Elisabeth Fairchild (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Kirk, dearest,” she whispered in his ear.

A sweet fragrance teased his memory. Copeland struggled to rise from what felt like
cold water, closing around him, heavy and crushing, too hard to breathe, his heartbeat
slowing in his ears—slow—too slow. Above him, sprang a distant white light, brilliant,
dazzling—was it a star?

And again her voice sounded, calling his name, faint, distant, calling him toward
the light.

“Belinda,” he tried to say, but his vocal cords would not respond. He tried to move
his feet—too weighty—leaded—and yet he moved, sinking or rising, he could not tell
until the light filled his eyes.

“Kirkland?” Her voice changed, the odor now a vinaigrette, strong enough to make
him wince. The voice persistently repeating his name he had known all his life.

Henrietta.

His brother asked, “Has Kirk been ill?”

Bolton bent over him, his breath all coffee and toast as he fumbled in his pocket
for the vial of foxglove. Odd, how soothing the calm of Bolton’s voice was. “Will
you be so good as to hold the Earl’s head in your lap, my dear?”

His head was lifted, shifted, settled in warmth. Then the familiar droplets were on
his lip, his tongue, sliding down his throat, and the pounding, pounding, pounding
of his heart slowed.

“What sort of medicine is this?” Henrietta asked, from above his head. She held him,
braced against her shoulder, her arms strong, stable.

“For his heart, miss,” Bolton murmured.

“What’s wrong with Kirk’s heart?” Henrietta asked calmly. She sounded shocked, in
the mild way that Henrietta allowed herself to exhibit shock.

It flitted through Copeland’s mind,
What is wrong with my heart? That I could not keep it true to her? That I stood ready
to give it to a stranger?

And in awaiting Bolton’s response, in his expectation of Henrietta’s, he knew the
answer.

He opened his eyes to a sea of faces against a clear sky, all of them worried, all
of his loved ones gathered around him—all but Belinda Walcott. He searched, head twisting.
She must be there, hidden among the trees, behind the coach wheels.

“His heart?” Henrietta’s voice sounded so small, so hurt.

“It breaks, my dear,” he murmured.

“Here he is.” Marcus sounded relieved. Dear Marcus. “You had us worried, Kirk, very
worried.”

“Belinda. Is she gone?” He regretted at once his question, for with it the happy sparkle
in Henrietta’s eyes was doused, as if he had blown out a candle.

Marcus’s wife, Catherine, asked Bolton, “Who is Belinda?”

“My lord is perhaps a trifle delirious,” Bolton said. “Belinda is what he called his
imaginary guest.”

Copeland tried to sit up. His head swam.

“What?” Henrietta asked, and Copeland wanted to echo the question.

Bolton and two of the footmen leaned close, knelt beside him, caught up the edges
of a blanket they used to carry him. The ground fell away, Henrietta’s hands fell
away, leaving him cold, oh so cold. He shivered as they carried him, watching the
mistletoe-clustered branches of trees pass above his head.

Bolton’s voice seemed to come from a distance, explaining, confident and competent.
“When none of his lordship’s expected guests arrived in time for Christmas, the Earl
did his best to keep himself, and the staff, in the Christmas spirit. Decorated the
hall and the chapel, even entertained an imaginary guest, before inviting the entire
neighborhood to share Christmas with us at Broomhill.”

Like a dream, this. What a peculiar claim for Bolton to make. Did he hope to spare
Henrietta’s feelings?

“And her name was Belinda?” A woman asked.

He did not recognize the voice, and turned head to look at her, tall and spare with
frizzled hair. Who was this? His thoughts seemed muddled, as limp as his legs.

“A place was set at table for Miss Belinda Walcott every evening, else the master
would have supped alone. They two took tea, and danced, and delivered gifts to the
tenants.”

“How very peculiar,” Marcus said.

“Peculiar, indeed,” the woman agreed, “considering who Belinda Walcott was.”

“Was?” Copeland said, so soft none heard him but the footmen. Weak as a kitten he
felt, a mewling kitten.

“Whatever do you mean?” Henrietta asked.

