Once Upon A Regency Christmas: On a Winter's Eve / Marriage Made at Christmas / Cinderella's Perfect Christmas

Chapter Two

‘Bed-making?’ Giles drawled. ‘I have more experience unmaking them, I fear.’

He hadn’t thought the remark that risqué, but Miss Chalcott smothered a giggle with her hand and a wash of colour came up over Lady Julia’s cheekbones. She was tired and upset and he admired the fact that she hadn’t followed the example of the cook and given way to tears.

‘I will see that your coachman and groom have what they need, then I will return and light fires, fold dust sheets, chase spiders…whatever you require, ma’am.’

She regarded him, lips tight as she controlled her emotions, a tall woman with skin still glowing unfashionably from years in the sun. Her nose was straight, her eyes were blue and her hair, what he could see of it, was blonde. It was difficult under the brim of that bonnet and with the poor light in the room, but he assumed she was in her early thirties. Certainly her air of command and authority was striking.

‘Thank you, Captain.’ Her voice was still sweet, just as lemonade, imperfectly sugared, was sweet. Then she turned to the servants with a string of clear instructions that had Mrs Smithers mopping her eyes and hurrying from the room and Smithers tugging at the dustsheets as though his life depended on it.

Perhaps it did, Giles mused as he let himself out and walked round the house to find the stables. Perhaps she would produce some exotic Indian weapon and behead the lot of them if they disobeyed her orders.

He was becoming whimsical with weariness, but it had been a long day and his life was so upside down these past weeks that it was no wonder he found himself oddly stirred by this woman. Most likely it was the memory of the weight of her rounded body in his arms, the womanly scent of her.

The coachman and groom were manhandling the carriage into a barn and he lent his weight to the shafts until it was fully under cover. ‘Have you all you need?’

‘Aye, we’ll do, thank you, sir.’ The coachman straightened himself, recognising authority when he heard it. ‘There’s stabling aplenty with bedding and fodder, although it’s a mite dusty and past its best. Shall we take that turkey to the kitchens?’

‘No.’ Giles looked into the stable block. Four brown rumps were all that could be seen of the carriage horses. ‘There’s an empty loose box, he can go in that. This is one turkey that is going to live though Christmas.’ Ignoring their carefully bland expressions, Giles lugged the heaving bundle out of the carriage and into the stall. He scattered some straw, filled a bowl with water and dumped a few handfuls of grain in a corner. ‘There you are, catch a few spiders while you are at it.’

The bird shook its wattles and emitted a furious gobbling, then proceeded to strut up and down, feathers puffed up.

‘Stop carrying on and eat your dinner. There are no stag turkeys for you to scare off and no hens to impress.’ There was a muffled snort behind him, but when Giles turned the two men were industriously hanging up harness. ‘Have you found anywhere to sleep?’

‘There’s a room overhead here with beds and a stove with kindling. We’ll be snug enough, sir.’

‘Go over to the kitchen when you’re ready to eat. There’ll be something. This is not what Lady Julia is used to, I imagine.’

‘Wouldn’t know about that, sir. We’ve only been in her employ a few days.’

Nothing to be gleaned there. Giles retrieved his saddlebag and went into the house through the kitchen door to find Mrs Smithers scurrying between larder, table and range.

‘What are the supplies of food like?’ he asked, stopping the harassed cook by the simple expedient of standing in front of her. The first thing you learned in the army—after the discovery that it was no use ducking in the face of artillery—was to secure the provisions. ‘The roads are deep in snow and more is falling. There’ll be no marketing done this side of Christmas unless we get a sudden thaw, and there’s eight mouths to feed for however long it takes.’

‘Hadn’t thought of that, sir.’ The cook sat down in the nearest chair and managed to compose herself. ‘I’d best take stock. There’s the mutton stew for tonight. We can eke that out with potatoes—we’ve sacks of them in store. Root vegetables in the garden clamp. Then there’s two full wheels of cheese. Dried apples and lots of flour. The butter will last a few days, then there’s lard. I’ve eggs in isinglass and the cow in the byre will stay in milk awhile longer. And game outside for the shooting. It’ll be plain fare, sir, but we won’t starve for a month. Her ladyship won’t like it, though. We never got no letter from the lawyer.’ She sniffed, on the verge of tears again.

