Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow

“Miss Talbot wishes to sing,” she continued, “and none of the other ladies seem to be able to cope with the stiffness of our sorry old pianoforte’s keys. But now we have you, Miss Blake, a born accompanist if ever there was one! You must play for Miss Talbot. Come, come, come, you cannot wish to keep such a splendid company waiting a moment longer!”

Miserably Sara thought of Revell, of keeping him waiting far more than a moment, of dreams of her own that had waited for six years and more. But that was nothing tangible, nothing definite, and nothing that could be explained to Lady Fordyce without risking her position and her livelihood. And so, with her head bent in dutiful unhappiness, Sara went to her fate, and the pianoforte.

She hadn’t come.

For over an hour Revell had waited for her on the terrace, letting the cold wind flail away at his body through his coat as well as the hopes he’d held somewhere near his heart. He’d come early, not wanting to miss her, and he’d stayed late, in the ever-dwindling possibility she’d been delayed. He’d stayed until he’d lost the feeling in his hands from the cold and his face had settled in an icy grimace, and he’d given up only when he could invent no more excuses on her absent behalf.

She hadn’t come because, quite simply, she hadn’t cared.

Now he sat at the breakfast table, listlessly prodding at his toasted rolls and shirred eggs while the purposelessly cheerful conversation rolled around him. He wondered what he’d do to pass this day, and all the ones that would follow. He reminded himself that Sara hadn’t promised to meet him, or anything else, for that matter. He tried to compose a suitable greeting for her when they met again, one that somehow wouldn’t put his disappointment and bitterness on public display. He considered inventing some sort of family emergency and leaving this afternoon, and never looking back. He endeavored not to imagine how his older brother would jeer and call him the greatest, most sentimental fool in Christendom, and how, this time, Brant would be right.

“Like the rarest, sweetest nightingale!” the man next to him was gushing. “Ah, Miss Talbot, how we were blessed to have such a songbird in our midst last night!”

Miss Talbot, the plump and amorous blonde who, to Revell’s dismay, persisted in trying to catch his attention, now giggled, balancing a teaspoon delicately between her fingers.

“You are too, too kind, Mr. Andrews,” she simpered. “I do my best, I do, even when you gentlemen do make me go on and on!”

“‘On and on,’ my word,” said Mr. Andrews, chuckling as if this were the greatest witticism in the world. “I could have listened to your sweet voice all the night long!”

He leaned into Revell, suddenly confidential. “Such a gem of a voice you missed last night, Lord Revell, oh, what you missed!”

“Indeed,” said Revell, as dry and discouraging as he could be, but the other man plowed onward undaunted.

“Indeed, yes, my lord,” he maintained, slyly winking at Miss Talbot and her décolletage. “Why, I hate to consider the pleasure we would have missed if Lady Fordyce hadn’t drummed her daughter’s governess into playing the pianoforte so Miss Talbot could have her music—”

“She made her governess play for Miss Talbot?” asked Revell, incredulous. “Last night, in the drawing room?”

“Oh, my, yes, my lord,” answered Miss Talbot, practically purring to have finally gained Lord Revell’s attention. “I must have sung for simply hours. The kind gentlemen wouldn’t let me stop, my lord.”

“And Miss Blake—the governess—played for you the entire time?”

“Yes, my lord.” Miss Talbot smiled winningly. “It was Lady Fordyce’s wish and order that she accommodate me. And though I am more accustomed to the touch of a true lady’s hand upon the keys, for one evening that sour little wren’s skills were adequate enough for—”

“Forgive me, Miss Talbot, but I must, ah, leave, leave directly.” Revell rose so fast he nearly toppled his chair backward, and as he bolted from the room to amazed gasps and outraged murmurs, he didn’t bother to look back, leaving Andrews to console the indignantly abandoned Miss Talbot.

At this hour of the morning Sara and Clarissa must be on their morning walk—”regular as clockwork,” the maid had said—and if he hurried, he might meet them before they returned home. Having Clarissa there wouldn’t let him speak as freely as he would have done last night, but it would still be far better than if he had to seek her out inside the crowded house. He raced to his room for his coat and gloves, past more startled servants and guests with his coattails flying about behind him, before he reached the back door and opened it himself, not waiting for the footman who belatedly hurried to do it for him.

