Under the Mistletoe

by Mary Balogh

  He blew out the candle and climbed into bed, keeping close to the edge.

  But it was impossible to sleep and impossible to believe that she slept.

  She was too still, too quiet. He almost laughed out loud. They had been married for longer than three years and yet were behaving like a couple of strangers thrown together in embarrassing proximity. But he did not laugh; he was not really amused.

  “Sally?” He spoke softly and reached out a hand to touch her arm.

  “Yes?”

  But what was there to say when one had been married to a woman for so long and had never spoken from the heart? Patterns could not so easily be broken. Instead of speaking he moved closer and began the familiar and dispassionate ritual of raising her nightgown and positioning himself on top of her.

  All their actions, hers and his, were as they always were. There were never variations. She allowed him to spread her legs, though she did not do it for him, and she lifted herself slightly for his hands to slide beneath. He put himself firmly inside her, settled his face in her hair, felt her hands come to his shoulders, and worked in her with firm, rhythmic strokes until his seed sprang. He was always careful not to indulge himself by prolonging the intercourse. She never gave the slightest sign of either pleasure or distaste. She was a dutiful wife.

  And yet he wondered after he had disengaged himself from her and settled at her side why he carried out the ritual at all, since it brought neither of them any great pleasure and was not performed frequently enough for there to be any realistic expectation that she would conceive. Why did he do it at all when his desires and energies could be worked out on women who were well paid to suffer the indignity?

  Perhaps because he needed her?Because he loved her? But of what use was his love when he had never been able to tell her and when he had never taken the opportunity to cultivate her love at the beginning, when she had perhaps been fond of him?

  Lady Birkin lay still, willing sleep to come. Were they reasonably warm and comfortable in the stable? she wondered. Did the man care for his wife? Was she lying in his arms? Was he murmuring words of love to her to put her to sleep? Did her pregnancy bring her discomfort? What did it feel like to be heavy with child-with one’s husband’s child? She burrowed her head into the hard pillow, imagining as she often did at night to put herself to sleep that it was an arm, that there was a warm chest against her forehead and the steady beat of a heart against her ear. Her hand, moving up to pull the pillow against her face, brushed a real arm and moved hastily away from it.

  Breakfast was late. It was not that the night before had been busy and exciting enough to necessitate their sleeping on in the morning. And it was certainly not that the beds were comfortable enough or the rooms warm and cozy enough to invite late sleeping. It was more, perhaps, lethargy, and the knowledge that there was not a great deal to get up for. Even if the rain had stopped, travel would have been impossible.

  But the rain had not stopped. Each guest awoke to the sound of it beating against the windows, only marginally lighter than it had been the day before.

  And so breakfast was late. When the guests emerged from their rooms and gathered in the dining room, it seemed that only the quiet gentleman had been sitting there for some time, patiently awaiting the arrival of his meal.

  Greasy eggs and burned toast accompanied complaints about other matters.

  Eugenia was sure to have taken a chill, Miss Amelia Horn declared, having been forced to sleep between damp sheets. Miss Eugenia Horn flushed at the indecorous mention of sleep and sheets in the hearing of gentlemen. Colonel Forbes complained about the lumps in his bed and swore there were coals in the mattress. Mrs. Forbes nodded her agreement. The Marquess of Lytton lamented the fact that the coal fire in his room had been allowed to die a natural death the night before and had not been resuscitated in the morning. Lord Birkin wondered if they would be expected to make up their own beds. Lady Birkin declared that the ladies could not possibly be expected to sit in their rooms all day long. In the absence of any private parlors, the gentlemen must expect their company in the taproom and the dining room. The other ladies agreed. Even Pamela Wilder nodded her head.

  “That is the most sensible suggestion anyone has made yet this morning,” the Marquess of Lytton said, nodding his approval to Lady Birkin and fixing his eyes on Pamela.

  The innkeeper’s wife was pouring muddy coffee for those foolish enough or bored enough to require a second cup. The innkeeper appeared in the doorway.

  “You’d best come, Letty,” he said. “I told yer we should ’ave nothing to do with ’em. Now look at what’s gone and ’appened.”

