Under the Mistletoe

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh,” Lilias said, and looked down at the small girl standing beside him, one hand clutched in his. She was handsomely dressed in dark red velvet, though she was not a pretty child. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, my lady.”

  “This is Miss Angove, Dora,” the marquess said.

  The child was looking candidly up at Lilias. “We have brought you a basket of food from the house,” she said, tossing her head back in the direction of the postilion, who was holding a large basket covered with a white cloth.

  “Won’t you come inside, my lord?” Lilias asked, standing hastily to one side when she realized that she had been keeping them standing on the doorstep. “And there really was no need.” She glanced at the basket and took it reluctantly from the servant’s hand.

  “We have taken one to each of the houses we have called at,” he said. “A

  Christmas offering, ma’am.” He looked at her with the hooded blue eyes and the marble expression that she had found so disconcerting a few days before. “Not charity,” he added softly for her ears only.

  His daughter was eyeing Megan and Andrew with cautious curiosity.

  “Do you think girls are silly?” she asked Andrew after the introductions had been made and Lilias was ushering the marquess to a seat close to the fire.

  Andrew looked taken aback. “Not all of them,” he said. “Only some. But then, there are some silly boys, too.”

  “Mrs. Crawford’s sons think girls are silly,” Dora said.

  “They would,” Andrew said with undisguised contempt.

  “And do you squeal and quarrel all the time and run to your mama with tales?” Dora asked Megan.

  Megan giggled.

  “Dora,” her father said sharply, “watch your manners.”

  “Because the children at the rectory do,” Dora added.

  “We have no mama to run to,” Megan said. “And when Drew and I quarrel, we go outside and fight it out where Lilias cannot hear us and interfere.” She giggled again. “We have been gathering holly. It is all wet and prickly. But there are so many berries! Do you want to see it?

  You may take your coat off and put on one of my pinafores if you wish.”

  “Megan,” Lilias said, her voice agonized. One of Megan’s faded pinafores on Lady Dora West?

  “What is the holly for?” Dora asked. “And, yes, please.” She looked at her father on an afterthought. “May I, Papa? Where did you find it? I wish I could have come with you.”

  “No, you don’t,” Andrew said. “My fingers look like one of Miss Pierce’s pincushions. We found some mistletoe too. It is in the kitchen. Come and look.”

  Lilias found herself suddenly seated opposite the marquess in the small and empty parlor, the object of his silent scrutiny. She jumped to her feet again.

  “May I offer you tea?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “That is not necessary. We had tea at the rectory not half an hour since.”

  She flushed. “I am afraid I have nothing else to offer,” she said.

  “Sit down,” he said. He looked over his shoulder into the kitchen, where the voices of the children mingled. “One of my men has been sent into town for your brother’s watch, among other things. I shall have it delivered tomorrow.”

  Lilias felt herself flush even more deeply. “You are kind,” she said.

  “And thank you for the other things.”

  More than ever she felt that she had begged from him and had been given charity. There was no unbending in his manner, not the merest hint of a smile on his lips or in his eyes. He was regarding her with what looked uncomfortably like scorn.

  “Dora is lonely,” he said. “She has never had children to play with.

  Until less than a year ago she lived with her grandparents.”

  Lilias did not reply. She could think of nothing to say.

  “Unfortunately,” he said, “when she does find playmates, she demands perfection. She wants them to be the sort of friends she would like to have. I am afraid our visits this afternoon have not been a great success.”

  Lilias smiled fleetingly.

  “Look, Papa.” Dora was back in the room, holding up one small index finger for her father’s inspection. A tiny globe of blood formed on its tip. “I pricked myself.” She put the finger in her mouth even as the marquess reached into a pocket for a handkerchief. “Megan and Andrew are going to put the holly all about the house for Christmas. May I stay and watch?”

  “It is time to go home,” he said.

  “But I don’t want to go home,” she said, her lower lip protruding beyond the upper one. “I want to stay and watch.”

  “We shall gather holly too, shall we?” he asked. “And decorate our house with it?”

  “But it will be no fun,” she said mulishly, “just you and me. I want to watch Megan and Andrew. And I want to watch Andrew carve the Nativity scene he is making. We don’t have a Nativity scene, do we?”

  “No,” he said, getting to his feet, impatience showing itself in every line of his body, Lilias thought as she too rose from her chair, “we don’t have a Nativity scene, Dora. Take off the pinafore now. I shall help you on with your cloak and bonnet.”

  “They have mistletoe, Papa,” Dora said, making no attempt to undo the strings of her pinafore. “They hang it up and kiss under it. Is that not silly?”

  “Yes,” he said, undoing the strings for her, “very silly.”

  “Can we have some, Papa?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “We will find some tomorrow.”

  “But it will be no fun,” she said again.

  “We will come with you,” Megan offered, glancing at her brother. “Won’t we, Drew? We know all the best places to look. Or rather, Lilias does, and she showed us today. Shall we come with you?”