“She was to have been a mistress of Broomhill,” the woman said incomprehensibly. “Many
years ago. Indeed she married a Copeland at Christmastime.”

“I have never heard of her,” Marcus said.

“A dark blot on the family tree from all accounts,” the stranger went on. “The marriage
was arranged. Lord Copeland agreed to the union out of greed for Belinda Walcott’s
substantial dowry. On their wedding night he proposed a game.”

“No!” Copeland forced himself to breathe deep, for this calmly voiced tale would steal
it all away from him.

“Hide-and-seek,” her voice went on, like ice cracking, and he could not stop it. “She
hid in her bride’s chest.”

No. No!

“Its lid, when closed, could only be released by a secret catch, from the outside.”

Oh God!

“Did he find her, Biddie?” Henrietta’s sister asked anxiously.

Biddie?
He was drowning in truths that closed over his head.

“Found her too late, I’m afraid,” Biddie said. “There were even nasty rumors, I am
sure they must be untrue, that the then Earl of Copeland seemed not at all upset by
his young bride’s hasty demise, though he was extremely pleased that her substantial
dowry allowed substantial debts to be settled.”

Biddie? Maggie’s friend, Biddie? Dear God! Help me.

“Poor woman suffocated. A sprig of mistletoe was found clutched in her hand.”

Copeland closed his eyes, chest aching, heart aching.

“My Lord!” Browne stopped. Biddie did not.

“Surely you have heard the stories. The Lady in White, they call her. Haunts Broomhill.”

He saw Belinda in his mind’s eye, wearing white the day he had met her, wearing white
last night.

“She is most often seen in the room with the
fleur-de-lys
windows.” The Biddie creature pointed, and Copeland saw her again—the woman in white,
standing in the window.

“There is an old bride’s chest tucked away in the attic,” Marcus said. “Carved. Painted.
Men with goat legs.”

Henrietta smoothed the hair from Copeland’s brow, hands warm, soothing. Her familiar
face filled the horizon. “Can you go on, Kirk?”

Was this but a dream? It must be a dream.

Bolton cleared his throat and said firmly, with all the authority a most competent
and dependable butler might muster, “Our Miss Walcott was no ghost.”

Damn straight!
He wanted to shout, but hadn’t the breath to do so.

Then the old man dashed his hopes. Dear old Bolton explained, as if there were no
other explanation, “She was but a whimsy, a Christmas whimsy to keep his lordship’s
spirits up, along with those of the staff. I did, in fact, encourage it—told the staff
to play along. The master showed none of the despair one might expect when his Christmas
plans were ruined. He entertained the entire household, the entire neighborhood with
the help of his imaginary guest.”

Lord Copeland laughed a bitter little laugh.

Henrietta leaned close, her cheek perfumed—not the attar of roses to which he was
accustomed. No, this was something new, spicy, cloves and cinnamon.

Christmas. She smelled of Christmas. But not the Christmas he yearned for. Not the
Christmas he had come to love.

“Feeling any better?” she asked. She smiled, a beautiful smile, so loving it tugged
at his heartstrings. Her eyes widened. She had beautiful hazel eyes, his Henrietta.
“I dreamed of you,” she said. “Of this.”

He turned his head, that he might better look at her.

“Dreams?” he asked, confused.

“The queerest dream,” she said, and her gaze was anything but mild, quite unusual
for Henrietta—to see in those golden-brown eyes such an intensity of concern, and
in her pale cheeks a deep blush of rose. “I know you will think it quite odd of me
for supposing so, but while we were the ones trapped in a ghastly, damp inn in the
middle of nowhere, I was beset by the odd notion that you were in more trouble than
we were.”

And suddenly everyone was talking to him, asking questions, and there was some suggestion
made that he must be carried into the house, out of the cold, and he offered no opinion,
and answered no one.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Henrietta wanted a spring wedding, and a spring wedding it was, three years later,
the ceremony held at the chapel of Broomhill Hall. Copeland insisted, though it surprised
his family and friends that he should desire it so. The bride was beautiful in blue,
daffodils and windflowers for a bouquet, apple blossoms in her hair.

