by Mary Balogh
She wondered, somewhere far back in her mind, if she would be ashamed of herself when rationality finally returned. It was one thing to grant him his conjugal rights. It was another thing altogether . . . But she would think of that later. His mouth was on hers, open, warm, relaxed.
“My love.” It was the warm, throaty voice she remembered. The one that came during or following lovemaking. “My beloved.”
It was a strange, almost theatrical word. But it had always been spoken from the depths of his being. He had used it often after a particularly powerful uniting. She did not believe now that he was using it for deliberate effect.
She was lying on her side then, snugly fitted to his body, his arm beneath her head, the bedclothes up about them. She must have fallen asleep, she thought. She wondered how long she had slept. She had been unaware of his disengaging from her body and lifting himself off her. She felt comfortable from the roots of her hair down to her toenails. She could hear his heart beating steadily against her ear. She wondered if it was the stamp of ownership he had been placing on her tonight. She wondered if he was gloating over her obvious and ravenous pleasure. She wondered—Oh, she did not want to wonder. She wanted merely to feel. She turned her head farther in toward his chest. She could smell his sweat. She wondered why it was always such a pleasant smell after a sexual encounter.
“The Christmas star,” he said.
She turned her head again. Some stars were visible through the window, one brighter than the others. It was Christmas Day. She was in bed with her husband. They had just made love. She was going to be staying with him. They were going to be a family again. Perhaps. She did not know exactly what he intended.
“ ‘Over where the young child was,’ ” he said so softly that she knew he was merely speaking his thoughts aloud. He was quoting words from the Bible. He breathed in deeply and let the air out slowly. “You are exhausted, Antonia. Sleep now. The children will need all your attention in the morning.”
The children, he had said. Not just Jeffrey. The children.
She turned her face back in against his chest and obeyed him.
She was one of the last down to breakfast. She hesitated after she had stepped through the doors of the breakfast parlor, clearly daunted by the numbers. He got to his feet from his place at one end of the table and extended a hand in her direction. He had kept the seat beside him empty.
She turned her head and looked at him—and blushed. She looked delicate and fragile in her simple high-waisted dress of pale yellow. She looked very like her daughter at that moment—all big hazel eyes. How could he ever have convinced himself, he wondered as she came toward him, dealing with a chorus of greetings as she did so, that she was no longer everything in the world to him? She set her hand in his and he carried it to his lips.
“Happy Christmas, Antonia,” he said.
“Happy Christmas, John.” For one brief moment her eyes met his and her blush deepened.
He had left her bed while she was still sleeping, edging away from her so that she would not awake. And he had stood looking down at her for a while before covering her with the blankets again. The new slenderness made her look more vulnerable. He found her infinitely desirable—as he had done since his very first sight of her dancing at her come-out ball in London during the Season, dressed in virginal white and looking as if her eyes would fall out of her head with the wonder of it all. He had fallen in love with her before he had even been presented to her, before he had danced with her himself.
His butler was putting food on her plate at her direction. Precious little of it. He had just eaten a very hearty breakfast himself. But it had always been thus, he remembered. He had used to tease her about it. Sex had always made him ravenously hungry while it had seemed to leave all her appetites satiated. If he grew portly with age, he had told her, she would have herself to blame. And if she grew to be reed-thin, she had said in retaliation . . . But no, he had told her, he was planning to make her deliciously plump and portly at regular intervals over the next ten years or so.
The memory brought a jolt of unbearable pain with it. He returned his attention to the table at large.
But no one lingered over breakfast. It was Christmas Day and there was a great deal to do. There was church to attend within the hour. And after that the gift giving and all the serious business of feasting and enjoying the day. The earl watched his wife leave the breakfast parlor with his sister and some of the other ladies who had children in the nursery.
This was the day he had come to hate more than any other in the year. This year he looked forward to it with almost painful eagerness. He tried to tell himself that nothing really had changed except that he had put an end to his wife’s banishment and had exercised his conjugal rights with her the night before. He tried to remind himself that she was still an adulteress with a child born of that adultery. And that he was still the man whose stupidity—one stupidity piled upon another—had undoubtedly driven her to it. But this morning, try as he would, he could not quell hope.
She had lived an exemplary life for longer than three years—he could have no real doubt about that though he had never appointed anyone to spy on her. And he—well, he had missed her far more than he had realized until she had stood in his hall again two evenings before, quietly dignified, holding the child of her sin. She was home again, and he was going to keep her at home with him. He loved her.
He watched them come through the arched doorway from the stairs, all warmly bundled up for the outdoors, and strode across the hall toward them. His son, he could see, was full of the suppressed excitement of Christmas. He was holding one of his mother’s hands while the child held the other.
“The carriages can get through to the church today,” the earl said. “Several have left already. Do you wish to wait for one, Antonia, or shall we walk?”
“I would prefer to walk,” she said.