A light dusting of new snow had fallen in the night, softening and smoothing the outlines of the landscape, but also making any new footprints sharp and clean by contrast. Revell crossed the yard near the stables, heading in the direction where he’d seen Sara and Clarissa yesterday. A wide trampled path of muddied snow showed where Albert had ridden out with his friends earlier, but there, off to one side, Revell found what he’d sought: two sets of prints walking closely together, one small, one smaller, and both framed by the sweeping trail of long petticoats.

He found them in a small copse of ancient holly, the leaves glossy and dark green against the snow, the berries crimson. In the snow sat a large willow basket that Sara and Clarissa were filling with branches Sara was cutting from the holly to take back to the ballroom. The little girl laughed with excitement, clapping her red-mittened hands as she kicked her feet in an impromptu dance in the snow.

Yet as pretty a scene as this was, Revell still hesitated to interrupt. While Sara’s role as an impromptu accompanist was certainly a plausible explanation for why she hadn’t joined him, she could just as easily have chosen to play over meeting him. Nothing was certain, but then nothing concerning Sara was.

Except, of course, that he wished it to be.

Sara turned, tossing another branch into the basket, and now that Revell could hear the song she was humming, without thinking he began singing along with her, the words coming back to him from at least a lifetime away.

“‘Green grow’th the holly,

So doth the ivy,

Though winter blast’s blow ne’er so high

Blow ever so icy,

Green grow’th the holly.”’

She looked up swiftly, found him on the edge of the copse, and her face lit with the most radiant smile imaginable, free of any shadow of uncertainty or second thoughts.

“Lord Revell!” cried Clarissa gleefully, loping through the snow toward him. “You did come! Miss Blake said you wouldn’t bother with us, not anymore, but you did!”

“Miss Blake is a wise woman, Clarissa,” said Revell with mock severity, his gaze never leaving Sara’s face. Strange how he was still speaking to the child—even making perfect sense, too—while so much else unsaid was vibrating between him and Sara. “But not even your Miss Blake knows everything, especially not about me.”

But if she’d only give him half a chance, a quarter of a chance, he’d offer her every last morsel of fact that there was to learn, plus his heart and his soul and the world in the bargain.

“Sing your song again, my lord,” begged Clarissa, hopping up and down with anticipation. “It’s exactly right for picking holly.”

“It’s not his song at all, Clarissa,” said Sara, rubbing her gloved hands together to warm them. Her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright, and the exertion of the bough-cutting along with her hood had tousled her hair into wispy tendrils around her face, most disordered for a governess and, decided Revell, altogether charming. “It’s a very famous song written long ago by King Henry the Eighth.”

“Then he must be a relative of yours, my lord,” said Clarissa sagely. “Miss Blake says dukes are next to princes and kings, which makes you almost family with King Henry himself.”

Revell laughed, both at the ridiculousness of the connection and because, in his present giddy—giddy?—state, he couldn’t help it.

“Not precisely, no,” he said. “My family’s muddled enough without claiming old King Hal and all his mischief into the tawdry mix. There’s only myself and two brothers left among us Claremonts, and I can assure you that that is plenty.”

“Then you are an orphan, too, just like Miss Blake,” said Clarissa with appropriate solemnity. “We are her family now, you know, especially at Christmas. Mama says she has nowhere else to go.”

“Oh, my, Clarissa,” said Sara, her smile perhaps more poignant than she intended, her unabashed joy clearly faltering. “You would have me be a stray dog that no one wishes to claim!”

“I did not say you were a stray dog, Miss Blake,” said Clarissa indignantly, “only that you had nowhere else to go, and you don’t, and neither does Lord Revell. I suppose we can look after him, too, same as we do you. Mama always says kindness must begin at home. Here now, my lord, bend down.”

Mystified but obedient, Revell bowed his tall shoulders to Clarissa’s level. He didn’t really consider himself an orphan, not at his age and with his less than warm memories of his long-dead parents, and he hardly felt in need of befriending because of their absence. But then hadn’t he accepted Albert Fordyce’s invitation for exactly that reason—to experience the kind of loud, cheerful, traditional family Christmas that he and his brothers had never really had for themselves? Wasn’t he every bit the footloose mongrel dog that Sara had just described, always roaming, without a home to call his own?

