by Mary Balogh
But he should not have come tonight. The events of the day had created the illusion of closeness between them. And so he had come to her, and she had received him with something more than the usual passion, which he knew himself capable of arousing. There had been an eagerness in her, a tenderness almost. A gratitude for what he had done for her little climbing boy.
He should not have come. How would he do without her after she had left with her parents after Christmas?
How would he live without her?
What would he give her as a Christmas gift? It must be something very special, something that would perhaps tell her, as he could never do, that despite everything he cared.
Some jewels perhaps? Something to dazzle her?
He smiled bitterly into the darkness as Estelle made low noises in her sleep and burrowed more closely into his warmth. Something to remind her that she had a wealthy husband. More baubles for her to lose or to cast aside with that look of disdain that she was so expert at when he was angry with her for some reason.
Like that ring. He stared upward at the dark canopy over his head. The Star of Bethlehem.The ring that had told him as soon as he slid it onto her finger two years before that she was the jewel of his life, the star of his life. It was not a bauble. Not merely a symbol of wealth.
It was a symbol of his love, of his great hope for what their marriage might have been.
If he could replace the diamond…
Where had she put the ring? It had probably been tossed into a drawer somewhere. It should not be hard to find. He could probably find it with ease if he waited for her to go out and then searched her rooms.
He would have the diamond replaced for her. She had been careless about its loss. It had not really mattered to her. She had told him about it merely to avoid a scolding if he had discovered it for himself at a later date.
But surely if he could put it on her finger again this Christmas, whole again, the Star of Bethlehem new again, as Christmas was always new even more than eighteen hundred years after the first one, then it would mean something to her.
Perhaps she would be pleased. And perhaps in the months to come, when she had not seen him for a while, when the bitterness of their quarrels had faded, she would look at it and realize that he had put more than his money into the gift.
He turned his head and kissed his sleeping wife with warm tenderness just above her ear. There was an excitement in him that would surely make it difficult to get to sleep.
Estelle had been happy about Nicky. He remembered the look she had given him as she left this very room after Mrs. Ainsford and the child-a bright and sparkling look all focused on him. The sort of look he had dreamed of inspiring before he married her. Before he knew himself quite incapable of drawing to himself those looks that she bestowed so willingly on other men. Before he realized that he would find himself quite incapable of communicating with her.
He would bask in the memory. And the child had been saved from a brutal life. That poor little skeletal baby, who was probably sleeping peacefully at that very moment in another part of the house, as babies ought.
At that precise moment the former climbing boy, whom his new master thought to be peacefully asleep, was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a room in quite another part of London-a dingy, dirty attic room that was sparsely furnished and strewn with rags and stale remnants of food and empty jugs.
“I tell you, Mags,” he was saying in his piping voice, which nevertheless did not sound as pathetic as it had sounded in the countess’s bedchamber the previous day, “I took me life in me ’ands comin’ ’ere in these togs.” He indicated the white shirt and breeches, obviously of an expensive cut and equally obviously part of a suit of livery belonging to some grand house. “But there weren’t nothin’ else.
They burned all me other things.”
The Mags referred to shook with silent laughter. “I scarce knew you, young Nick,” he said. “I always thought you ’ad black hair.”
The child touched his soft fair hair. “Such a scrubbin’ you never did ’ear tell of,” he said in some disgust. “I thought she’d rub me skin away for sure.”
“So yer can’t be up to the old lark no more,” Mags said, the laughter passing as silently as it had come.
“Naw.” Nicky scratched his head from old habit. “Thought she was bein’ a blessed angel, she did, that woman. And ’im standin’ there arskin’ me if I wanted to stay at their ’ouse. Exceptin’ I couldn’t say no. I would’ve given an ’ole farthin’ to ’ave seen old Thomas’s face.” He giggled, sounding for a moment very much like the baby the Earl and Countess of Lisle had taken him for. He was in reality almost eleven years old.
“This might be better,” Mags said, rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “You can go ’round the ’ouse at leisure, young Nick, and lift a fork ’ere and a jeweled pin there. P’raps they’ll take you to other ’ouses, and yer can ’ave a snoop around them too.”
“It’ll be almost too easy,” Nicky said, rubbing the side of his nose with one finger. His voice was contemptuous. “They’re a soft touch if ever I seen one, Mags.”
“Got anythin’ for me tonight?” Mags asked.
The child shifted position and scratched his rump. “Naw,” he said after a few moments’ consideration. “Nothin’ tonight, Mags.Next time.”
“It weren’t hardly worth comin’, then, were it?” the older man said, his narrowed eyes on the child.
“Just wanted yer to know that me fairy godmother come,” the child said, leaping lightly to his feet. “Did yer give the money to me maw for that thimble I brought you last week?”
“ ’Tweren’t worth much,” Mags said quickly. “But yes. Yer maw got her food money.” He laughed silently again. “And yer sister got ’er vittles to grow on. Another two or three years, young Nick, and yer maw’ll be rich with the two of yer.”
