by Mary Balogh
He had never learned to cope with his own. He had learned only how to bury them deep inside himself. How to run and hide.
“It is heartening to see a mingled family begin to form, is it not?” she said of the four people walking abreast ahead of them. “Note that it is Abby walking at Marcel’s side, while Estelle is on Viola’s.”
“Do you think Dorchester will do something for Abigail Westcott now that she is his stepdaughter?” Colin asked. “Draw her into society, perhaps, and force the ton to overlook her illegitimacy? Help her find a husband worthy of her upbringing?”
“I am sure he would,” she said. “If she wishes it, that is.”
“You think she may not?” he asked.
“I think it very possible,” she said. “We have all tried, you know, and most of us have considerable influence, Alex and Avery most of all. There is really no reason for her to be ostracized, even though the highest sticklers will doubtless always consider her birth tainted. But I am not sure Abby is willing to allow others to help her slip and sidle into a life that would be very nearly like her old one but never identical. She is Viola’s daughter. She is sweet and quiet and dignified. But I do believe she has a spine made of steel.”
“Ah,” he said. And she was also a lovely girl.
“Oh, oh,” Elizabeth said suddenly. “That was thoroughly predictable.”
A shriek and shouts of laughter came from up ahead and the bellow of Molenor’s wrathful voice, and Bertrand Lamarr was hauling Winifred out of the snow while Molenor’s boys quelled their laughter and made excuses to their father for dropping her. Molenor was obviously not convinced. He grabbed each boy by his coat collar and marched them at a brisk trot toward the house. Winifred meanwhile was gazing rather worshipfully at Lamarr.
Colin laughed. “I love this family,” he said. “I really do, Elizabeth. And I love this place, shabby as it still is at present. And I am loving this Christmas. It is the only real Christmas I have ever experienced, you know.”
“Is it?” she asked. Then her eyes grew mischievous. “Since it is also a white Christmas, I must see to it that you come to love it even more. But later. I want to get inside and take these boots off before my feet turn to blocks of ice.”
“Later meaning games in the outdoors, I suppose,” he said. “Hmm. We will see about that, Lady Overfield. I can fight quite fiercely when I am provoked, you know.”
“Empty bravado,” she said, laughing as they climbed the steps to the house and stamped their feet and shook off the hems of their outer garments.
“I can also fight dirty,” he said.
“With snow?” She preceded him into the house, smiling an acknowledgment to the footman who held the door open. “Impossible, Lord Hodges. It is a contradiction in terms.”
Three
Elizabeth had never quite understood why snow could turn grown adults into children as no other weather condition could. They all did indeed overeat at dinner, or if they did not exactly stuff more into themselves than usual, it still felt like overeating because of all the rich foods—the goose, the stuffing, the gravy, the Christmas pudding and custard, to mention just a few. And they did indeed feel a bit lethargic afterward and would doubtless have adjourned to the drawing room and drifted from there up to their rooms for what would euphemistically be called a rest—if, that was, there were not the snow outside, making a vast and sparkling white playground in the sunshine that had broken through the clouds, if only temporarily. It beckoned with a quite irresistible allure.
Everyone went outside, with the exception of the babies, Josephine and Jacob, who were both sleeping in the nursery, and the dowager countess and Mrs. Kingsley, who were flanking the fireplace in the drawing room, and Lady Matilda Westcott, who felt it incumbent upon herself to keep an eye upon her own mother and Viola’s in order to make sure they were not sitting in any draft and had taken no harm from their dinner.
Elizabeth was standing with Anna and Viola on the steps outside the front doors, looking at the scene below with some satisfaction and the anticipation of being a participant soon. She had been delayed when her maid had had to dash downstairs to retrieve her boots, which had been set to dry before the kitchen range. They had been toasty warm when she put them on.
“How lovely it is to see Harry looking healthy again,” Anna said.
