughter. “If you are giving instruction, my lord, may I sit at your feet?”

  Maris Danesby waved to them to keep their seats. She perched on the arm of her husband’s chair. His arm came up around her waist to support her.

  Though one was not supposed to notice such things, Dominic rather thought that even in the two weeks he’d been gone her figure had changed. The child was not due to make an appearance for a minimum of two more weeks. However, women’s fashions were not designed to hide fecundity.

  Even more than the changes of body, a new glow had come into her face, a sense of peace that seemed to spread around her like the ripples in a pond. Ken had some of that quality as well. They seemed so satisfied in their union that nothing of rancor or vexation could survive against it. Dominic, taken aback by the surge of jealousy that swept over him, couldn’t look at them. He addressed himself to his brandy, letting the aromatic heat burn the feeling away.

  He had to force a smile as he looked up. After he met Maris’s concerned eyes, though, the smile became more natural. His friend could have so easily married a horrible girl. Others of his friends had done so. Though Maris was quite young, she had a balanced view of life. Unlike other brides, she’d never interrogated Dominic about her husband’s past life or the women appertaining thereto.

  “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for taking the time to escort Sophie home. It is as though I had the brother I always wanted.”

  Dominic saw Ken give Maris a tiny head shake. Her smile became even more innocently beatific. “Well, I shall leave you two to your drinking.”

  “We won’t carouse too long or late. Dom looks tired.”

  “Did you really ride all the way from Dover? Wouldn’t Sophie let you ride inside?”

  “The weather was good so I never asked,” Dominic answered. “I don’t get enough exercise anymore. It’s not like the old days when I would have walked from Dover to London. I should be the most ungrateful dog alive if I complained.”

  Tip opened a lazy eye upon hearing the word “dog.” Seeing that nobody was offering him any food, he went to sleep again.

  Dominic put his glass down on the table at his elbow, then stretched, one fist out, the other by his head. “I am tired.”

  Now Kenton shook his head at his friend. “You’ll never send the polite world mad after your particular style of coat until you have it made tight enough to pop seams when you stretch.”

  “True, true. But what would you? I care more for comfort than for a neat appearance.”

  “For that, who can blame you?” Maris asked rhetorically. “I had thought men would forget all notions of dandyism upon marriage, but I have been sadly disillusioned. Kenton becomes more occupied with his attire with every season that passes.”

  “I strive only to be a credit to you, my love.”

  “Indeed you are.” She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. Then, a trifle awkwardly, she stood up and left the room.

  “I don’t know if I should warn you or not, Dom,” Kenton said after a few minutes.

  “Warn me?”

  “When a wife gets that matchmaking gleam in her eyes, all a husband can do is hide in the library and suggest his friends do the same.”

  Though Dominic fancied his posture became no less relaxed, inwardly he felt an increase in tension. He took up his glass before he spoke. “Who is the fortunate female Maris has in mind for me? Some friend from the village?”

  “No. Who else but Sophie?”

  The ringing of the crystal as Dominic’s glass bounced gently on the carpet was like the muffled ringing of fairy bells, soft but very clear in the paneled silence of the room. “It’s all right,” Dom said, leaning forward to pick it up. “The glass was quite empty.”

  * * * *

  Sophie was sitting up in bed, plaiting her hair before retiring, when the knock she expected sounded at her door. Maris popped her head in. “May I come in and talk to you? Or are you too tired?”

  “No, I’m not tired at all.” Under the covers, she moved her legs over to make room. Curious, she thought, we are so different, yet no one could mistake us for anything but sisters. Their coloring was the same and their noses. Maris’s hair was a deeper gold, her eyes a brighter blue. Though she’d put on some weight, naturally enough, her face hadn’t changed very much. It retained the piquant interest in everything that had always been her leading characteristic.

  Sophie, younger and shorter, couldn’t help comparing their lives as well as their appearances. One had an adoring husband, a child on the way, a place in the world that was hers irrevocably. She would remain Lady Danesby until the end of her days. For herself, she had a dead husband, no children, no place except that of a fallen leaf, wafted by a wind into a river, there to float unmemorably until sunk. At most, she would rate a footnote in some future writer’s history of Broderick Banner’s brief life and tragically early demise.

  Maris had by now absorbed the details of Sophie’s appearance. “Do you have your dressing gown on? In bed?”