“There, my lord,” said Clarissa, scowling with concentration as she stuck a small sprig of holly into the top buttonhole of his coat. “Now you truly belong with us all at Ladysmith, at least until Twelfth Night.”

Slowly he straightened, patting the holly sprig as he wondered where his lighthearted smile had gone, and with it Sara’s rosy-cheeked exuberance. Now she looked as if a score of private sorrows had pinched and drained the color from her face, memories that he didn’t share and perhaps never would.

More unexpected strangeness, this, that the little girl’s attempts at aping her mother’s grand lady-of-the-manor kindness could touch him—and Sara—so deeply. Perhaps they were both the stray dogs no one would claim, and though he tried to laugh again at the sheer lunacy of such a notion, he couldn’t. Miracles and elephants, stray dogs and plum pudding and holly for Christmas: who could sort out the significance in so much foolishness?

“Mama says to be truly happy, my lord,” continued Clarissa, “you must have someone to care for, and someone to care for you. Isn’t that so, Miss Blake?”

But for once Sara left a question of her student’s unanswered. “Clarissa, I believe I must have left my scarf back at the walnut tree. Would you please oblige me by going to fetch it?”

“Yes, Miss Blake,” said Clarissa, nodding with gleeful anticipation. She was so seldom permitted to go anywhere unattended, even twenty feet to the walnut tree, that she was off before Sara could change her mind, crashing through the brush and snow.

But Sara was crashing ahead, too, her words racing in a breathless rush, knowing she wouldn’t have long to explain. “About last night, Rev, about—”

“I don’t care,” he said, coming to stand close before her, gently pushing back her hood.

She was trembling with anticipation. “But, Rev, I want you to know that—”

“That’s enough,” he said softly, and then he was kissing her, his lips warm on hers in the chilly air, his fingers tangling in her hair as he cradled her head. She should have pulled away, she should have protested, but instead she closed her eyes and surrendered with only a faint, fluttering sigh that was lost between them.

She tipped her head and hungrily parted her lips, welcoming him deeper as the rush of well-remembered pleasure and intimacy slipped through her body. Her head and her reason might have tried to forget him, but the rest of her had clung to his memory with fervent loyalty, making the years they’d been apart slip away as nothing. One kiss, and she realized how much a part of her Revell still was, and always would be.

“Ah, Sara,” he murmured, his voice rough with desire as at last he broke the kiss, keeping her face close to his. “How can you know how much I have missed kissing you?”

She smiled through a blur of tears, her emotions almost too strong for lowly words. She felt shaken and uncertain, as if she’d been turned inside out and back again, without any notion of what would come next. Yet even so she still heard Clarissa’s return behind her, and just in time she pulled away from Revell.

Her cloak blown back from running, the girl rubbed her nose with the thumb of her mitten and gazed up at Sara accusingly. “Your scarf wasn’t there, Miss Blake.”

“It wasn’t?” asked Sara, her heart racing as she self-consciously tried to smooth her hair back into place. Even without turning she could sense Revell beside her, and it took all her willpower not to reach for his hand.

How could one kiss cause so much damage? She’d done well enough for years without Revell at her side. What was it about him that could turn her into such a dreadful, quivering mess, especially when he’d only promised to linger in her life through Twelfth Night? Didn’t he realize how disastrous this game could be to her, or did he simply not care? They had to talk: they had to talk now, certainly before he tried to kiss her again.

And heaven preserve her if she were still even halfway in love with him….

“It wasn’t.” Clarissa sighed and pointed dramatically at the basket with the ivy clippings and the missing scarf looped over the handle. “Your scarf wasn’t near the walnut tree, Miss Blake, because it was here all the while, and if—Miss Blake? Are you ill, Miss Blake?”

“Of course I am well, Clarissa,” said Sara quickly, convincing neither the girl nor herself. “Have you ever known me to be ill in all the time I’ve been with you?”

“You don’t look right,” said Clarissa warily. “I think we should go home directly.”

“Agreed,” said Revell, though to Sara his voice didn’t sound any more steady than hers. “I told you, Clarissa, that while Miss Blake is vastly clever in most matters, there are times when she is absolutely as mortal as the rest of us. Which is why she needs us to look after her now, exactly as she takes such excellent care of you.”