“It is,” Viola agreed, sounding wistful as she gazed at her son, who had only recently recovered from serious injuries incurred in battle. “I just wish this recruitment business could take a year or more, though that is very selfish of me when so many other men are exposed to grave danger out in the Peninsula, the French as well as the Allies. And he is very eager to return to his regiment. He would go today if he could. Sometimes I wonder if the wars will ever be over or if anyone but the female half of the population wants them to be.”
“But how well blessed you are, Viola, and how well blessed we all are, that he came home so unexpectedly in time for your wedding,” Elizabeth said.
Captain Harry Westcott was attempting to direct Mildred and Thomas’s teenage boys in the building of a snow fort, complete with battlements, dungeons, and tunnels. Oh, and apparently the obligatory maiden in distress. Ten-year-old Winifred had been volunteered for the role—though that seemed something of a contradiction—by one of the boys, and she was looking rather pleased at the prospect of being locked up in a tower with nothing but dry bread and water for sustenance while she waited for her prince to ride to her rescue. No one had yet volunteered for that role. Harry was trying, not too successfully, to inject some engineering sense into the builders and tunnelers, while Bertrand Lamarr stood with folded arms watching him, and Jessica and Estelle called out contradictory words of advice and encouragement.
The sisters Abigail and Camille were strolling along the driveway, which had been partially cleared since the morning, arm in arm with Colin. Avery and Joel were taking young Sarah and Mary Kingsley, the Reverend Kingsley’s wife, for a sleigh ride. Sarah was laughing with glee and reaching for the jingling bells. Alex and Wren had gone out to the hill behind the house to make sure it was ready for the sleds when the action should move that way. Marcel and the Reverend Kingsley had gone with them. Thomas and Mildred—Lord and Lady Molenor—were watching the action a short distance away with Mildred’s sister Louise, the Dowager Duchess of Netherby.
“I am indeed well blessed,” Viola said in answer to Elizabeth’s last words. “Camille is happily settled and Harry is safe and sound, at least for the present. And Abby . . . She has been lonely. Perhaps now that I am married she will be less so. Estelle is ecstatic to have a stepsister and is determined that they be bosom friends. I think Abby is touched by her eagerness.”
Elizabeth was watching the three walkers, who had turned back toward the house. They looked to be in good humor with one another. She tried to imagine Colin and Abby as a couple. They would certainly make an extraordinarily handsome pair. And they would surely be compatible in character and disposition. But . . . Too compatible? Was that possible?
Perhaps we should put ourselves out of our misery and marry each other.
She smiled a little wistfully at the memory of his saying those words to her on the way home from church. It had been an absurdity, of course. But even so it was good to know that she was still young enough and personable enough to draw such a jest. And why was thirty-five feeling almost elderly these days?
There was a shriek from the direction of the fort—from Winifred or Estelle or both—followed by a bellow from Thomas, Lord Molenor.
“I hate to say I told you so, lad,” Harry was calling out cheerfully to a sputtering Peter, who was digging his way out of a collapsed tunnel, “but I told you so. Just be thankful the roof was built of snow, not bricks.”
Bertrand was laughing and slapping snow off the boy. “If I were you,” he said, “I would listen very attentively when an infantry captain deigned to o
ffer me advice. He is almost bound to know what he is talking about.”
“He is extremely handsome, is he not?” Anna said.
“He is, indeed.” Elizabeth assumed she was referring to Bertrand Lamarr, who was an outstandingly good-looking young man, very much like his father. But then she saw that both Anna and Viola were looking at Colin.
“He is an amiable young man too,” Viola said. “It was unbelievably wicked of his mother to tell him when he was a child that Wren was dead. I am so very glad Alexander went in search of him after he married Wren.”
“And look, Aunt Viola, at how he and Abigail are smiling at each other,” Anna said. “Perhaps . . . Do you think . . . ?”
“I think Christmas is making you sentimental, Anna,” Viola said. “Nevertheless, perhaps . . .”
They both laughed rather gleefully.
“What do you think, Elizabeth?” Anna asked. “Would they not make a lovely couple? And suit each other?”
