“Gideon is in mourning for his grandmother, so he and Sabrina will not be out in society until December, or I would suggest a house party.”
Lark sat straighter. “Do people have Christmas house parties?”
“Of course they do. Have you never attended a house party during the holidays? There are none so special as Christmas gatherings.”
Lark called for more tea and shared her background with Alex, as Alex shared a bit of her own amazing life with Hawksworth, and sometime during the course of the afternoon, the two became fast friends.
She took Alex to the nursery to meet Micah and Brian, who were, unfortunately, not on their best behavior. It seemed Micah had locked Brian in her bedchamber, and Brian did not like locks. So when she picked it and got herself out, she threw an inkwell, a full inkwell, at Micah’s head. It broke, of course, the inkwell, not Micah’s head, though he did have a bruise the size of an egg on his temple.
Even though Mim had basically cleaned them up, India ink stained Micah’s cheek and both children’s hands. Even so, they bowed, and curtseyed, and gave the incorrect impression of having manners.
Lark shut the door on the nursery and rolled her eyes. “I sometimes ask myself why we want another.”
“Because making babies is splendid fun?”
“I will come to see you when your own comes,” Lark told Alex as they descended the stairs. “I cannot wait to hold it.”
“The babe will be nearly three months by Christmas,” Alex said absentmindedly, as if doing sums in her head. “I would invite everyone to Christmas at the Lodge, but it is still a heap and we have not made rooms livable yet for so many.
“Lark, would you consider holding a Christmas house party here at Blackburne Chase? This will be Gideon and Sabrina’s first real Christmas without his grandmother so they will be happy for a place to go rather than remain home and feel sad. It would give you an opportunity to meet all the rogues and their families.”
Lark held her fluttering middle. “I do not know what to do to celebrate Christmas, nor anything about planning a house party. I would die of fright with such a task before me.”
“We could ask each family to bring the makings of their favorite family tradition. I will coordinate, so we do not duplicate efforts. We live near enough to each other, you and I, to consult on menus and preparations. Did you know that Huntington Lodge is barely twelve miles to the north?”
Lark caught Alex’s contagious excitement like a fever. “I have butterflies again. I swear I will be as sick on the day of my house party as I was this morning for knowing you were coming.”
“You were sick this morning? Has this happened before?”
“I suppose a lady should not speak of such things,” Lark said in response to Alex’s frown. “I will never learn.”
“Have you had your monthlies recently?”
“Oh yes,” Lark said. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought perhaps you had been ill because you are with child, but that cannot be.”
“Why can it not? Will I not know until I am as big as a prize sow—” Lark slapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry.”
Alex laughed, and with so much merriment, Lark feared she would birth her babe there on the indigo damask settee.
“The easiest way to tell,” Alex said some minutes later, as she dabbed at her watering eyes, “is that your monthlies will stop.”
The men returned, and though Lark wanted to consult Alex further, she could not wait to give Ash the news. “Ash,” she said, approaching him, reminding herself to remain sedate, and not gallop, as her excitement warranted, “we are hosting a Christmas house party here at Blackburne Chase, and Alex is going to help.”
While both rogues regarded their wives with unspoken skepticism, neither commented further.
Lark had had the maids fasten a curtain across her small personal sitting room the day her dressmaker was due to deliver her new wardrobe.
Now Ash, Brian and Micah sat on the opposite side of said curtain waiting for Lark to come from behind it wearing one of her new outfits.
When her first dress had been dropped over Lark’s head, she regarded herself in the cheval glass from every angle, both amazed and flattered. “This cannot be me. I feel as though I am wearing someone else’s clothes.”
“Well you must surely be, My Lady,” the dressmaker said as she attempted to fasten the buttons up the back. “Because this dress is too small for you.”
“I heard that,” Ash said, “and I am pleased to hear my campaign to fatten up My Lady is become a success. She was all bones a month ago, you must own, still is, in my eyes.”