“I got to go,” the child said. And he climbed down the stairs from the attic and went out into the street, where for the first time in his life he had something to fear. His appearance made him fair game for attack.
Only the filthy stream of curses he had been quite capable of producing had discouraged one pair of tough-looking urchins when he had been on his way to Mags’s attic.
And unexpectedly he still had something to protect on his way back home.
He still had the ring and the diamond pressed between the band of his breeches and his skin, although the main reason for his night’s outing had been to deliver them to Mags for payment. One of his better hauls.
But he had not given them up. That woman, whom he had been told he must call “your ladyship,” had bawled like a baby after the man had left her, and flung the ring across the room.
And she had had food brought to him, and had sat and watched him eat it, and smiled at him. And she was the one who had told the big, sour-faced, big-bosomed woman to give him back his bundle-the bundle that held her ring and diamond, and who had stooped down and kissed him on the cheek before he got dumped in that hot water up to the neck and scrubbed raw.
She was pretty. Silly of course, and not a brain in her brainbox-calling him a baby, indeed, and believing his story about the orphanage and about his mother’s lock of hair! But very pretty. Well, he would keep her ring for a day or two and sell it to Mags the next time he came. He would have more things by then, though not much. The reason he had never been caught was probably that he had never been greedy. He had learned his lesson well from Mags. He had never taken more than one thing from each house, and never anything that he had thought would be sorely missed.
Nicky darted in his bare feet along a dark street in the shadows of the buildings and cursed his clean hair and skin, which would make him more noticeable, and his clothes, which would be like a red flag to a bull if the wrong people were to spot him on these particular streets.
The bed was empty beside Estelle when she woke up the following morning.
She felt only a fleeting disappointment.
After all, he never had stayed until morning. And if he had been there, there would have been an awkwardness between them. What would they say to each other, how would they look at each other if they awoke in bed together in the daylight?
And remembered the hot passion they had shared before they had fallen asleep.
When she met him downstairs-in the breakfast room perhaps, or later in some other part of the house-he would be, as always, his immaculate, taciturn, rather severe self again. It would be easy to look at him then. He would seem like a different man from the one whose hands and mouth and body had created their magic on her during the darkness of the night.
It was a good thing that he was not there this morning. The night had had its double dose of lovemaking and silent tenderness. At least she could image it was tenderness until she saw him again and knew him incapable of such a very human emotion.
Estelle threw back the bedclothes even though Annie had not yet arrived and even though the fire was all but extinguished in the fireplace. She shivered and stood very still, wondering if she really felt nausea or if she were merely willing the feeling on herself. She shrugged, and resumed the futile search for her ring. She had combed through every inch of the room the day before, more than once. It was not to be found.
What she should do was repeat what she had done the day before. She should send for Allan before she had time to think and tell him the truth. If he ripped up at her, if he yelled at her, or-worse-if he turned cold and looked at her with frozen blue eyes and thinned lips, then she would think of some suitably cutting retort. And she need not fear him. He had never beaten her, and she did not think she could ever do anything bad enough that he would.
And what could he do that he had not already done? He had already decided to banish her. There was nothing he could do worse than that.
Nothing.
“Oh, my lady,” Annie said a few minutes later, coming into the room with her morning chocolate and finding her standing in the corner of the room where she had thrown the ring, “you will catch your death.”
Estelle glanced down at herself and realized that she had not even put on a wrap over her nightgown. She shivered. And looked at her maid and opened her mouth to tell the girl to go summon his lordship.
“It is rather cold in here,” she said instead. “Will you have some coals sent up, Annie?”
The girl curtsied and disappeared from the room.
And Estelle knew immediately that the moment had been lost. In the second that had elapsed between the opening of her mouth and the speaking of the words about coal being brought for the fire, she had turned coward.
It had been easy the morning before to have Allan called and to tell him about the missing diamond. She had still be smarting from the accusations he had hurled at her the night before, and the sentence he had passed on her. She had derived a perverse sort of pleasure from telling him of the ruin of his first gift to her.
This morning it was different. This morning she could remember his kindness to a little child. And his gentle tenderness to her the night before. And she could hope that perhaps it would be repeated that night if nothing happened during the day to arouse the hostility that always lurked just below the surface of their relationship-except when it boiled up above the surface, that was.
This morning she was a coward. This morning she could not tell him.
She had arranged to go shopping with her friend Isabella Lawrence. There were all sorts of Christmas gifts to be purchased before their houseguests began to arrive to take up all her time. There was Allan’s gift to be chosen, and she did not know what she would get him. She did have one gift for him already, of course. She had persuaded Lord Humber, that elderly miser, to part with a silver snuffbox Allan had admired months before, and she had kept it as a Christmas gift. But that had been a long time ago. And Lord Humber had refused to take anything but a token payment. Besides, she had given him a snuffbox the year before too. She wanted something else, something very special. But what did one buy for a man who had everything? Still, she would enjoy the morning despite the problem. Isabella could always cheer her up with her bright chatter and incessant gossiping.