  The child looked almost pretty for a moment, Lilias thought, as her face lit up with eagerness. “Yes, you come too,” she said. “We will need ever so much holly because our house is much bigger than yours. Isn’t it, Papa? And mistletoe for every room. And Andrew can carve a Nativity scene just for me.”

  “No,” Andrew said, “there will not be time. But I will bring the shepherd with me to show you. It will be finished by tomorrow.”

  Lilias found herself suddenly gazing into the marquess’s eyes across the heads of the children and feeling decidedly uncomfortable. His eyes were cold and penetrating. And for the first time there was a half-smile on his lips. But she wanted to shiver. The smile had nothing to do with either amusement or friendship.

  “Well, Miss Angrove,” he said, “it would be quite too bad if you were the only one to miss this merry outing. I shall send my carriage for the three of you after luncheon tomorrow and we will all go holly gathering together. You will do us the honor of taking tea with us afterward.”

  He did not ask questions, Lilias noticed. He did not even make statements. He gave commands. Commands that she would dearly have liked to refuse to comply with, for if one thing was becoming clear to her mind, it was that he disliked her. Quite intensely. Perhaps it was her temerity in reminding him of a long-forgotten debt that had done it. She could think of no other reason for his hostility. But it was there nonetheless.

  And she was glad suddenly that he had come home, glad that she had seen what he had become, glad that she could put to rest finally a dream and an attachment that had clung stubbornly long after he had left in such a hurry the very day after they had spent two hours together strolling the grounds of his home, hand in hand, looking at the flowers of spring and planning what they would do during the summer.

  She was glad he had come back, for he no longer lived, that gentle and sunny-natured young man whom she had loved. He was dead as surely as his older brother was dead. As surely as Philip was dead. He had died six years before. She had just not known it.

  He was holding her eyes with his own. He was obviously waiting for an answer, though he had asked no question. And how could she answer as she wished to do when there
were three children standing between them, all eagerly anticipating the treat that the morrow would bring?

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said. “That would be very pleasant.”

  Very pleasant indeed, the Marquess of Bedford was thinking the following afternoon as the five of them descended the steps of his house and set off past the formal gardens and the lawns and orchards to the trees and the lake and the hill and eventually the holly bushes.

  She was wearing a cloak that looked altogether too thin for the weather.

  And beneath it he could see the same wool dress she had worn for her first interview with him. Except that he had realized the day before that it could not, after all, be her oldest gown. The cotton dress she had worn when he and Dora had called upon her was so faded that it was difficult to tell exactly what its original color had been.

  The children were striding along ahead, one Angove on each side of Dora, Megan holding her hand. Dora had had a hard time getting to sleep the night before. He had sat with her, as he had each night since their coming into the country, until she fell asleep. He had sat there for almost an hour.

  “We won’t forget the mistletoe, Papa?” she had asked after he had tucked her comfortably into her bed.

  “No,” he had assured her, “we won’t forget the mistletoe.”

  “Will you kiss me, Papa?” she had asked.

  He had leaned over her again and kissed her.

  “Under the mistletoe, silly,” she had said, chuckling uncontrollably for all of two minutes.

  “Yes, I will kiss you, poppet,” he had said. “Go to sleep now.”

  But she had opened her eyes several minutes later. “Do you think Andrew will remember the shepherd, Papa?” she had asked.

  “I expect so,” he had said.

  He had thought her asleep ten minutes after that. He had been considering getting up from his chair, tiptoeing out of the room, and leaving her to the care of her nurse.

  “Papa,” she had said suddenly, frowning up at him, “what is a Nativity scene?”

  “A Nativity scene,” he had said. “I’ll tell you some other time. It is time to sleep now.”

  “It won’t rain tomorrow, Papa, will it?” she had asked plaintively.

  She had been excited about the promised outing with the Angoves. More excited than he had seen her since taking her from Lorraine’s parents early the previous spring, a thin and listless and bad-tempered child.

  Damnation! he thought now, and offered his arm to Lilias. Events could not have turned more to her advantage if she really had planned them.

  The afternoon before he had thought she had, but he had been forced to admit to himself later that she could not have done so. Too much had depended upon chance. She had not even known that he and Dora were going to call on her.

  But she would take full advantage of the cozy family outing. He supposed he would be forced to listen to patient cheerfulness about the prospective post as governess and tender lamentations on the fact that the family was about to be broken up. Doubtless she would confide again her intention of reuniting them when she had made her fortune as a governess.

  Lilias. He had not expected her to come to this. He looked down at her as she walked silently at his side. She had not grown since the age of sixteen. Her head still barely passed his shoulder. Her hair was still smooth and fair beneath her bonnet. But she was thinner. Her hand, even inside its glove, was too slender on his arm. Her face was thin and pale. Her dark-lashed gray eyes seemed larger in contrast. She really did look as if she were half-starved.

  Damnation!

  “I wanted Christmas for my daughter,” he told her, realizing with a jolt as he heard his own words that that was exactly what she had said to him four days before about her brother and sister. “Christmas as I remembered it. I thought I would find it here. But I chose just the year when there is no snow. Only this infernal cold and damp.”