“I can hear this conversation,” Lark said. “Please refrain from discussing my plump self within my hearing, if you do not mind.”
On the opposite side of the curtain, Ash chuckled, Brian gave a giggle, and the additional snicker Lark heard was surely Micah’s.
“Won’t take but a rip and a stitch or two to fix, My Lord,” the dressmaker said.
“Happy to hear it.”
The dressmaker whipped the first dress off and settled another over Lark’s shoulders. “Here now, this one fits as it should. The empire style suits you,” she said, “and the emerald green color makes your flaxen hair shine.”
Lark stepped into a pair of satin high heeled slippers of the exact fabric and accepted a striped-silk fringed shawl the color of the blonde lace on her bodice.
As she stepped from behind the curtain, her family applauded, Brian’s eyes surprisingly wistful, Micah’s wide, and Ash’s hot and … inspired.
Lark grinned, certain she understood the degree of her husband’s inspiration. “I take it you approve?”
“The style suits you, and the way it looks on you suits me.”
“Good because I am fond of this style and ordered several, though I do feel like a child playing dress up. Look, my slippers match the precise color of my dress and each other.” She raised her hem to show her emerald silk slippers to good advantage, and did a dance step that had the children giggling.
“You have slippers to go with every dress.”
“Oh, Ash, surely not. That would be … extravagant.”
“Nevertheless, you have them. Your order was modest, Lark, I simply made it more practical, not excessive in any way, I assure you.”
Lark took a chair among them. “I wish to see Brian in one of her new dresses.”
Brian did not hesitate for a moment before she stepped behind the curtain, for she was too precocious by far, now that she’d lost her fear, and almost too beautiful as well. Lark wondered if her mother had been so striking, so alive, and if Ash saw the woman he loved in Brian’s perfect Irish features and fine raven hair.
Did he yearn for the woman even now? Lark almost hoped that the news about Brian’s paternity, due from Ellenora’s friends in London, never came, for she would as soon never know that her husband had fathered a child with the woman he loved.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As the dressmaker dressed Brian in her new clothes, Ash regarded Lark. He adored her in her own new things, though he would adore her more out of them, which he believed she read in his gaze even now.
As every new day passed, he became more enamored of his bride and more torn by their goal—odd how he thought of it in terms of their goal now.
While Lark must soon get with child, to keep them in grandfather’s will so as to save the estate, Ash dreaded the day he would be forced to stop going to her bed.
He had wondered recently if grandfather would accept Brian as the child Ash must produce before Christmas … if Brian proved, indeed, to be his. But he had realized soon enough that to claim Brian as his own would be to declare her as illegitimate and ruin her in the eyes of society.
Though Brian would not use her true name—Lark had convinced him she must have her reasons and they should keep her secret—she was legally the Lady Ashley Briana Fairhaven, legitimate daughter of the late Lloyd Harvey, Duke of Amesbridge, and
so she would remain.
Even if it meant losing grandfather’s favor, and losing Blackburne Chase as well, come to that, Ash would not destroy Brian’s future, whoever her sire might be.
All was not lost, he reminded himself now. Lark might yet conceive. Nearly four months were left to them before Christmas after all, and what better sport could be found than baby-making with Larkin Rose?
The fact was, despite his bride’s guttersnipe beginnings, she had become like a sprig of fresh lavender in his life—unspoiled yet spirited—a blend he found soothing and invigorating at one and the same time.
Beneath her oft-times unbendable surface, he had found Lark to be a woman of great passion, a woman he enjoyed having as his wife, his helpmeet, his lover—a woman so rare, even his curmudgeon of a grandfather had taken a fancy to her. So rare, she would love her husband’s natural child as her own.
Ash fingered the puzzling note in his pocket from Jane Hawking, Ellenora’s bosom friend, asking him to come to London where she would tell him everything she knew of Nora’s child. One way or another, he must discover whether he had left Ellenora carrying his child or not.