Copeland’s heart swelled with pride, with joy, to see his Henrietta so happy. He kissed
her blooming cheek and wished her a happy marriage. He shook the groom’s hand and
told him what a lucky man he was. The luckiest of men.

Henrietta agreed with a laugh over the punch bowl later, the two old friends blessed
with a moment alone. Then she took a deep breath and let out a great sigh, and said,
“Christmas. How do you manage to make Broomhill Hall always smell of Christmas, Kirk,
even in springtime?”

Copeland offered an enigmatic smile and sniffed the air, and leaning down over the
bowl, said. “Perhaps it is the punch.”

“Not the punch.” She shook her head, apple blossoms swaying, and closed her eyes,
and breathed deep, and opened eyes again with a dreamy look. “I cannot quite define
it, other than to say it is quite nice, really, and a feeling stirs within me that
gifts await whenever I step through the door. And, indeed, you have given me the greatest
of gifts in refusing to marry me, my dearest friend. You realize that, do you not?”

Copeland must smile at that, as he ladled cups of punch, glass clinking glass. A wistful
smile. The day left him feeling rather wistful. “I cannot say I ever considered my
jilting of you a gift, Hen.”

She was ebullient, her joy overflowing as she eyed him over the lip of her cup. “A
gift, I say,” she insisted. “That is precisely how I think of it.” She reached for
his hand, and gave it a quick squeeze. “Though I remember being quite upset with you
at the time.”

He looked upon her with deepest affection, that she should be so forgiving, his brown-eyed
Hen. “I thought you’d never speak to me again.”

She laughed, spilling punch, setting down her cup to dab at her damp glove. “Silly
of me, really. Not to see the sense of it. Not to realize that as much as we were
friends we were not really in love.” Her expression became quite serious. “Do you
ever regret calling off our engagement, dearest? I could not bear it if my happiness
should make you miserable.”

So worried she looked. Dear Hen.

Copeland took her hands in his. Pausing a moment to admire her ring, he then kissed
each of her cheeks, and leaned close to whisper, “I could not be happier for you,
Hen. No regrets. Trust me. Absolutely none.”

She beamed across the room at her husband with a bride’s beauty, a bride’s glow, as
pleased with him as she was with the day. “I am glad to hear it. And you? Is there
no one for you?” Mischief sparkled in her eyes. “Other than your one hundred and one
wives?”

Puzzled, he blinked at her, and said, “My what?”

She tipped her head to look at him from fresh perspective, as though he surprised
her. “Surely you have heard—everyone calls you the bachelor with one hundred and one
wives.”

“Do they?”

“You did not hope to keep it a secret, did you? Your almshouse for widows?”

He chuckled. “It is no great secret, no.”

“Charitable acts would seem to agree with you, Kirk.”

He smiled. “How so?”

She smiled back at him. It was a day for smiles. “You have the look of a man content,
a man in love, perhaps?”

“I am in love,” he admitted. And when her brows rose questioningly, he said. “With
life, my dear Hen. Head over heels.”

He wanted to laugh.
The man diagnosed with a broken heart. Told to put my affairs in order? And so I do.

“I live every day as if it were my last,” he said lightly.

“So that you might be beloved of many rather than one?” she teased. “And yet.” Her
smile faded, her mouth pulled into a serious line. “I should like to think you will
know such a love.” She looked fondly in the direction of her husband, who made his
way toward them.

“Not to worry,” Copeland gave her hands a final squeeze.
I have dreams, Hen. Beautiful dreams.

“When you do give your heart,” Henrietta whispered, before her husband claimed her
for a dance, “it should be forever.”

***

Five years later, in late summer, Copeland sat by the pond with his nieces and nephews,
dragonflies hovering, fleet as thought, seedpods like fairy boats floating in the
water. Sunlight silvered his hair, and the pond sat dreaming of the sky. Fishing lines
sent ripples through reflected clouds, as if they were meant to catch slivers of sunlight
among the reeds. The children had convinced their uncle they must each catch one of
the little dace, roach, or golden carp that darted about the water, or the day would
be considered a complete failure.