“My mama says so, too.” Clarissa nodded, reassured enough to assume, for this once, the role of caretaker, and solicitously took Sara’s hand. “Come, Miss Blake. We’ve been out of doors long enough.”

“That is most kind of you, Clarissa, but I’m perfectly well,” insisted Sara. “Rev—my lord, please tell her!”

“Not when the lass is correct,” said Revell, slinging the basket with the holly over one arm, then offering the other to her. His smile was warm, teasing, yet seductive, too, all attributes she’d no right receiving with a smile from him. “You look peaked, Miss Blake, and we cannot take too much care with you.”

Pointedly, Sara ignored his arm. “I am not peaked.”

“Yes, you are,” said Clarissa, turning to Revell with a confidential whisper. “You are most right, my lord, and most kind. It’s as Mama says. We cannot take too much care. And I don’t care what the others say about you, my lord. You are not the wickedest man in India, not when you are being so nice to Miss Blake like this.”

He tucked Sara’s hand into the crook of his arm, giving it an extra pat, and woefully Sara knew that even if he were not the wickedest man in India, then surely she must be the weakest woman in Sussex.

Chapter Six

“So there you are, Miss Blake.” The cook looked past her two maids, their hands white with flour from pie-making, as Sara shepherded Clarissa through the kitchen door. “Lady Fordyce’s been asking for you all through the house, Miss. Oh, My Lord Revell, forgive me, I didn’t see you a-coming there too!”

“He’s very hard to overlook, Mrs. Green,” said Clarissa, stretching to reach the plate of sliced plum cake destined to accompany some lady guest’s tea. “He’s even bigger than Albert, you know.”

“Your flatter me, Clarissa,” said Revell easily, setting the basket of holly on the table as if he were a footman instead of a lord, and making the two young kitchen maids wide-eyed with amazement and admiration, too. “I think so, anyway. Doesn’t she, Miss Blake?”

But Sara was already unfastening her cloak, hurrying to make herself presentable for Lady Fordyce. It must be the tigers and elephants being inappropriate for Christmas: she’d already been half expecting to be called to task by her ladyship for that.

“Mrs. Green,” she said briskly, stripping off her gloves, “will you please see that one of your girls takes Clarissa upstairs to the nursery to change her wet things?”

“Lord Revell can take me,” suggested Clarissa promptly. “I can show him the way to the—”

“You must not presume on Lord Revell’s good nature, Clarissa,” said Sara, trying to ignore the waves of curiosity rising from the cook and her maids, and no wonder, either, not with Clarissa treating Revell with all the familiarity of a favorite uncle. “Go along now, upstairs with Bess.”

“And what orders for me, Miss Blake?” asked Revell with an easy, fond familiarity that made Sara blush all over again. His smile was warm and winning, his blue eyes so full of affection that she felt it as surely as if he’d kissed her again. Lightly he patted the sprig of holly in his buttonhole, reminding her of far too many things. “Where do you wish me to go?”

If he’d acted like Clarissa’s uncle, then Sara didn’t want to venture what he must seem to her in the eager eyes of the kitchen staff. No one would believe they’d only just met, and no one—no one—would believe their relationship held all the propriety of the humble governess with a noble-bred guest of the house.

“You shall do whatever you please, my lord,” she said, daring him, just remembering to curtsy to him before she left the kitchen. “That is both your prerogative, my lord, and your habit, is it not?”

Oh, that was wrong, wrong, wrong of her to say! If only they’d have ten minutes alone together—ten minutes without kissing—then this would all be sorted out between them! Furious with herself and with him, she bunched her skirts in her fist and marched up the stairs to Lady Fordyce’s rooms.

“Ah, Miss Blake, here at last,” said Lady Fordyce. She motioned to her lady’s maid, waiting with two pairs of slippers in her hands. “The red ones, Hannah, and mind you check that the stitching on the beading is still tight. I shouldn’t want them flying off while I danced. Now, Miss Blake, to your affairs.”

Sara squared her shoulders. “If you mean to speak to me further of the elephants and tigers that Clarissa is making for the ballroom, my lady, then—”

“But I don’t.” Lady Fordyce smiled brightly. “They are the height of fashion. All the ladies I have asked have said exactly that, and agreed with Lord Revell. You are to be congratulated for your originality and resourcefulness.”