She ate her breakfast in lone state, her husband having already removed to his study, Stebbins told her. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
But there was one thing she had to do before going out. She had Annie bring Nicky to her dressing room.
She smiled at him when he stood inside the door, his chin tucked against his chest, one leg wrapping itself around the other. He was clean and dressed smartly in the livery of the house. But he was still, of course, pathetically thin and endearingly small.
“Good morning, Nicky,” she said.
He muttered something into the front of his coat.
She crossed the room in a rush, stooped down in front of him, and set her hands on his thin shoulders. “Did you have a good breakfast?” she asked. “And did you sleep well?”
“Yes, missus,” he said. “I mean…”
“That is all right,” she said, lifting a hand to smooth back his hair.
“You do look splendid. Such shiny blond hair. Are you happy, Nicky, now that you have a real home of your own?”
“Yes, missus,” he said, sniffing and drawing his cuff across his nose.
“Nicky,” she said, “I lost a ring yesterday. In my bedchamber. You did not see it there when you came down the chimney, I suppose?”
The child returned his foot to the floor and scratched the back of his leg with his other heel.
“No, of course you did not,” she said, putting her arms about his thin little body and hugging him warmly. “Oh, Nicky, his lordship gave me the ring when we were betrothed. And now I have lost it. It was without question my most precious possession. Like the lock of your mama’s hair is to you. And the seashell.” She sighed. “But no matter. Something else very precious came into my life yesterday. Even more precious perhaps because it is living.” She smiled at his bowed head and kissed his cheek. “You came into my life, dear. I want you to be happy here. I want you to grow up happy and healthy. There will never be any more chimneys, I promise you. His lordship would not allow it.”
Nicky rubbed his chin back and forth on his chest and rocked dangerously on one leg.
“Annie is waiting outside for you,” Estelle said. “She will take you back to the kitchen, and Mrs. Ainsford will find you jobs to do. But nothing too hard, I assure you. Run along now. I shall buy you a present for Christmas while I am out. And I will not add ‘if you are good.’ I shall give you a gift even if you are not good. Everyone should have a Christmas gift whether he deserves it or not.”
Nicky looked up at her for the first time, with eyes that seemed far too large for his pale, thin face. Then his hand found the doorknob and opened the door. He darted out to join the waiting maid.
Estelle tied the strings of her bonnet beneath her chin and knew what she was going to buy for her husband for Christmas. It was not really a gift for him, she supposed. But it would do. It would be the best she could do, and perhaps after she had gone away into her banishment he would understand why she had chosen to give him such a strange gift.
Perhaps-oh, just perhaps-her exile would not last a lifetime.
The Earl of Lisle felt very guilty. He had often accused his wife of flirting, on the basis of very hard evidence he had seen with his own eyes. He had a few times accused her of doing more than flirting. She had always hotly denied the charges, though she had usually ended the arguments with a toss of the head and that look of disdain and the comment that he might believe what he pleased. And who, apart from him, would blame her anyway for taking a lover, when she was tied for the rest of a lifetime to such a husband?
He had never looked for evidence. And it was not because he was afraid of what he might discover. Rather it was out of a deep conviction that even though he was her husband, he did not own her. Although in the eyes of the law she was his possession, he would never l
ook on her as such.
She was Estelle. His wife. The woman he had secretly loved since before his marriage to her. And if she chose to flirt with other men, if she chose to be unfaithful to him with one or more of those men, then he would rant and rave and perhaps put her away from him forever. But he would never spy on her, never publicly accuse her, never publicly disown her.
He would endure if he must, as dozens of wives were expected to endure when their husbands chose to take mistresses.
It was with the greatest of unease, then, that he searched his wife’s rooms after she had left on her shopping trip with Isabella Lawrence. He was looking for the ring. He was terrified of finding something else.
Something that he did not want to find.Something that would incriminate her and destroy him.
He found nothing. Nothing to confirm some of his worst suspicions. And not the ring either. Wherever she had put it, it certainly was not in either her bedchamber or her dressing room.
It seemed to him, as he wandered through into his own dressing room, that he must now abandon the plan that had so delighted him the night before. But not necessarily so, he thought after a while. The diamond would have been new anyway. Why not the whole ring? Why not have the whole thing copied for her? A wholly new gift.
A wholly new love offering.
The trouble was, of course, that he would have to describe the ring very exactly to a jeweler in order that it could be duplicated. He had bought the ring for her two years before. He had put it on her hand. He had looked at it there, with mingled pride and love and despair, a thousand times and more. And yet he found that he could not be clear in his mind whether there had been eight sapphires or nine. And exactly how wide had the gold band been?
He tried sketching the ring, but he had never been much of an artist.
He would have to do the best he could. After all, it was not as if he were going to try to pretend to her that it was the original ring.
The idea of the gift excited him again. Perhaps he would even be able to explain to her when he gave it. Explain why he had done it, what the ring meant to him. What she meant to him.