They had always walked to church on Christmas morning, leaving the carriages for the more elderly of his relatives. He had carried the baby, Jeffrey, on two of those occasions. On this particular morning, after seeing to it that everything was organized before leaving the house, making sure that there would be carriages for all those who still lingered in the hall, he took his son’s hand in his and they fell into step behind his wife and her daughter.
“Church first,” he said, smiling down at Jeffrey, “to remember why we are celebrating this day, and then back home to open the gifts. I wonder if any of them will be for you.”
“Mama brought some parcels with our baggage and would not tell us what they were,” Jeffrey said. “I think maybe they were our gifts, sir.”
His father chuckled. “And why are we going to church this morning?” he asked. “Has Mama explained to you?”
“It is Baby Jesus’ birthday,” his son said. “There was a stable and shepherds and wise men and angels. And a star. Mama told us the story. And Miss Matthews had me draw pictures.”
Ah yes, the star. And the stable. And the man who had kept and protected the woman who had given birth to a child who was not his. And had taken the child for his own. The parallels had persisted in his mind, and they no longer seemed so irreverent to him. He was, he admitted fully to himself for perhaps the first time, as flawed as she. Perhaps more so. If he had not been so stupid to start with and had not compounded the stupidity by lying to her . . .
“Are we going to live with you here for always, sir?” Jeffrey asked him.
“Would you like to?” he asked.
“Mama and Jane too?” His son was frowning and looking wary.
“Yes,” he said. “You and Mama and Papa and your sister. Would you like that?”
“Do you really want us?” The boy was still frowning. “Do you love us? Do you love me?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “I love you very dearly, and I want you here with me all the time. All of you. Do you ride? Swim? Play cricket? I want to do all those things with you. All the things papas do with their boys.”
“And help be the man of the house, like Mama says?” his son asked him.
“And that too.” He smiled. “You and I together, my son.”
“Then I think I would like to stay, sir,” Jeffrey said. “I love cricket more than anything else in the whole wide world.”
The church was full, half of its pews filled with family and friends and guests from Wycherly. The Earl of Wycherly took his place in the family pew with his wife and his family and looked at the carved Nativity scene before the altar and listened to the church bells pealing out the glad news of a child born into the world eighteen hundred years before and newly born again each year. His son was seated between him and his wife. The child was at her far side. He turned his head to look at his wife. They had exchanged scarcely a dozen words today. He wondered if she regretted last night, if she had said yes while still only half awake, if she was disgusted with herself and with him this morning. She turned to look back at him and he smiled at her. She half smiled in return—and blushed.
It was only for the past three years that he had hated Christmas, he thought during the following hour. Before that he had always liked it, even loved it, for various reasons. But never as much, perhaps, as this year. As now, this morning, in the village church at Wycherly. Never before had he felt so poignantly that Christmas was all about family and commitment and acceptance and total, unconditional, self-giving love. That it was about love for one’s woman and the children of her body and about giving her and them the protection, not only of one’s name, but also of one’s strength and one’s love and one’s trust.
“And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. . . . And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.”
Joseph had protected his woman and her child and guarded them and had taken them home with him so that he might nurture them down the years.
There was a great deal of talking and laughing and handshaking in the porch and on the church path after the service was over and the church bells began to peal again. But the children were impatient to be gone. Their exuberance at knowing what part of the day came next was no longer to be contained. Jeffrey ran on ahead with some of his cousins. A whole noisy group from the house trudged homeward through the snow, stepping off the driveway whenever a carriage passed them by.
The earl walked silently beside his wife. But she stopped after a while and he could see that the child had released her hand and was holding both arms up to her. Before she could respond, he leaned across her and swung the child up into his own arms. They walked on.
He was aware as he walked of feather lightness and of a warmth about his heart—and of the child’s face turned to his from only a few inches away. She had a disconcerting habit of silently gazing. She lifted her hand after a while and set it against one of his cheeks. But something did not satisfy her. She pulled off her glove with her teeth and patted her bare hand against his face. She drew it downward along his jaw to his chin and then pushed it back up again, pressing a little harder. He realized that she was fascinated by the slight roughness of the stubble there, though he had shaved earlier. Possibly, he thought—no, probably—she had never been this close to a man’s face before.
“Jane—” his wife said, sounding embarrassed and even a little alarmed.
“Let her be,” he said. “She is just a baby.”
A baby who was somehow twining herself about his heartstrings.
They walked on in silence, surrounded by noise and laughter and the occasional flung snowball.
Soon enough the children would want to be out in the main room of the nursery, she knew. Especially Jeffrey, who was finding the lure of other children to play with quite irresistible. They would want to be out there comparing gifts with the other children, playing with them, sharing one another’s new toys.
But for now she had them all to herself in the privacy of their bedchamber. She had all the wonder to hug to herself of their expressions as they unpacked their gifts. Her children were all she had had to live for in more than three years. She knew that she had come to cling too tightly, even if only emotionally. She knew that it was good for them to have other children about them for the next week. She knew that it would be good for Jeffrey to have a father with him even beyond that.