“Lark” he said, making a decision on the instant, I must away to London soon to look into the matter concerning which I have sent inquiries.” He regarded the curtain pointedly. “Do you suppose you could do without me for a day or so?”
“I think you would be missed by us all, but we would manage. What say you, Micah? Shall you, Brian, and I, become adventurers, out here in the wilds of Gorhambury on our own for a full twenty four hours or more?”
Micah looked at Ash with fretful eyes, but he nodded all the same, and then Brian came out wearing … a dress, and took all their attention.
A termagant into a swan.
The first thing Brian did was curtsey before Ash. “I believe I will be pleased to dress like a girl again,” she said.
“Oh,” Ash said on a chuckle, tweaking her nose, “and shall you be pleased to be named like a girl as well? Someday you will be forced to settle on one name only, you know, and be content to live with the one only for the rest of your days.”
“Not yet, if you please.”
“Fine,” Ash said. “So you will wear dresses but still be called Brian?”
She looked at Lark, as if for reassurance, and raised her chin, much as Lark was wont to do. “I would like to be called Briana now, please.”
“Briana,” Ash said. “Close enough to your—to … Brian, and not so difficult a change to remember. It is a fine choice.”
That night Lark and Ash discussed the fact that Briana did not want the world to know her first name was Ashley, so they agreed, with apprehension, that neither would use it under any circumstance.
* * *
The following week, a note arrived from Huntington Lodge. “Dearest friends, you may wish us happy. Alex and I are proud to announce the arrival of our son, Brandon Alexander Wakefield, two weeks old today, and as perfect as his mother. Alex sends her love and bids Lark visit soon. She cannot wait to show him off.”
Lark and Ash toasted Hawksworth’s heir that night at dinner, and worked very hard afterward to produce an heir of their own.
Two days before Ash planned to travel to London, the Hawksworth carriage arrived promptly at nine to whisk Lark away on her adventure to visit Alex and the baby. Ash, Briana, and Micah, waved her away from beside the carriage. Mim, Cook and Grimsley stood on the steps waving her off as well, for Lark had alerted all available hands to keep the children in line during her absence.
Huntington Lodge, by Devil’s Dyke, topping the steep hill beside the River Ver, was not the leaking, tumbling pile Lark had been led by Alexandra to expect. The pristine Lodge stood an imposing mortared brick edifice, ruddy of face, and straight of line, with at least two score of men scrambling over its roof like ants on a hill high above them.
Everywhere Lark looked, happy, energetic men and women worked like bees in a hive. Among the tenants’ cottages, home farm and outbuildings, she saw dovecotes, granaries, even a pottery, as if the lodge were a world unto itself. Hawksworth had certainly made improvements, judging by Alexandra’s description of the home she originally inherited.
The man himself welcomed Lark and helped her from his carriage with a kiss to her hand, and before bringing her to Alex, he gave her a tour of the Lodge.
“The family chambers are now livable,” he said some time later, if a bit threadbare, as are the kitchens and servants’ quarters. Few of the guest-chambers have been touched, because we chose to build the tenant cottages first. Ah and here are my wife and son,” he said, beaming as they ended their tour in a rose silk drawing room.
Hawk sat Lark beside Alex on the sofa and bent to kiss his wife’s lips then his son’s brow. “Perfect,” he said lovingly cupping the boy’s tiny head as he slept. “Absolutely perfect.” He beamed at Lark. “Did Alex not do a fine job on this one?”
Lark smiled inwardly at the imposing Duke of Hawksworth turned to jelly by the sight of his wife and babe. “She certainly did,” Lark said, reaching tentatively, and was rewarded with the smallest armful of babe she ever held. “Oh my,” she said. “He is so soft.” She kissed a tiny hand. “I am in love.”
“And so you should be,” Hawk said, kissing Lark’s brow. “Again,” he said, and bowed. “Welcome, and enjoy your visit.” Hawk exited the drawing room and left them.
Lark cuddled and crooned to the babe and told him how fortunate he was to have such wonderful parents who loved him.