“The pond knows much of failure,” he said, “and yours would be small by comparison.”

“Is this not the same pond great-uncle Cope rescued you from as a boy?” Margaret’s
eldest asked. Gerald was ten now, a fine, strapping lad who looked like his father,
and questioned the world just as his mother always did.

Interests piqued, the others begged the story: Anthony and little Rebecca, and Marcus’s
Winifred and Robert, the youngest. He had the look of James about him, Copeland thought,
in both coloring and stature, in the bowl full of curls tipped upon his head. “Please,
Uncle Copeland. Please!”

And so he told them. “Once upon a time, when I was a lad, not much older than Robert,
my family was invited to spend Christmas here, by my Uncle Cope, then heir and master
of Broomhill.”

“He is the one in the gallery.” Anthony had heard this story before.

“The one all in green?” Young Robert had spent many a rainy afternoon studying the
portraits.

“That’s right.” Copeland nodded, but refrained from telling them why their great-uncle
wore green. Best no one knew that part of the story.

“It was a dreadfully cold winter.” He cast his mind back. The moment no longer wrenched
as strongly at his heart as it once had. “So cold it snowed and the pond froze.”

“This pond?”

“Yes, this pond. The reeds gone brown, and dripping icicles. The mayflies and dragonflies
all dormant. The fish swam to the bottom of the pond that they might not freeze.”

“They go to the bottom, do they?” Winifred leaned over to look into the water, intrigued.

Copeland stayed her face-first plop into the pond with a gentle, bracing hand. “Yes.
The top freezes first.”

Anthony wondered aloud, “Did it freeze the year we caught the croup and could not
come?”

“Indeed it did. Very much like the year when I was a lad.”

Gerald tipped his head, as if trying to imagine him a lad.

Long ago. So very long ago.

“We were thrilled the pond had frozen, my brothers and I. We had brought our ice skates
with us, to Broomhill.”

They listened round-eyed, mouths agape as he described their getting up early one
morning, running out into the snow. “My mother, your grandmother, was away visiting
a friend. We were in our uncle’s care.”

“Just as we are in your care.” Winifred observed.

“Just so,” he agreed. “But Uncle Cope had not yet risen, and we could not wait. He
had not forbidden our skating on his pond, and so we decided amongst ourselves that
it was the perfect day for it. The sun was out, and everything sparkled and glittered
like magic, and the icicles on the rooftop had begun to melt, and so we were sure
we must hurry, before the pond melted.”

“But if the ice was melting, did you not question the sense of going onto the ice?”
Gerald asked reasonably.

“Have you ever wanted something so badly, even knowing it beyond your grasp, that
you willingly deluded yourselves into believing you must have it anyway?” Copeland
asked. He thought of Belinda Walcott, of the yearning he still felt for her, every
night as he drifted off to dream.

Gerald nodded. Beside him a row of shorter heads nodded. They knew.

Copeland smiled ruefully. To tell them that this was a heartbreak they would outgrow,
would be a lie. “Browne warned us not to run,” he said instead. “He warned us we were
apt to cut our throats running downstairs with skates tied about our necks.”

Winifred set aside her pole and came to stand beside him, regarding his neck with
childish intensity. “And did you cut your throat?”

“No.” He pulled off his neck cloth that she might see. “My neck is fine.”

Warnings come, often enough, but not always the right ones.

“But you ran anyway?” Robert guessed.

“Yes, for we were very young and did not know when to heed sound advice.”

“And was the pond still frozen?” Rebecca asked.

“A solid sheet, glittering in the sunlight. And so we hurried to tie our skates, and
raced one another to be first onto the ice.”

“You fell in?” Winifred frowned at him.

“Not right away. You see, the ice was sound enough along the edge of the pond, but
my brother James made the mistake of skating too far.” He remembered James turning
to look back over his shoulder, taunting his brothers for being so slow. He could
see, imprinted forever in his memory, the gleeful light in his brother’s eyes.

He saw it now in the eyes of the children who waited to hear of his fall as much as
they would hear of his rescue.

“Did it make a cracking noise?” Anthony wanted to know.

“Oh no.” Winifred covered her ears.