  “What ’as ’appened?” The coffee urn paused over the quiet gentleman’s cup as Mrs. Palmer looked up at her husband. “ ’Ave they gone and stole an ’orse, Joe?”

  “I wish they ’ad,” Mr. Palmer said fervently. “I wish they ’ad, Letty.

  But no such luck. ’E’s in the taproom.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s ’aving ’er pains. In our stable, mind.”

  “Oh, Lord love us,” Mrs. Palmer said. The quiet gentleman was still waiting for his coffee. “She can’t ’ave it there, Joe. Who ever ’eard of anyone ’aving a baby in a stable?”

  The quiet gentleman smiled and appeared to resign himself to going without his coffee.

  “Oh.” Lady Birkin was on her feet. “The poor woman.How dreadful.” She looked at her husband in some distress. “She must be taken extra blankets.”

  “There ain’t no extra blankets,” Mrs. Palmer said tartly. “We ’ave a full ’ouse, my lady.”

  Lady Birkin looked appealingly at her husband. “Then she must have the blankets from our bed,” she said. “We will manage without, won’t we, Henry?” She reached out a hand to him and he took it.

  “Perhaps one from your bed and one from ours, Lady Birkin,” Mrs. Forbes said. “Then we will both have something left.”

  “I have a shawl,” Miss Eugenia Horn said. “A warm woolen one that I knitted myself. I shall send it out. Perhaps it will do for wrapping the baby when it is, ah, born.” She flushed.

  “And I will send out my smelling salts,” Miss Amelia Horn said. “The poor woman will probably need them.”

  “I have a room,” Pamela said quietly. “She must be carried up there.”

  “We don’t ’ave no other room to put you in, miss,” Mrs. Palmer said.

  “And I won’t ’ave no one in the taproom,” Mr. Palmer added firmly.

  “Then I shall sleep in the stable tonight,” Pamela said.

  The Marquess of Lytton got to his feet. “Is the husband large and strong?” he asked the innkeeper. “If not, I shall carry the woman in from the stable myself. To my room. Miss Wilder may keep hers. And you will, my good man, have someone in the taproom. Tonight. Me.”

  Mr. Palmer did not argue.

  “I’ll lend a hand,” Lord Birkin said, and the two gentlemen left the room together, followed by Mr. Palmer.

  “Perhaps,” Lady Birkin said, looking at the innkeeper’s wife, who appeared to have been struck with paralysis, “you should have coals sent up to Lord Lytton’s room to warm it.”

  “Lord love us,” Mrs. Palmer said, “I ’ave breakfast to clear away, my lady, and dishes to wash before I gets to the rooms.”

  Colonel Forbes puffed to his feet. “I have never heard the like,” he said. “I never have. An inn with no help. Where are the coals, ma’am? I shall carry some up myself.”

  Mrs. Forbes nodded her approval as her husband strode from the room.

  “I shall go up and get the bed ready,” Pamela said, “if you will tell me which room is Lord Lytton’s, ma’am.” She flushed rosily.

  “That would be improper, dear,” Miss Eugenia Horn said. “Though, of course, it is not his lordship’s room any longer, is it? I shall come with you nevertheless.”

  “Thank you,” Pamela said.

  “And I shall go and fetch your shawl, Eugenia, and my smelling salts,”


  Miss Amelia Horn said.

  “You will send for a midwife?” Lady Birkin said to Mrs. Palmer.

  “Oh, Lord, my lady,” Mrs. Palmer said. “There is no midwife for five miles, and she wouldn’t come ’ere anyhow for no woman what can’t pay as like as not.”

  “I see,” Lady Birkin said. “So we are on our own. Have you ever assisted at a birth, Mrs. Palmer?”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Not me, my lady,” she said. “Nor never ’ad none of my own neither.”

  Lady Birkin’s eyes moved past the Misses Horn and Pamela to Mrs. Forbes.

  “Ma’am?” she said hopefully.

  Mrs. Forbes ceased her nodding in order to shake her head. “I was forty when I married Colonel Forbes,” she said. “There was no issue of our marriage.”