‘Her ladyship can lump it,’ Giles said, making her gasp with laughter. ‘Do your best, Mrs Smithers, I’ll see what’s going on upstairs.’

He followed the sound of voices, or rather the series of thumps and flaps and one very clear voice issuing from a bedchamber. The hapless Smithers struggled to turn over a mattress while the Girl gathered up dustsheets and Lady Julia and her stepdaughter sorted linens.

‘Captain.’ She turned as he entered, still brisk, but he could hear the weariness under it and perhaps the relief that there was someone else to help cope. ‘The fire, if you please.’

He set a taper to it, then she had him tucking in sheets on one side of the bed before he could make his escape. ‘Tighter, Captain. Get some tension in it.’

She was certainly making him tense, most inappropriately. Giles wrestled the coverlet straight, then gathered up pillows in a strategic attempt to disguise just how tense.

He was handed a pile of pillowcases. ‘When you’ve done those we will be next door.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ It was tempting to tease her with a salute. Instead he admired the way her hips swayed as she strode out of the door. Giles stuffed pillows and told himself this was not some bivouac in the Spanish mountains and Lady Julia was not a camp follower.

The next chamber was smaller. He lit the fire, then went to help Miss Chalcott drag a heavy curtain across a window, but even with that in place the draught still stirred the bedraggled bed-hangings. The fire smoked foully. Giles kicked it out with a muttered oath. ‘I’ll take this chamber, I’m used to the cold. I’ll see if there’s another room with a clear chimney, otherwise you ladies will be better together in the first chamber.’

The army had certainly been good training for this house. He’d been in more comfortable tents in the snow before now, he mused as he followed Miss Chalcott into the next room along. The chimney there obliged by drawing steadily. It was a small room, but that made it easier to heat, he pointed out as he helped her make the bed.

‘Thank you, Captain.’ Her smile was enchanting, he thought, discovering that he was admiring her as he might an exquisite artwork, not a living woman.

On the other hand there was certainly one of those next door, judging by the sounds penetrating the wall. ‘Smithers, is there another mattress? Captain Markham cannot sleep on that—the mice have been in it.’

‘Lady Julia is obviously used to dealing with servants,’ he remarked as Miss Chalcott draped blankets over a chair in front of the fire.

She laughed. ‘She has had a great deal of practice.’

‘You had many servants?’ he asked, puzzled. A borrowed carriage, plain, sensible gowns, this frightful house her only legacy from her husband… Something did not add up.

‘Seventy, perhaps. Look at this fabric! Moths, I suppose, though by the size of the holes I would not like to meet one.’

‘Seventy?’

‘Oh, everyone in India has servants if they have any kind of a household at all. Inside servants, outside servants, the grooms, the gardeners, the sewing women and the laundry, my father’s business… It all adds up and it costs a fraction of what it does in England.’

‘Your father was a man of business, then?’

‘My husband was a merchant, a trader in many things.’ He had not heard Lady Julia’s approach. ‘But, despite the common misapprehension here, not every man who trades in India is a nabob, wealthy beyond compare. Or even wealthy at all.’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. I allowed the informality of our circumstances to lead me into curiosity.’ He really had been in the army, and in the wilds, too long if he had forgotten not to discuss money or trade. As an earl’s daughter Lady Julia’s marriage might have been deemed acceptable if sweetened by vast wealth, but a mere merchant would put her firmly on the wrong side of the social dividing line. Why had her family allowed it?

‘No matter. India makes everyone curious, I find.’ Lady Julia came further into the room and he saw how weary she was, for all the firm voice and straight back. Then she smiled and he realised something else. He had been quite out in placing her in her thirties. Surely she could not be more than twenty-five or six, at the most. And Miss Chalcott was, what? Twenty, twenty-one? Which meant her husband, unless he had been sowing his wild oats in India at a precocious age, must have been in his late forties at the very least when he married her.