  “And my thickest knitted bed socks and two petticoats.” “But it’s quite warm in here,” Maris said, glancing at the fireplace with a housewifely eye.

  “Would you believe I’d quite forgotten how beastly the win
ters are in England? When I think how I used to complain when the temperature would fall to forty!”

  “I suppose your blood became rather thin living there. But think of all the lovely sunshine in the summer. We had nine wet days in a row in the middle of June.” She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I’m hard to please,” Sophie confessed. “I always found the summers too hot.” She didn’t add that it was because her stuffy little room never felt a breeze and all the heat from the stoves, along with all the torturing smells of good Italian cooking, collected there. “But enough of my nonsense. Tell me about you. What does Dr. Richards say?”

  “About what one would expect. Stay quiet, no violent exercise, drink milk. How tired I am of milk!”

  “But all is well?”

  “So far as anyone can tell. What I hope is that once the baby is born, people will start fussing over it and not me. Between Mother and Ken, I hardly dare move without one or the other of them reminding me I should sit down.”

  “Everything is prepared, then?”

  “Prepared and overprepared. One would think I was expecting the Heir of England,” Maris said, then broke off, her eyes shadowed.

  Though it had been three years and more since Princess Charlotte had died in childbirth, her fate hung like a sword over the heads of young women. She’d had the best attendants, the most famous obstetrician in England, Sir Richard Croft, to deliver the child—everything, in short, suitable for the Heiress of England. She had perished nonetheless, and the child with her. The Regent had been inconsolable. The unfortunate doctor had committed suicide a year and half later, despite being absolved of all blame in the case. If such wealth and care had brought about so grievous an outcome, what chance did lesser women have?

  “By all I have heard,” Sophie said, hoping to give her sister’s thoughts a more cheerful direction, “men do behave as if a baby were all their own doing.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Maris said. “A rooster crowing his own glory is nothing compared with it. The number of waistcoat buttons that I have sewn on is incalculable, his chest swelled so with pride.”

  “And you are no less excited about it, or so I gathered from your letter.”

  Maris leaned against the bottom post of the bed. “I was excited at the beginning. And I daresay I shall be

  excited once more at the end. But the months in between, my dear! So lengthy. So dull. One is advised not to ride. We went to Brighton. One is advised not to

  bathe. We went to London. One is advised not to dance. One mustn’t read any invigorating literature for fear of

  the harm it might do the developing mind. Improving books only—and a duller occupation I should be hard-

  pressed to find. I could go to the theater, thank God, but only until my condition began to be apparent. A woman of quality, it seems, is never glimpsed when she is increasing.”

  “Poor Maris!”

  “Poor Ken! I’m afraid I’ve not been the easiest person to please, and he tries so hard, the poor darling.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be suffering too much,” Sophie said, recalling how her brother-in-law paid the closest attention to his young wife, so much so that Maris’s cup was filled almost before it was empty and she never need stand up without his hand at her elbow. Then, too, there was the look in his eyes when he gazed at her, that brilliant light of love that had gone out so soon in Broderick’s eyes.

  As if thinking of him brought him into her sister’s mind as well, Maris suddenly spoke his name. “You never did tell us what happened to Broderick. Only that one letter informing us that he had died suddenly. Were you...with him?”

  Sophie hesitated. Though it would relieve her mind to discuss the facts, she didn’t know if it were right to burden another. If reading an exciting book might alarm an unborn child, what could a tale of sudden death do?

  “Sophie?”

  Of course, Maris did have, and always had, a wonderfully adventurous mind. Though she’d been destined for the quiet life of a gentleman’s daughter, she’d won a grand prize in the Matrimonial Stakes—a wealthy, titled gentleman, the catch of the county. She’d done it by taking risks that would have terrified a professional gamester and, in the end, by laying her cards on the table without fear. Sophie couldn’t imagine that her child would be any less intrepid.

  Sophie leaned her head back against the upholstered headboard. “He took a trip to Sicily to edit his poems. A friend of his, Mr. Knox, accompanied him. Broderick was very fond of appreciating beauty firsthand. A few weeks after they arrived, Broderick fell down a rocky scree. He was picked up dead.”

  “Oh, my ...” Maris groped for her sister’s hand. She pressed it between her own, tears springing to her eyes. “You must have been devastated.”

  “He’d left me long before. All the same, I suppose I was appalled by the waste of his gifts more than anything else. This is a great age for poetry and I believe, truly and even now, I believe he could have been the greatest of them all.”