  “Oh,” Lady Birkin said. She looked around at the other ladies rather helplessly. “Then I suppose we will have to proceed according to common sense. Will it be enough, I wonder?”

  Pamela smiled at her ruefully and left the dining room so that Lord Lytton’s former room would be ready by the time he carried up the woman from the stable. Pamela had been surprised by his offer both to give up his room and to carry the woman up to it. She would not have expected compassion of him.

  The quiet gentleman picked up the urn, which Mrs. Palmer had abandoned on his table, and poured himself a second cup of coffee.

  Lisa Curtis’s baby did not come quickly. It was her first and it was large and it appeared determined both to take its time in coming into the world and to give its mother as much grief as possible while doing so. Tom Suffield, the father, was beside himself with anxiety and was no help to anyone. Big, strapping young man as he was, he made no objection to the marquess’s carrying his woman into the inn and up the stairs, Lord Birkin hovering close to share the load if necessary. Tom was rather incoherent, accounting perhaps for his lack of wisdom in admitting to his unwed state.

  “We was going to get married,” he said, hurrying along behind the two gentlemen while Lisa moaned, having had the misfortune to suffer a contraction after the marquess had picked her up. “But we couldn’t afford to.”

  And yet, Lord Lytton thought, wincing at the girl’s obvious agony, they could afford a child. An unfair judgment, perhaps. Even the poor were entitled to their pleasures, and children had a habit of not waiting for a convenient moment to get themselves conceived.

  A strange scene greeted them at the entrance to his former inn room-had he really given it up in a chivalrous gesture to counter Miss Wilder’s brave offer to sleep in the stable? Miss Amelia Horn was hovering at one side of the doorway, a woolen shawl of hideous and multicolored stripes clutched in one hand and a vinaigrette in the other. Mrs. Forbes was hovering and nodding at the other side. The room itself was crowded. He had not realized that it was large enough to accommodate so many persons.

  Colonel Forbes was kneeling before the grate, blowing on some freshly laid coals and coaxing a fire into life. Both his hands and his face were liberally daubed with coal dust. He was looking as angry and out of sorts as he always did. Miss Eugenia Horn was at the window, closing the curtains to keep out some draft and a great deal of gloom. Lady Birkin was in the act of setting down a large bowl of steaming water on the washstand. Pamela Wilder was bent over the tidied bed, plumping up lumpy pillows and turning back the sheets to receive its new occupant. Lord Lytton, despite the weight of his burden, which he had just carried from the stable into the inn and up the stairs, pursed his lips at the sight of a slim but well-rounded derriere nicely outlined against the wool of her dress.

  What a fool and an idiot he had been the night before! He might by now be well familiar with the feel of that derriere. She turned and smiled warmly at the woman in his arms. He found himself wishing that her eyes were focused a little higher.

  “The bed is ready for you,” she said. “In a moment we will have you comfortable and warm. The fire will be giving off some heat soon. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, thank you,” Lisa said, her voice weak and weary as the marquess set her gently down. “Where’s Tom?”

  “Here I am, Leez,” the young man said from the doorway. His face was chalky white. “How are you?”

  “It’s so wonderfully warm in here,” the girl said plaintively, but then she gasped and clasped a hand over her swollen abdomen. She opened her mouth and panted loudly, moaning with each outward breath so that all the occupants of the room froze.

  “Who is in charge?” the marquess asked when it appeared that the pain was subsiding again. He had felt his own color draining away. “Who is going to deliver the child?”

  The one Miss Horn, he noticed, had disappeared from the doorway, while the other had turned firmly to face the curtained window. Obviously not them, and obviously not Miss Wilder. He must take her downstairs, away from there. But it was she who answered him.

  “There is no one with any experience,” she said. She flushed. “And no one who has given birth. We will have to do the best we can.”

  Hell, he thought. Hell and damnation! No one with any experience. A thousand devils!

  “Sally,” Lord Birkin said, “let me take you back to our room. Mrs.

  Palmer is doubtless the best qualified to cope.”