An earl’s daughter marrying a not very successful India merchant twice her age. How had that come about? He felt the curiosity stir like the flick of a cat’s tail at the back of his mind and bit down on the question he had nearly allowed to escape.

She ran one hand over the draped blankets and wrinkled her nose. ‘This house had been in my husband’s family for years. I had no idea it had been so neglected.’

Considering that she had travelled thousands of miles to discover her expected security was a ramshackle house miles from anywhere, Lady Julia was showing remarkable resilience. Perhaps she was planning to go back to her family.

‘Mrs Smithers should have water heating, although I doubt it will run to a bath. I will have some sent up to your chamber, Captain. Until seven o’clock and dinner.’

‘I’ll see to the water myself.’ Giles almost told her to go and rest, then decided that telling any female that she looked weary was not tactful. ‘Until dinner time, ladies.’

* * *

Captain Markham had shaved, donned a clean, if rumpled, shirt and neckcloth, and made some improvement to the state of his breeches and boots. He also looked as though he had managed to snatch some sleep, which was more than Julia had, she thought resentfully as she regarded him across a dinner table much in need of polishing.

She had lain on the bed in her dusty, draughty chamber and willed herself to sleep, but oblivion would not come. What had kept her awake was the sickening realisation that she had allowed a sentimental memory of childhood Christmases to blind her to reality. She had set out on this journey in a temper, clinging to the belief that at the end of it would be a charming country house, complete with its charming staff. It would all be modest but comfortable, warm and safe.

Instead she and Miri were stranded in a cold, neglected house, miles from anywhere, with three nervous servants. Plus a turkey they couldn’t even eat. Plus one down-at-heel army captain who looked at her in a way she could not decipher, but which made her both irritated and… aroused, damn him. She had rescued him from a snowstorm. He should be as exhausted as she was and yet he just looked tough and competent and ready to lead a cavalry charge if necessary. Just as soon as he had finished reducing her to idiocy with one glance.

He didn’t look at Miri that way. He treated her with perfect respect, as though she were no more than the average unmarried girl and, after the first shock, appeared utterly unmoved by her beauty.

‘More potatoes, Lady Julia?’ Not that he didn’t treat her with respect also. His manner was perfectly correct, so correct that she kept telling herself that she was imagining the warmth in his regard, the occasional double meaning in what he said. It must be her imagination. She had felt an immediate attraction to him in the carriage so perhaps now she was reading an answering interest where there was none at all. How lowering.

‘Thank you.’ The food was adequate. Plain but hot, dull but filling. Miri ate with a delicacy that concealed any distaste for what was unfamiliar for both of them.

‘After shipboard fare for months this has to be an improvement.’ She reached for the pepper. ‘But if we stay I must order some spices. I cannot endure such bland seasoning much longer.’

‘You are in two minds about remaining?’ Captain Markham twirled the stem of his wine glass slowly between fingers and thumb. The cellar had revealed a number of dusty bottles of dubious vintage and they were cautiously sampling one.

‘This house is a disappointment,’ Julia admitted. More than the house, if she was honest. After six years of brutal realism and clear thinking she had allowed freedom to go to her head. She had let herself dream and had followed that dream. She looked at Miri and acknowledged that she had been selfish as well. All for the very best of motives. ‘I will sell it.’

‘You will achieve a better price if you wait until the spring,’ Markham suggested. ‘Once it has been cleaned and had a lick of paint and the sun shines on it, it might be transformed.’

‘And a maharaja on a white elephant might come down the driveway and offer me chests of gold for it,’ she retorted and was rewarded with a laugh from Miri.

They ate the apple pie, the desire for cream politely unspoken. ‘There was no port in the cellar, I gather,’ Julia said as she and Miri stood up. ‘We will leave you to your wine. If you will excuse us, we will retire now.’