Perhaps, she thought, she would be able to learn to let go a little, with Jeffrey anyway. She would have a husband with her for the next week and even beyond that. He had promised that she would never have to share him again. She hugged secretly to herself the memories of last night and the physical reminder, the slight soreness inside. It had been so long.
Both children stopped short on the threshold of the room. There were parcels on each of their beds, put there by Miss Matthews after they had left for church and before she had followed them there. And beside Jane’s bed, the gift that had been too large to wrap. Antonia watched her daughter’s face. Her eyes grew even larger than usual and her mouth formed a silent oh as she gazed at her new doll’s cradle, beautifully carved by the gardener at Lanting, whose talent the countess had encouraged and who was now developing a quite impressive clientele. Jane walked toward it and touched the wood, smoothing her hand almost reverently over it.
“Oh, I say,” Jeffrey said, “now you have a bed for Pamela, Jane.”
By day, perhaps. Their mother could not quite imagine Pamela being spared from sharing Jane’s pillow by night. She smiled. Jane had just discovered that the cradle rocked.
Antonia sat in the large chair and watched her children alternately open their gifts—a set of building bricks, carved by the gardener, brightly painted by herself, for Jeffrey, as well as a cricket bat and ball, a new muffler, and some books, and frilled and embroidered pillows and blanket and comforter and mattress for Jane’s cradle as well as mittens and picture books, and paints for both of them from Miss Matthews.
Jeffrey hurled himself onto her lap when they were finished and clung tightly to her neck. “Thank you, Mama,” he said. “Thank you. You are the best mama in the whole world. I am going to build a castle with my bricks and Simon can defend it with his soldiers. Jane can wrap Pamela in her new blanket and come and watch. She can help build a tower.” He spoke in an excited yell.
Jane was patting the pillow into place in the cradle.
And then the door opened. Antonia had been half expecting him. But she had been hoping to leave before he came, to take Jane with her. It was Jeffrey who had been summoned here for Christmas, Jeffrey whom he wanted more than anyone else in his life. She was under no illusions about his main motive for allowing her to stay. His son still needed his mother. She did not fail to notice now that he set three parcels down on Jeffrey’s bed and smiled at the boy as he scrambled from her lap.
“I have a new cricket bat,” Jeffrey told John in a voice that would have reached his father if he had been three rooms away. “I can hardly wait for summer to come. I am going to hit a mile with it.”
“And in the meantime,” John said, “I can see that you will be able to build me a fort.”
Antonia got to her feet. “Come, sweetheart,” she said to Jane, “we will go out and find some other children. Shall we wrap Pamela in the new blanket and take her too?”
“Do sit down,” her husband said. “The child has a new cradle to play with here.”
Antonia sat. Some of the joy had gone from the day. Jane—ah, Jane. She was watching as John handed one of the parcels to Jeffrey, who whooped with delight and tore off the paper. He was bounding around then, yelling with exuberance.
“Soldiers!” he yelled. “A whole army of them. Oh, wait till I show Simon. And Christopher. I will be able to put my own soldiers into my castle. Oh, thank you, Papa.”
His father ruffled his hair and picked up the second parcel. Antonia put her head back against the chair. She felt rather like crying.
“And for you,” John was saying, holding it out toward Jane.
Antonia frowned and bit her upper lip. And held her b
reath. She could not remember a moment more sweetly painful. He had bought a gift for Jane?
Jane took it, wide-eyed, and undid the ribbon with painstaking slowness before unfolding the paper. Her mouth formed that silent oh again and she lifted from the folds of the paper with infinite care a porcelain doll that looked for all the world like a newborn baby.
Antonia swallowed convulsively.
“A baby sister for Pamela,” John said, his voice gentle. “And I see you have a cradle for her to sleep in. I daresay Pamela is too big a girl for a cradle. She needs to share your bed.”
Jane stared at her doll for a long time before raising her eyes and gazing unblinkingly upward. “Are you P’pa?” she asked.
He went down on his haunches in front of her and rested one hand lightly on her curls. “I am,” he said. “Jeffrey’s papa and your papa. You are my little Jane. My treasure.”
Antonia could no longer see. She tasted blood from her upper lip.
When she had finally succeeded in blinking away her silent tears, she saw that the third parcel was being held out to her. Her eyes snapped up to his. “Oh no,” she said. “But I have nothing for you.”
“Oh yes,” he said, his eyes smiling at her, “you do, Antonia. Believe me, you do.”
She took the parcel and opened it slowly. It was a fur muff. It matched the fur on her green cloak. She slid her hands inside it and lowered her nose into its softness. She closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, John, thank you.” She believed that he understood she was thanking him not just for the muff. Though it seemed to her at that moment that it was the most precious gift he had ever given her. “But you did not know we were coming.”
“I went into town yesterday afternoon,” he said.
To buy gifts for her and for Jane? Jane had seated Pamela beside her on the bed and was quietly rocking her new baby. Jeffrey was standing his soldiers in a row. John was smiling at her.