  “Mrs. Palmer,” she said, her eyes flashing briefly at him, “has the breakfast to clear away and the dishes to wash and the rooms to see to.

  I’ll stay here, Henry.” She turned to the girl, who was sitting awkwardly on the side of the bed, and her expression softened. “The stable must have been dreadfully dirty,” she said. “I have brought up some warm water. I will help you wash yourself and change into something clean. I have a loose-fitting nightgown that I believe will fit you.”

  She looked up. “Will you fetch it, Henry? It is the one with the lace at the throat and cuffs.”

  He looked at her, speechless. She, the Baroness Birkin, was going to wash a young girl of low birth who at present smelled of rankly uncleaned stable? She was going to give the girl one of her costly nightgowns? But yes, of course she was going to. It was just like Sally to do such things, and with such kindness in her face. He turned to leave the room.

  “I’ll help you, my lady,” Pamela said. She stooped over the girl on the bed. “Here, I’ll help you off with your dress once the gentlemen have withdrawn. What is your name?”

  “Lisa,” the girl said. “Lisa Curtis, miss.”

  “We will make you comfortable as soon as we possibly can, Lisa,” Pamela said.

  Miss Eugenia Horn coughed. “You must come with me away from this room, my dear Miss Wilder,” she said. “It is not fitting that we be here. We will leave Lisa to the care of Lady Birkin and Mrs. Forbes, who are married ladies.”

  The Marquess of Lytton watched Pamela’s face with keen interest from beneath drooped eyelids. She smiled. “I grew up at a rectory, ma’am,” she said. “I learned at an early age to help my fellow human beings under even the most difficult of circumstances if my assistance could be of some value.”

  It was a do-gooder sentiment that might have made him want to vomit, the marquess thought, if it had not been uttered so matter-of-factly and if her tone had not been so totally devoid of piety and sentiment.

  “I think it will survive without your further help, Forbes,” the marquess said, looking critically at the crackling fire. “Let us see if our landlord can supply us with some of that superior ale we had last night, shall we? Join us, Suffield.”

  He was rewarded with a grateful smile from Pamela Wilder. Lady Birkin was squeezing out a cloth over the bowl of water and rubbing soap on it.

  Miss Eugenia Horn was preparing to leave the room and sights so unbecoming to maiden eyes.

  It was strange, perhaps, that for the rest of the day all the guests at the White Hart Inn could not keep their minds away from the room upstairs in which a girl of a social class far beneath their own, and a girl moreover who was about to bear a bastard child, labored painfully though relatively quietly.
Her moans could be heard only when one of them went upstairs to his own room.

  “They should have stayed at home,” Colonel Forbes said gruffly. “Damn fool thing to be wandering about the countryside at this time of year and with the girl in this condition.”

  “Perhaps they could not afford to stay at home,” Lord Birkin said.

  Tom could not answer for himself. He had returned to the stable despite the offer of ale and a share of the fire in the taproom. He was pacing.

  “The poor child,” Miss Eugenia Horn said, having decided that it was unexceptionable to talk about the child, provided she ignored all reference to its birth. She was sitting in the taproom, knitting a pair of baby boots. “One cannot help but wonder what will become of it.”

  “Tom will doubtless find employment and make an honest woman of Lisa, and they and the child will live happily ever after,” the marquess said.

  Mrs. Forbes nodded her agreement.

  “It would be comforting to think so,” Lord Birkin said.

  Mrs. Palmer, looking harried, was emerging from the kitchen, where she had given the guests’ servants their breakfast and washed the dishes, and was making her way upstairs to tidy rooms.

  They were all increasingly aware as the day dragged on that it was Christmas Eve and that they were beginning to live through the strangest Christmas they had ever experienced.

  “We might decorate the inn with some greenery,” Miss Amelia Horn said at one point, “but who would be foolhardy enough to go outside to gather any? Besides, even if some were brought inside, it would be dripping wet.”

  “As far as I am concerned,” Colonel Forbes said, “there is enough rain outside. We do not need to admit any to the indoors.” No one argued with him.