  “Will you forgive me if I say I don’t see him like that?”

  “Of course,” Sophie said with an inviting smile. “How did you see him?”

  Looking off into the distance, Maris opened her mouth. Glancing suddenly at her sister, she shut it tight, her lips nearly disappearing.

  “No, it’s all right I want to know.”

  “He didn’t seem a very serious man,” Maris said slowly. “Serious about anything. Not even on his wedding day.”

  “Oh, I think he loved me then.”

  “But not later?”

  “No. Not by the time he was dead. Not for a long time before then.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s easy enough. He thought he loved me enough to be married to me. He didn’t love me enough to live with me day after day, doing all the simple, ordinary things that husband and wife do for and with each other.” Sophie was surprised by the sudden stab of pain she felt. Surely there must come a day when she either stopped producing pain or stopped feeling it. Someday, this wincing flesh must be covered by a scar—an ugly remembrance of agony, but no more than a dead region in her heart.

  “I didn’t mean that. I don’t understand how you can be so calm about it. If Kenton ever left me ...” The pink in her cheeks failed completely just imagining it, her hand creeping up to press against her heart.

  “What should I have done? Murdered him? Jumped off Trajan’s Column?”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Red Sea, Black Sea, bays, lakes, and rivers.” She had no tears now. “I begged him on my knees to stay with me, not to abandon me in a strange country. He only laughed and told me he had fallen in love with someone else. He couldn’t do anything about it, he said. He said that people couldn’t be expected to control their feelings when feelings were, by their nature, the masters of reason and will.”

  “How horrible. To talk philosophy at such a moment. It’s inhuman.”

  “I don’t think he meant to be cruel. Or perhaps he did but only to make as clean and sharp a break as possible. Perhaps he thought it would be less painful that way.”

  “You are far too forgiving. How can you even bring yourself to consider his feelings? It’s absurd.”

  She lifted her hands and let them fall. “He’s dead, Maris. Whatever crimes he committed against me, he is absolved.”

  “By you, if you like. But I am older than you and can hold a grudge for much longer. I shall pray tonight that God will let me forgive him, eventually.”

  Sophie slipped her hand free from her sister’s grasp and returned to braiding her hair, changing the subject abruptly. “I’ve so looked forward to sleeping on a really good mattress. My bed in Rome was straw-stuffed and slung on ropes. Old ropes.”

  “You stayed at some very good inns, if I know Dominic. He isn’t one to suffer from the inconveniences of inexpensive inns.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m quite glad the trip is over. I was in a fair way to b
ecoming the most hideously spoiled child. If you’d sent a fairy godfather to look after me, I couldn’t have been more spoiled.”

  Maris traced around the line of white knots that made up the pattern in the coverlet. “Do you ... I mean you do like Dominic, don’t you?”

  “Naturally. I’ve always liked him. That is, for as long as I’ve known Mm, I’ve liked him. He has the rare quality of silence. He is almost dangerously easy to talk to. Now, why are you smiling?”

  “He is Kenton’s dearest friend. Of course I wish for you to like him.”

  “Then you have your wish,” Sophie said lightly.

  “And if I wished... never mind.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You have more than enough to concern yourself with right now.”

  “True, but that will be over soon. I can go on worrying about you even after two more weeks pass.”

  “Then you’ll have a baby to worry over. You concentrate on her.”

  “Her? Do you know something that I do not?”

  “Wouldn’t you like a girl? Honestly, now. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Between the two of us, and with the door closed, I’ll tell you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I do not know what I should do with a boy.”

  “I remember how terrible we thought all boys were when you and I were children.”

  “Dreadful, noisy things. Always covered in dirt. In truth, men are very little different than boys. Of course, I should love it no matter what. A nice little girl, though, as nice as we were ...”

  “You were nice, Maris, and still are, though I seem to remember a girl falling off a horse and coming in covered with dirt and straw. And I wasn’t much better. Do you remember when I fell out of the big oak and you carried me home because both my knees were bleeding?”

  “Are you trying to tell me that my daughter will be a horrible little hoyden just as we were?”

  “Just reminding you that not all little girls are prim princesses who sit happily sewing samplers.”

  “Heavens no, I forgot what a wretched hellion I was.” Maris laughed. “Father liked us to be quite, quite fearless and we were, weren’t we?”