The Last Chance Christmas Ball

by Mary Jo Putney

  It was unwise to hurt someone Nick was fond of, as he was fond of this girl....

  Who needed help. Claire pushed branches and leaves and bows of red ribbon out of her lap and crossed the room to her.

  Gower’s daughter. Heiress of some reasonable amount of money, owner of that box of gaudy jewels, darling of the ton, cousin to the sort of people who lived in country mansions, but still not someone to envy. All kinds of lessons to be learned from that.

  “He’s looking for her right now.” Nick interpreted the mumbles coming from the region of his chest. “He went to her room and didn’t find her.” More mumbles. “Fortunately, by that time she’d gone to hide in my bedroom.”

  “Where you were not.”

  “Where I was not because I was following you hither and yon about the property.”

  “You lead a charmed life, Nick.”

  “And because I was harmlessly engaged in following you, Gower didn’t find me with Mary, doing this”—he lifted his hands an inch, indicating what he held—“in my bedroom.”

  “That would have been a merry meeting. The daughter, your bedroom, and an already-enraged father.” Gently she disengaged Mary from Nick’s shirtfront and turned her. “Let me see, pet.” She coaxed blond hair back from a pale, blotched face. “Where did he . . . ?”

  She saw—Nick saw—a reddened cheek that resolved into the print of a spatulate hand.

  Shock filled her, and then anger. No woman who worked for her in her house, or served in the shops, or repaired jewelry at the benches in the studio would face this. Every woman of them knew there was a place to go for help and someone to protect her. Mary Gower needed that protection.

  “I made him angry,” Mary said in a little voice. “I should have—”

  “A pox on that. You didn’t make him angry. He made himself angry.” Her own vengeance against Gower was feeling more and more trivial. She touched Mary’s cheek. “We’ll get some ice to put on it. There’s certainly enough around the place.”

  Nick said, “He’s looking for her right now.”

  “Then he won’t find her. We won’t let him.”

  Nick was already calculating, going over the same possibilities she was. “Where is she safe?”

  She could answer that. The simple answer. “With Lady Holly. Absolute protection.”

  “Until Gower takes Mary back to London.”

  Mary started crying again, not making any noise, just standing there between them, trembling, with tears running down her face. Nick put his arm around her shoulder, muttering, “Damn it. Where is Charlie when I need him? I suppose he has to run off with her. Gower’s never going to let them marry.”

  He must have felt the question. He met her eyes. “Charlie is the best of good fellows. He has an income and a small property somewhere.”

  “In Kent,” Mary said in a wavering voice.

  “But he doesn’t move in the highest circles. He’s Edgerton’s bastard. Gower has higher ambitions.”

  “Like you,” Mary said.

  “That’s all very well.” It wasn’t, but if Nick could deal with Turkish bandits, which he could, he could depress the ambitions of a Gower. More important—she peered into Mary’s face and asked, “Do you want to run off with Charlie? Elope? Is that what you want?”

  “Yes,” Mary said simply and stopped crying.

  “Then you shall, Mary mine. I will arrange it.” Nick grinned his insidious, wholly unrepentant grin. They’d done some of their best work when he was grinning like that. “Which means we can’t give you over to Lady Holly because it’s not polite to involve one’s hostess in an elopement.”

  Nick with the bit between his teeth. Sometimes the man needed the voice of reason. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Your definition of easy has always eluded me, sweetheart. She wants to run off with Charlie. Charlie, for reasons of his own, doubtless good ones, wants to run off with her. Simple.”

  “So you say. In any case, they can’t go today.” She gestured toward the window. White flakes in various stages of torment writhed outside. “You couldn’t elope to the garden wall in this weather, let alone Scotland.”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll send them off tomorrow.”

  “If the weather clears.” She lined up problems in her mind, one by one. “If we can distract Gower long enough. If they want to go.”

  Mary—she’d almost forgotten Mary—piped up, “We do.”

  “We keep Gower away from her,” Nick said, his voice hard. “He doesn’t come near her. Pity she can’t just lock herself in her room for a day or two.”