“Did it hurt when you fell?” Rebecca inquired.

“Was it dreadfully cold?” Robert asked, round-eyed.

“The worst cold you can imagine. It stole my breath away. Weighed down as I was by
freezing cold water in my heavy winter woolens, I could not hold on to the ice’s slippery
edge. It kept breaking beneath me. I went under—having seen that Uncle Cope was running
toward me. I might have drowned had not someone reached for me.”

“Uncle Cope.” Anthony thought he knew what came next, but Copeland surprised him.

“A woman,” he said.

They all stared at him in surprise. Even Winifred took her hands away from her ears
to listen.

“A woman? What woman?” Gerald asked indignantly. “It was Uncle Cope who saved you.”

Copeland had never told this part of the story. He never quite understood why he chose
to tell it at all. Perhaps it was sight of his nieces’ beautiful young faces. “A beautiful
woman,” he said. “The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, leaned over to take my
hand. I could see her face, her outstretched hand, as I looked up through the water.”

“Was she an angel?” Winifred suggested in all seriousness.

“An angel?” the other chided her. “Don’t be silly, Win.”

“Perhaps she was.” Copeland startled them into silence again. He could not help remembering
his first sight of Belinda Walcott’s face, looking up from the stairwell’s murky depths.

“Did she wear white?” young Robert asked.

“Yes, white.”

“But it was Uncle Cope who saved you.” Gerald seemed unwilling to in any way suspend
what he knew to be true.

“Yes. Your great-uncle Cope came running out to grab me up. Not a beautiful woman,
not an angel to carry me away. I must have imagined her. Delirious with the cold.”

Win tugged at his sleeve. “Uncle Cope was an angel to save you.”

Copeland smiled. “I suppose he was, in a way. You’ve a lovely way of looking at the
world, Win.”

“He leaves footprints, doesn’t he?” Gerald knew the story well—perhaps too well.

Copeland was amazed to hear the lad say it so matter-of-factly. “Who told you that?”

Gerald shrugged. “The gardener, Paul. Said he has seen them on more than one snowy
morning at Christmastime. He says that Uncle Cope keeps running to the pond over and
over again to try to save . . .”

Copeland gave a swift shake of his head, his gaze sweeping over the smaller children
as he interrupted, saying, “Yes, trying to save me all over again.”

“Not you.”

He shot the lad a forbidding look. The children need not hear the tragedy of poor
James, who was not rescued that day, too far out on the pond for Uncle Cope to reach.
“Yes. Dear Uncle Cope,” he murmured. “Come to save his nephew all over again. There
have been footprints. I have seen them myself, on snowy days. But whose they were,
and how they got there, has never been determined.”

“Do you believe it is his ghost?”

“It’s possible.”

“You believe in ghosts, then?”

“Yes. I do.”

“And the lady? Who is she?”

For a moment Copeland felt the same falling sensation he had that long-ago day, when
the ice had gone slushy beneath his skates. “Lady?”

Gerald nodded. “She wears white, and comes into the children’s game room now and then.”

“What?”

They looked at one another guiltily.

“You’ve all seen this lady in white?”

They nodded, uncertainly, as if afraid he would be angry with them for telling such
tales.

“When?”

“Last Christmas,” Win said.

“And the one before.” Anthony was nodding.

“Several times when I was younger,” Gerald said.

Copeland blinked at them. He did not know whether to believe their claims. They were
not above telling wild tales, and yet they all seemed so serious for the moment.

“Tell me what you saw.” He shielded his emotions. He must not let them see how much
their answers mattered to him.

“Well, everyone was downstairs dancing,” Rebecca began, startling him. She was usually
so quiet. “And the music got quite lively, so we decided to creep out to the stairwell
for a peep.”

“There she stood.” Anthony’s voice still reflected his awe.

“A lovely lady in white.” The words sounded so odd in Rebecca’s little-girl voice.

“Thought she was one of the guests strayed upstairs,” Anthony explained.

“And?”

Gerald shrugged. “And we thought if she spotted us we might be in trouble for leaving
the game room, since we had been told not to. So we turned to go back.”