‘Of course.’ The Captain got to his feet. ‘Goodnight, ladies. And my thanks for rescuing me from the snow.’

Julia saw Miri to her door, then turned, restless, and walked back to the head of the stairs, back to her own door. Dithered. What was the matter with her? She never dithered. Perhaps fresh air would steady her. If nothing else it might drive her to her bed and then, surely, she would sleep.

She jammed her feet into her half-boots and swung her cloak around her shoulders. The front door opened with its sepulchral groan and then she was picking her way cautiously towards the stables, the only destination for a stroll in the freezing darkness.

It had stopped snowing and she could see the glow from candles in the room above the stables and the drift of smoke from the stove chimney. Below, the light of one lantern shone out across the trodden snow and she followed it to the door and went in.

The air was warmer here and smelt of dusty hay and horse. Four heads appeared over the half-doors of the boxes, but Julia did not approach them. She missed her mare, Moonstone, and these handsome beasts were no substitute for a brave little horse who was afraid of nothing, not even elephants. Another mistake, to have sold her, but Julia had thought she was being strong and decisive.

An irritable sound drew her to the door without a horse behind it. Scratching about in the straw was the turkey, his pompous dignity returned now he was free of the rug. He thrust out his chest and spread his tail at the sight of her.

‘Ridiculous creature. You’ve no doubts, have you? You make an idiotic dash into a snowstorm and certain death, but of course you are rescued and looked after and now you will escape your proper fate.’

Whereas she had made an idiotic escape and ended up here. And if she wasn’t careful and didn’t make the right decisions she would find herself trapped, or lured, or simply cornered into marriage—the proper fate for a rich widow. ‘Oh, what have I done?’ She bent to rest her forehead on her arms, crossed on the top of the loose-box door.

‘Well, what have you done?’ a voice behind her asked. Captain Markham.

‘Let my heart rule my head,’ she said wearily without moving. ‘I left India full of nostalgia for England, dragging Miri behind me. I hate it here.’

‘What will you do?’ He was so close she felt her skirts brush against the backs of her legs. For a moment she thought he would touch her, but he stayed still. It must be she who was shivering with reaction. Not with cold. Not with his heat at her back.

‘Go back to India. I know where I am there.’ Who I am.

‘Do you love it so much?’ Giles Markham asked softly, the deep voice intimate, as though he asked her about her feelings for a man.

Julia straightened, but she kept her gaze on the turkey cock. Was it her imagination or could she feel Markham’s breath, warm on her neck?

‘Most of the time I fought it as though it was a person, an enemy. But sometimes it was an exotic fairy tale. It can take your breath with beauty and magic so deep and rich it cannot be true. The people. The colours. Oh, and the mornings…just at sunrise, when it was cool and clear and the whole impossible place was coming to life and I would ride my mare and the world was mine.’

‘That sounds like love to me. An attraction that goes soul-deep, but which you fought against even as it seduced you.’

‘You are a romantic, Captain.’

She shivered and he moved closer, put his hands on the stable door either side of her, caging her against his heat, the muscled wall of his body. There were responses she should make to that. A sharp elbow in his ribs, the heel of her boot on his toes, a jerk backwards with her head into his face. She knew all the moves, had used them before now.

Julia turned within the tight space and stared at the top button of his waistcoat. Hitting this man was not what she wanted. ‘A romantic,’ she murmured.

He made no move to touch her, to crowd closer. ‘Only a man who has ridden at dawn over wide plains before the battle started, who has seen the mist rise and heard the birds begin to sing and who has tried to hold the moment, hoping against hope that the sun will not burn away the mist and the guns will not begin to fire and that the earth will not be reddened with blood.’

‘That seems strange for a soldier to say.’

‘Soldiers are not immune to beauty. Only a few of us want to fight and kill for the sake of it. But when the mist vanishes and the guns begin, then we forget those moments of peace and plunge into hell.’

‘Who do you fight for, Captain?’

Chapter Three

She had surprised him. ‘It is my duty,’ Giles said after a moment.