  “But it did not always snow,” she said, looking up at him. “Just very rarely, I think. It was especially lovely when it did. But Christmas was always wonderful anyway.”

  “Was it?” He frowned.

  She drew breath as if to speak, but she seemed to change her mind.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I have your watch,” he said. “It is at the house. I shall see that you have it before you leave after tea.”

  She looked up at him again, bright-eyed. “Thank you,” she said.

  Here we go, he thought. He had supplied her with the perfect opportunity to heap upon his head reflections on how happy the boy would be during the coming years and how he would be able to remember his sisters and their life together every time he pulled the watch from his pocket. He clamped his teeth together and felt his jaw tighten.

  He felt guilty suddenly. She so obviously was very poor, and it was so obviously true that the three of them were to be separated after Christmas. He just wished she had not decided to use the pathos of her situation to win herself a rich and gullible husband.

  Except that he was not gullible. Not any longer.

  She half-smiled at him and shifted her gaze to the three children, who were now quite a distance ahead of them. She said nothing.

  Dora was skipping along, he was surprised to notice when he followed the direction of Lilias’s eyes.

  “This is where we got the holly yesterday,” Megan announced a while later when they came up to the thicket. And then she looked at Lilias, a hand over her mouth, and giggled.

  Andrew was laughing too. “We were not supposed to say,” he said, darting a mischievous look at the marquess. “We were trespassing.”

  Lilias was blushing very rosily, Bedford saw when he glanced at her. She looked far more as she had looked as a girl.

  “But these ones don’t have as many berries as yours,” Dora complained.

  “All the good branches are high up,” Andrew said. “We could not reach them yesterday. Even Lilias.”

  “It seems that I am elected,” the marquess said. “Thank goodness for leather gloves. This looks like certain self-destruction.”

  Megan giggled as he stepped forward and his coat caught on the lower branches of holly. He had to disengage himself several times before he could reach up to cut the branches that were loaded with berries. His upturned face was showered with water. Dora was giggling too.

  Lilias had stepped in behind him to take the holly as he handed it down.

  Her gloves and cloak were not heavy enough to protect her from hurt, he thought, and clamped his lips together as he was about to voice the thought.

  “Ouch,” Dora cried excitedly, and giggled even more loudly. “I have almost as big an armful as you, Andrew. I have more than Megan. Oh, ouch!”

  “You must not clutch them,” Andrew said. “Just hold them enough that they do not drop.”

  “Well,” the Marquess of Bedford said when he paused and looked behind him. “You look like four walking holly bushes. Do you think you can stagger back to the house with that load? Only now does it strike me that we should have had a wagon sent after us.”

  “Oh, no,” Andrew said. “That would spoil the fun.”

  “This is such fun, Papa,” Dora said.

  “Let me take some of this load,” Bedford said, reaching out to take some from Lilias’s arms, “before you disappear entirely behind it.”

  Her eyes were sparkling up at him.

  “But, Papa,” Dora wailed. “The mistletoe.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said, “the mistletoe. I shall go and get some. You all start back to the house.” But she was loaded down. She would never get back without being scratched to death. “Better still, drop your load, Lilias, and show me where this mistletoe is. You children, on your way.

  We will catch up to you.”

  God, he thought, turning cold as she did what she had been told-considering her load, she had had little choice-he had called her Lilias. The witch! Her wiles were working themselves beneath his guard despite himself. His jaw hardened aga
in.

  She led him around past the thicket of holly bushes, past the old oaks, to the mistletoe, which he had forgotten about. The old oaks! He had climbed them with her, to sit in the lower branches, staring at the sky and dreaming aloud with her. He could remember lifting her down from the lowest branch of one-he could not remember which-and kissing her, her body pressed against the great old trunk, her hands spread on either side of her head, palm to palm against his. He could remember laughing at her confusion because he had traced the line of her lips with his tongue.

  “It was all a long time ago,” he said abruptly, and felt remarkably foolish as soon as the words were spoken. As if he had expected her to follow his train of thought.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  He gave her the mistletoe to carry, being very careful not to lift it above the level of her head as he handed it to her. And on the way back he took the large bundle of holly into his own arms, against her protests, to carry to the house.

  “My coat and my gloves are heavier than yours,” he said.

  She brushed her face against the mistletoe as they walked.

  “I suppose,” he said harshly after a few silent minutes, “you do not get enough to eat.”

  She looked up at him, startled. “My lord?” she said.

  “Your brother and sister do not look undernourished,” he said. “I suppose you give all your food to them.”

  Her flush was noticeable even beneath the rosiness that the wind and cold had whipped into her cheeks.

  “What a ridiculous notion,” she said. “I would have starved to death.”

  “And have been doing almost that, by the look of you,” he said, appalled at his own lack of breeding and good manners.

  “What I do is my own business, I thank you, my lord,” she said. Her voice was as chill as his own, he realized. “I do not choose to discuss either my appetite or my means with you.”

  “You were quite willing to do so a few days ago,” he said.

  “Only enough to explain why I had to bring up the matter of that old debt,” she said. “And I take it unkindly in you to refer again to a topic I confided only with embarrassment and reluctance.”