  “She can.” It was possible. More than possible. This would work. “Mary has a headache. Mary has a fever and—I don’t know—chilblains and the migraine and fits. She needs nursing. She needs that scary old bat who haunts the attic. The old nanny.”

  “Mrs. Locksley. I used to be terrified of her when I was a boy.”

  “You still are, if you have any sense. We will bring the old lady down and put her on a trundle bed in Mary’s room. Even Gower won’t get past Mrs. Locksley.”

  “There are Prussian regiments who would retreat in disarray before Mrs. Locksley.”

  “You talk to Lady Holly. I’ll . . .” She could feel the seconds ticking by. Gower would be going room to room, looking for his errant daughter. Only a matter of time before he showed up at the Tapestry Room. “I’ll get her out of sight.”

  “Where?”

  ” As well here as anywhere else.”

  There were no places to hide in the Tapestry Room. Nick didn’t look for one. He knew she’d have a plan. “What do you need?”

  “I’ll use that chair. That one. Bring it over ”—she picked a spot—“here. And take your jacket with you. You’ll want it if you’re visiting distant attics to fetch down crones.”

  He’d already lifted one of the baskets to the chair, and moved the other closer. “She can’t really hide behind this,” he said.

  “She’ll do well enough. I need your handkerchief.”

  He was carrying a nice large one. Perfectly clean. She folded herself down to the ground, muttering, “Ribbon, thread, and needle. And a handkerchief. Thank God some men can be relied on.”

  Now she needed Mary. She looked up. “Come here.” She pointed. “Sit. No. Closer to me. Facing away from the door.”

  Mary was all bewilderment, but willing. She set herself down rather gingerly on the hearthrug.

  “White ribbon.” That was for Nick. “Around her waist. Tie it in back as if she’s wearing an apron.” More words than she needed, really, with Nick.

  “Right. Where are the scissors—Good.” Nick pulled out two arm’s lengths of wide ribbon. Snipped it off. Circled it around Mary’s waist and into a neat bow. “But will he recognize the dress?”

  “I don’t understand.” Mary did not seem to be one of the world’s speedy thinkers.

  “You’re going to pretend to be a maid.” She said that to Mary. To Nick, she said, “Dark blue velvet. We’re lucky. Half the maids are wearing dark blue wool.” She had the needle threaded. “A dozen feet away he won’t be able to tell the difference.” She began the huge, hurried stitches that would shape the handkerchief into a rough cap. Fast and clumsy. It would do for a single glance from the doorway.

  “Maybe. Maybe.” Nick danced backwards six steps. Ten steps. All the way to the parlor door. Fast and facile. Sword-fighting moves, so graceful it hurt to look at him. Hurt her, anyway. He said, “It’s good. The basket hides you, mostly.”

  He came back to make minute adjustments to the placement of baskets.

  “We are maids putting out decorations. Nobody looks at us. And we will be even less conspicuous when you are gone, Mr. Lafford.”

  “Then you need this.” He dropped to one knee, reached among the ivy and pine, and spilled a huge inventory into Mary Gower’s lap to hide the lack of an apron.

  He said, “Claire.”

  “Yes.” Stitching, she didn’t bother to look up.

&
nbsp; “Love . . .”

  That got her attention. Not in the best way, perhaps, since he was saying it in front of his cousin. She said, “You should—”

  He leaned across the Christmas trimmings and the disorder of greenery and kissed her quickly, but firmly and thoroughly. At her ear he whispered, “Take care of yourself, as well as that fool Mary. I need you.”

  She didn’t think of a reply before he was out the door and gone. Then she thought of five or six.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Claire said, “Almost done.” The mobcap turned in her hands, receiving the final stitches that attached the ribbon trimming. It was large and floppy and would cover most of Mary Gower’s hair. “It’s not authentic close up. But then, if anyone comes that close, the game is up.”

  “Am I supposed to wear that?” Mary’s face screwed up into mild distaste. “It’s very ugly.”

  “Isn’t it? You’re not nearly as stupid as you act—nobody could be that stupid—so you’re used to wearing a disguise. Lean over and let me put this on you.”