He had just turned his attention the other way and was laughing over something with Camille.
“I think Abby can be trusted to choose the man best suited to her when she is ready, regardless of what we may think or hope—or fear,” Elizabeth said. “I believe she will choose love or nothing. And I believe Lord Hodges is young and charming and very probably not even considering matrimony yet.” Though she knew he was.
“You are very right, Elizabeth,” Viola said. “About both of them.”
Elizabeth turned her attention back to the fort building, in which Harry and Bertrand and even Winifred were now actively engaged with the three boys. But, against all reason, her thoughts continued to dwell upon Colin. She did not know much about his family situation, but she did know that Lady Hodges, his mother, was a difficult person to deal with and had made childhood insupportable for Wren with her disfiguring birthmark. And she sensed that life had been difficult for the other children too and that they had not had a happy home life. The fact that Colin now lived at Withington House, Wren’s property, instead of in his ancestral home, and that he had rooms in London instead of living in his own town house there, told its own story. So did the fact that he was spending Christmas here instead of with his own family. And he had mentioned to her that he’d never experienced a Christmas like this one.
She was so glad he was here. He had been right this morning on the way home from church. They did have an easy rapport with each other. She felt as comfortable with him as she did with her own brother. Except that there was an added dimension to her friendship with Colin. She ought not, but she found him—
Suddenly her world turned cold and white and wet, and she gasped and lifted her arms helplessly to the sides as she heard laughter.
“I warned you I was a star bowler,” a voice called cheerfully to her as she clawed snow out of her eyes and spat it from her mouth and tried to prevent it from trickling beneath her collar. Ugh. Oh, ugh!
“Oh, poor Elizabeth,” Anna was saying, laughter in her voice.
“That was remarkably unsporting of you, Lord Hodges,” Viola scolded, though she was chuckling too. “Elizabeth was not even looking.”
Camille and Abigail were laughing merrily. So were the fort builders—and Louise and Mildred.
“A barefaced attack upon my sister,” Alex’s voice called from somewhere to the right. “And I returned in time to witness it. This calls for retaliation.”
“A bigger, better snowball, Alex?” Harry suggested.
“Are you threatening my brother, Alexander?” Wren was laughing merrily with everyone else. “I cannot allow that, you know, even if you are my husband. Blood is said to be thicker than water.”
“You also warned me that you are a dirty fighter,” Elizabeth said, blinking away some snow clumps from her eyelashes and looking into the handsome, laughing face of Colin a short distance away. “You have just proved your point, sir. Well, war has been declared. Name your team, and I shall name mine. As the aggrieved party, I have first choice, I believe. I pick Alex.”
“Wren,” Colin said without hesitation.
Joel had carried a sleepy Sarah inside for an afternoon nap but was back in time to join Colin’s team after Elizabeth had chosen Cousin Louise’s daughter Jessica.
“Thomas,” Elizabeth said.
“Winifred.”
“Camille.”
“Bertrand.”
“Boris.”
“Lady Estelle.”
And so the teams were formed. And Elizabeth suddenly felt young and invigorated and wildly happy despite her thirty-five years. Colin was laughing and gathering his team about him.
And the fight was on.
* * *
• • •
His team would have won handily, no question about it, Colin protested when the fight was over, to shouts of agreement from his own troops and jeers of derision from Elizabeth’s. Her team had not played fair, he explained, for they had employed strategy of all the nasty underhanded things they could have done, probably because they had Captain Harry Westcott on their side. They had delegated two members of their team—the Dowager Duchess of Netherby and Lord Molenor—to the exclusive task of rolling snowballs and stockpiling them so that the rest of the team had merely to pick them up and hurl them. And their two snowball rollers had fast hands.
As it was, Lady Molenor, who had early designated herself judge and jury and had thus avoided having to be a participant, declared after ten minutes or so of vigorous action that the fight was a draw.
It was a verdict that was popular with neither side, though all of them were breathless and laughing as they hurled insults this time instead of snowballs. All of them were snow caked.