‘Is that always what soldiers fight for? King and country? Or did you become a soldier to impress your lady-love?’ She had meant to tease and he smiled when he shook his head. ‘So you have been fancy-free while you break hearts across the Continent.’

Darkness swept through his gaze, his jaw hardened. Julia glanced away, shocked and guilty. In her own awkwardness she had stumbled into something private, something that hurt.

After a moment she felt the big body caging hers relax and she dared to look up and meet his eyes. Grey eyes with gold tracing out from the pupil like tiny flames in the lantern light. The moment was a fragile bubble—one wrong move and it would be gone again like that morning mist. She reached up her hands and pulled down his head, lifted her lips to his and the iridescent shimmer of the bubble enclosed them both.

There was a momentary pause, the faintest hitch in his breath, then the Captain’s lips moved over hers, firm, slightly cold. His tongue touched the seam of her lips, shockingly hot against her own chilled mouth as she opened to him.

Could he tell that she had hardly ever been kissed? Julia made herself hold back, forced down her need to simply drown in his embrace, drag him to the heaped straw, discover, finally, what it was like to know a virile man in his prime.

Over-eagerness would betray her inexperience. She let him lead, followed the strokes of his tongue with her own daring movements, allowing him to angle her head for his taking. Giles Markham knew what he was doing, she thought hazily, striving to focus, to learn and not to lose herself in this assault on her senses. On the few occasions Humphrey had actually kissed her she had been frightened by his forcefulness, repelled by the taste of him—cheroots, heavily spiced meat, strong spirits.

The taste of this man was enticing, which was puzzling as it seemed to be made up of faint traces of tooth powder, wine and…masculinity, she supposed. There was the heat of his mouth and the cold of his skin, the scent of plain soap and the dusty hay of the stables, the comforting smell of horses. And there was his body under her hands. Muscled shoulders, short hairs on his nape, the strength of his arms as he held her.

When he released her she swayed back against the stable door, dizzy and enchanted, her hands still on his shoulders. So this is what it is like. After all these years. At last.

‘Julia?’

Just her name. She found she liked it on his lips.

‘Giles.’ She liked that, too. A good, straightforward name. She let her fingertips stray to the bare skin of his neck above his collar and even in the dim light saw his gaze darken. You want me. Tell me you want me.

‘You are upset, cold, tired,’ Giles said as he stepped back a pace, leaving her cold and alone, her hands still raised. ‘This is not a good time to begin—’

‘Begin what?’ Cold, tired and upset was sweeping back to smother dizzy and enchanted.

‘A dalliance, I was going to say.’

So that was what she desired. Julia realised that she did not have the words for this. Giles probably knew all about dalliances and he was tactfully making it clear that he did not want one. And he was not exactly tearing himself from her arms with deep reluctance. How humiliating.

Julia found the cool smile, the mask she wore when bargaining, whether it was with Rajput gem dealers or desert camel breeders. ‘Goodness, how serious you are. Dalliances indeed! I had merely the impulse to kiss when I found us almost nose to nose.’ She laughed, aiming for sophisticated amusement, fearing pathetic bravery. Share the jest. Please.

He smiled crookedly, almost as though he did not find any humour, but his eyes were warm, the gold flames intense. ‘Of course. Forgive me. If you give me a moment to check on the livestock, I will walk you back to the house. It is treacherous underfoot.’

‘Certainly.’ How cool she sounded. Not at all like a woman who was quivering with desire, lapped by heat, almost speechless with embarrassment at her own recklessness. When Giles came back from checking water buckets and feed she was ready to slip her hand under his proffered arm, curl her fingers around his sleeve.

He was rock-steady as they negotiated the yard, lit by starlight reflecting off the snow. ‘My goodness, I am chilly.’ An exaggerated shudder would hide her shaking, surely?

Once inside she went directly to the stairs—walking, not breaking into a run, not fleeing to her room to bury her head under a pillow. ‘Would you check the doors and windows are secure and the fire safely banked? I do not yet know how much reliance to place on Smithers.’