“Thank you, my lady,” said Sara faintly, wishing she found this more reassuring than she did.

“Most original, yes,” said her ladyship, as pleased with herself as she was with Sara. “Which is why I have decided that you shall attend the masquerade with Clarissa, in costume like everyone else. As a treat, you see.”

“My lady!” exclaimed Sara with more dismay than gratitude. Her days for such frivolous entertainments were long past, left behind in Calcutta along with her bright clothes and jewels and plumes in her hair. “My lady, you are most kind, but—but I have no proper costume of my own, and with the ball being only two days away—”

“Ah, but I have thought of that, too.” Lady Fordyce clapped her hands together with triumph. “Off in our lumber room are trunks and trunks of old gowns and petticoats and headdresses and goodness only knows what else. Take Clary with you, and rummage about as you please. I’m sure you’ll find exactly what you need to assemble the perfect costume.”

“Thank you, my lady,” said Sara faintly, taking the plain black mask that her ladyship handed her. “You are too kind.”

“Not at all, my dear.” But her ladyship’s habitually cheerful demeanor faded, and restlessly she tapped her fingers together. “That, you see, was the more agreeable message for me to deliver. The other is…is more vexing.”

She twisted her mouth to one side, searching for the right words in a way that only made Sara more uneasy.

“You know, Miss Blake, that I have always tried to run this household in a fair and agreeable manner, for the good of everyone beneath this roof,” she finally began, “and I am perfectly aware that a rogue is a rogue, no matter what his station. But whereas I can dismiss the footman for taking freedoms with the dairymaid, it is an entirely different when a gentleman, a peer, a guest at Ladysmith, is involved.”

Sara felt her cheeks growing warm and her palms turn damp as she realized exactly where her ladyship’s conversation was heading.

“Oh, my lady, please don’t—”

“No, no, this is my responsibility, not yours,” said Lady Fordyce firmly. “You should not be put in the position of having to defend yourself against the unwanted attentions of Lord Revell. No, don’t deny that it has happened. The entire house whispers of nothing else.”

Sara gasped, mortified. Why couldn’t this have stayed between her and Revell alone, without involving everyone else at Ladysmith? Why had she once again become the miserable target of talk and gossip? How long before someone learned her real name, and the shameful truth behind her father’s death?

And oh, what would Revell say in return?

“You will not—not address Lord Revell about me, will you, Lady Fordyce?” she begged.

“I would never do such a thing, Miss Blake.” Her ladyship pressed her lips tightly together. “He is a gentleman. I could hardly scold him, could I? But I believe I have found an, ah, another solution. I cannot explain further, not yet, but I believe you shall find Lord Revell soon ceases his unwelcome attentions.”

But it wasn’t as simple as that, not by half, and Sara knew it. For what if she didn’t wish Revell to avoid her? What if, in the last two days, his attentions had come to seem not troublesome, but desirable?

Unhappily, Sara stared down at the floor, praying her confusion didn’t show on her face for her ladyship to read. She’d told herself that these two weeks until Twelfth Night would be something to endure, and now that same time with him had become something to treasure. That was the truth, if only she’d be honest with herself. She wanted to see him, and wanted to be with him, however brief that time together would be.

And it would be brief. As giddy as her heart might be, her cold reason hadn’t entirely abandoned her. Once Revell learned the truth about why she’d left Calcutta, he’d scorn her, and she in turn had no assurance that in the end he’d treat her with any more loyalty or honor than he had before. Miracles made for pretty talk, but they weren’t guarantees of anything.

Yet still Sara felt the pull of the old connection between them, as if they were once again young and blissfully in love, as if nothing in the world were more complicated than that miracle they’d both never forgotten. That was what she wanted, to feel like that again, even if it were only for a handful of days. She wanted that, and she wanted it with Revell, and unconsciously she touched her fingers to her lips, remembering his kiss. He had promised to join them in the ballroom, to help arrange the holly and the elephants. Likely he was already waiting for them—for her—now.

“I shall expect you and Clarissa downstairs to join me as soon as she can be shifted into dry clothing,” continued Lady Fordyce. “I have already called for the sleigh to take us across to Peterborough Hall.”

Sara looked up swiftly, jerked back to the present. “Peterborough, your ladyship? Clarissa and I were planning to spend the rest of the day decorating the ballroom.”