And then young Sarah Cunningham put an end to the altercation by coming back outside, wrapped to the eyeballs in warm clothing. Immediately ten people coaxed her down the steps by demonstrating to her how to make a snow angel. She came down and toddled among them, shrieking merrily at this new game and showering them with mittenfuls of snow. She made no angels herself, Colin observed. Not even a snow cherub.
It was the turn of the hill and the sleds then, and they trekked out there to find that Alexander, together with the Marquess of Dorchester and the Reverend Kingsley, had smoothed out a wide run. There were five sleds, all looking a bit ancient but still serviceable with their newly honed runners and brand-new ropes. Soon there were sledders zooming down the hill in ones or twos or—in one case—threes. But Molenor’s boys came to grief during that particular run, the sled shedding the middle boy during its descent and then the other two while their father closed his eyes, shook his head, and refrained from bellowing.
Colin was having the best time he had had for a long while—well, perhaps ever. If he had been half serious about spending the afternoon quietly in the drawing room, toasting himself before the fire, nibbling upon more rich Christmas baked goods, and even dozing, he was no longer even thinking about it. Snow of this depth and consistency was too rare a phenomenon in England to be wasted. And by tomorrow it would probably be turning to slush.
He took Lady Jessica Archer down the slope and then Lady Estelle Lamarr after trying it once alone to be sure he could control the sled without making a thorough ass of himself. He relinquished the sled to someone else for a while and then offered to take Lady Molenor down, though she protested that she was far too elderly for such frolics.
“And there is definite danger,” she said with all the air of resignation one might expect of the mother of three rambunctious boys. “Just look at that, Lord Hodges.”
That was Camille Cunningham riding down with Winifred while her husband zoomed down behind them with a screaming Sarah and avoided crashing into them only after some fancy maneuvering and much laughter and shrieking from both sleds.
But Lady Molenor climbed on the sled anyway and laughed all the way down.
“I hope,” Colin sai
d later when he was standing at the bottom of the run watching the action and Elizabeth had just come down with the Reverend Kingsley, “I did not offend you with the snowball in the face?”
“Oh, let me see,” she said. “Was that the first one or the fourth?”
“Numbers two, three, and four were part of a fair fight,” he said. “The first one was not. I hope I did not offend you. Actually I meant to hit you on the shoulder.”
“What?” she said. “You are not such a star bowler after all, then?”
“As for numbers two, three, and four,” he said, ignoring the jibe, “you really need to learn how to duck, Elizabeth.”
“The third time I did duck,” she said, “and got it in the face anyway.”
Her cheeks were bright red and glowing. So was her nose. Her hair beneath the red-brimmed bonnet was wet and pulling free of its pins. Her eyes were sparkling, her lips curved into a smile. She looked really quite beautiful with animation to add to the usual smiling serenity. She appeared young and vibrant. But she ought to be offended. He had concentrated most of his attack during the fight upon her, perhaps because she was concentrating most of hers upon him and had been so very obviously enjoying herself. She had missed by a mile with every snowball but one, and that had shattered harmlessly against his elbow.
“Yes. Thank you,” he said when Dorchester offered him the sled he had just ridden down with his wife. The two of them wandered off together, hand in hand. Colin turned to Elizabeth. “Shall we?”
“But can I trust you?” she asked.
“Always.” He clapped one gloved hand over his heart and they trudged up the hill side by side.
They did two runs together. The first was flawless. Colin’s only regret was that the slope was not longer, but this was the highest hill in the park and it really was not bad. The second run was not so successful. Bertrand Lamarr, on his way down with Abigail, swerved to avoid colliding with his twin and Boris, Molenor’s eldest boy, and Colin had to swerve to miss them both. He was on the outer edge of the run and hit soft snow before reaching the bottom. He tried to correct their course, but the sled had other ideas and went plowing farther in, veering wildly from side to side before upending its occupants into deep snow close to the bottom.