  A quick, shaky laugh. Mary took the crude cap from her, pulled it on, and began a competent job of hiding her distinctive blond hair. “If I’m a fool, nobody pays attention to me. If Papa thinks I’m stupid, he doesn’t watch me carefully. Sometimes I get away with doing exactly what I want.” She tilted her head, fingering the edge of the cap. “Will I pass as a maid? I’ll keep my head down and be very occupied with this.” She picked up some of the sprawling decoration in her lap.

  “We both will. I want your father to walk past this room with a single glance and see two maids putting up the Christmas decoration. Nothing else.”

  “When Papa’s angry, he doesn’t give up. He rolls over everything and everybody. He’ll—”

  A clatter from above. Someone was coming down the great staircase. But the noise quickly became four or five on the stair, their voices lighthearted together, tossing laughter back and forth. That wasn’t Gower. Not yet.

  Mary had frozen in place. “He’ll be so angry when he finds me.” She squeezed her hands together and pressed them against her belly. “He’ll come here.”

  “But he’ll go through the obvious places first.” Claire kept her voice entirely calm. “The attics and storerooms. He’ll go pounding on the doors of locked bedrooms and stomping through the kitchen, making himself a nuisance. He’ll be tired and impatient and humiliated and he’ll never imagine you’d be here, in plain sight, on the main floor.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine it either,” Mary said.

  “Then let us play the role fate has assigned. We’ll keep our hands busy making perfectly splendid festoons. Black thread.” She held up a spool. “I’ll show you what I want done with the holly.”

  They worked, making the garlands as she wanted, turning them in a curl that would surround the Christmas candle set in the middle of the mantel. Holbourne Abbey would get exactly the sort of decoration she put in her own parlor, except twice as long. She murmured, “Use more string,” and “Turn it so the leaves face in the same direction. Like this,” and “We’re putting tiny gold pinecones on the ivy,” and “Don’t ask me why.”

  Mary’s hands stopped shaking when they had something to do.

  After a while, Mary whispered, “You’re not a servant, are you? You’re the shop girl. Nickie’s shop girl.”

  “I own shops.” This was what it meant to be scandalous. In her own world she was respected and deferred to. In Nick’s, she was an object of mockery.

  “Cousin Lavinia—Nickie’s sister, you know—calls you ‘That Shop Girl.’ She makes up a lot of vicious nicknames.”

  “I’m not entirely surprised.”

  “She calls me the Idiot Mouse and smiles when she does it. But she doesn’t smile when she talks about you.”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Then you know what she is,” Mary said. “I’m not sure Nick does. You can’t tell what he’s thinking.”

  Nick was the shrewdest of men, but even shrewd men could be blind when it came to a sister. He didn’t listen to her today, but years from now, when it was too late, he might.

  Nick’s sister had come to the house in Bedford Street months ago, mincing into the parlor, pricing the furnishings in a fretful, dissatisfied way, looking for vulgarity and not finding it. She’d perched on the edge of a chair and explained crisply that the affair between a shopkeeper and a Lafford must end. That it was ruinous for him. That the Foreign Office would ask for his resignation. That his family was disgusted with him.

  Mary would appreciate this—“She said she’d make sure no one came to my shops if I didn’t give her brother up.”

  That got a genuine smile. “Oh, but she’d like to have a tenth that much power. She’s nobody in the ton. She doesn’t realize they’re sneering at her most of the time. They tolerate her because of Nick. What did you say?”

  “What any little upstart foreign shopkeeper would say. I told her she should have asked for Austrian crystal when she replaced the jewels in her bracelet. Birmingham glass is sadly obvious.”

  Mary choked on laughter and pressed her fist to her mouth to keep it inside.

  That was what Gower saw when he passed in the hall and poked his head into the Tapestry Drawing Room—two housemaids sitting tailor-fashion on the hearthrug, half-hidden by baskets and chair and long garlands of shiny green leaves, whispering together, doubled over laughing.

  Gower snarled, “Damned lazy sluts.”