Alex beamed upon her son. “Yours will be as fortunate. When shall I hold him, or her? Did the doctor give you an approximate date?”
Lark laughed. “No, for I have seen no doctor. I am not as yet increasing, and I believe Ash is disappointed, though he says he is not, and that he is pleased to work so hard at his favorite sport.”
“Oh but you are with child,” Alex said. “You bear all the signs, Lark.”
Lark raised the babe in her arms to look at her belly. “I see no signs.”
“Have you had your monthly flux since my visit?”
“Well … no.”
“Aha. And how long has that been? Two months at least. You are breeding, mark my words. Your breasts are bigger too, and tender I’d warrant. Do you nap more often than not?”
“Oh.” Lark held the babe in her arms closer, felt a warmth of joy and love rush through her. “The dressmaker said something on the fit of my bodice the other day, but I had not considered. And I have dropped off to sleep at the most peculiar times. Why the children dressed me in a lavender crown, as I slept in the grass beside the field one afternoon, and I awoke feeling like a virgin sacrifice.”
Alex took her hand. “Before my visit to your home, when did you last have your flux?”
“I … do not remember.”
“Do you remember the last time you did?”
“Oh, yes, for I was ever so embarrassed at having Ash see me—” Lark warmed and brought the babe up for a kiss.
“Nonsense, rogues who fought with Wellington take blood, of all things, in stride, though try and remember to have Sabrina tell you about her daughter, Julianna’s, birth and Gideon’s hand in it.”
“Gideon was present at the birth?”
“He delivered the child.”
Lark paled. “I would not know what to do.”
“Neither did Gideon.”
They shared a chuckle. “We need to know how far along you are,” Alex said. “Pray, liken the time of your last flux to the season, if you please. Were the lilacs in bloom? Fruit in blossom, lavender, roses?”
“Oh, I do not know. I remember that, at least a week previous, the blossoms had been falling from the apple trees.”
“Dearest Lark, you must be four months gone, at least. I would wager your babe is due sometime in January or February.”
“Do you think so? You think I am truly with child?”
“I think you should see a doctor.”
“Perhaps I will, but
I’d as soon not tell Ash until I am certain. Would you mind not telling Hawksworth yet, so Ash can be the first to know?”
“Certainly not. I adore secrets.”
“Besides,” Lark said, “I do not want Ashford to stop coming to my bed any sooner than he must.”
“He does not need to keep from you when you are with child, did you not know?”
“I know no more of babes than begetting them, but in this case, keeping Ash from my bed when I got with child was a stipulation of my own, given at the point of our original bargain.” She sighed. “I now wish I had not made it, but what can I do, but stick to my own rules, if I ever expect my husband to honor my wishes in future?”
“You have got yourself into the soup with this one, my girl. Methinks that only a good seduction will get you out of it. If you need help, Sabrina has taught me some delightful tricks, which I will be pleased to pass to you. I had already planned to send you home with a jar of Sabrina’s special “oil of seduction.” It will be of use in the event you put that plan into effect. Remind me to give it to you before you leave. Sabrina has it especially made by an apothecary in London.”
Lark heard a commotion outside the room.
“Oh, listen. Do you hear it? There is a babe, not my own, crying. Must be young Master Judson Chesterfield himself. Do you mind if we save our Christmas planning for our next visit? Claudia wants to meet you.”
Not at all, Lark said, delighted at the prospect of another visit and of meeting Hawksworth’s niece.
“I must caution you,” Alex said, “before the hoards descend, that to survive a Christmas House Party big enough to accommodate the rogues’ families, you will need truckle beds in the nursery, triples if you are smart. We have a tenant who makes them. Remind me to give you his direction before you take your leave.”
A beautiful dark-haired woman swept into the drawing room then, with a babe thrice Brandon’s size in her arms and a young woman in tow.
Alex introduced them as her niece Claudia, wife to the Viscount Chesterfield, and mama to little Judson, and Beatrix, Claudia’s younger sister.
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 18