  Peering sideways, Claire saw high boots, a gold-and-green waistcoat, and the florid, self-indulgent, pug-nosed fury of a bully.

  An inch away from her, Mary’s face drained of all color. Claire took her forearm and squeezed hard, telling her to stay quiet. Do nothing. There was no way to call back their laughter, but it was natural enough for a pair of giggling housemaids to be startled and dismayed and fall silent.

  She said, “Sorry, sir,” in a muffled voice, not moving, trying for a bit of Northumberland accent.

  “I’m looking for Miss Gower. Where is she? Have you seen her?”

  “No, sir.” Mary, beside her, was shaking. She wanted to say, “Stay still. Still as a rabbit that sees the fox. Still as ice in a frozen stream.”

  She had to get him out of here before Mary fainted. Claire stood up slowly. It would be unnatural to do otherwise. A good housemaid is polite to the guests.

  She spread her skirt in a half curtsey. It hid Mary behind her. “Is owt wrong, sir? Should I fetch up Mrs. Taft to ye? The housekeeper, sir?”

  She watched his face. Gower had already discussed matters with the housekeeper.

  “We’ll go look fer yer Miss Gower. I’ll just run get Mrs. Taft.”

  It routed him. He snarled, “No, God damn it,” and slammed the door back against the wall as he left.

  And they were safe.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Just before midnight Claire wrapped herself in her wool dressing gown and crept from her bed among the sleeping maids. She felt her way down the dark attic hall, one hand running along the wall. The window over the stairs was full of darkness and rattling windowpanes. Christmas was riding in at the back of the North Wind, but it was coming.

  Maybe the weather would clear tomorrow. Maybe it would be a day of elopement, the rescue of fair maidens, and clever vengeance. She indulged in some mindless optimism since that was suited to the season.

  The servants’ stair was cold as the attics and as dark. But she knew these stairs by heart, having been up and down them a good many times. The upper floors were all silence. A knot of men stayed up, drinking and playing billiards in privacy at the back of the house, but most of the guests had gone to bed early. Some of them would go to the village tomorrow for Christmas service in the little church there, even in the face of the storm. It was a tradition for the Strettons. For the guests . . . it made an excuse to be vigorous in the open air. Some of these former soldiers found civilian life dawdling.

  The grand rooms of the ground floor were drafty
caverns, lit here and there by candles set inside glass chimneys. The double doors to the Tapestry Drawing Room were closed. In this well-maintained household they made not a single squeak when she opened them and slipped through.

  A fire burned low in the hearth, giving plenty of light to guide her through the room. The hunting scenes hung on the wall were muted into contours of black and gray. She couldn’t see the horses rearing and dogs leaping, huntsmen bounding into the fray, maidens cheering them on from the side of the wood. But she knew they were there.

  At the center of everything the Christmas candle stood on the mantelpiece surrounded by the swirls and twists of the Christmas garlands she’d made.

  Lady Holly had lit it before sunset. Family, guests, and everyone from downstairs crowded into the room to watch. It would burn all night, on this night, at the heart of the house.

  She came close to the fire, getting warm on one side, still cold on the other, and looked up at the candle flame. She’d fallen into an odd mood, no longer gnawing away at plans for tomorrow. She had an inexplicable certainty that everything would work out.

  “Mary’s safely settled,” Nick said, behind her. “I checked after supper. Nobody’s getting past the Demon Nanny. She’ll meet us in the library tomorrow morning.”

  I knew he’d come. “You have allies among the servants. Somehow, they all know Gower hit her.”

  “The servants always know. It’s part of their charm.” Nick came closer. “It means every eye will be turned elsewhere tomorrow, glued to a roast on the spit or the Christmas pudding aboil—”

  “Letting Mary elope.”

  “If we have good weather.” After a minute he said, “You’re cold.”

  “December in Northumberland.”

  “Of course. The very rocks in the ground are shivering.”

  There was no distance between them now. She felt the warmth radiating from his body, then a brush of his clothing as he opened his coat and took her in his arms and wrapped the coat around both of them. He held her. They stood like the old friends and lovers they were, sharing their bodies’ heat.