Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish (15 page)

Val climbed aboard too, settling onto the sheepskin cushion St. Just had fashioned the night before. “It helps with that initial, ball-shriveling shock of cold when your backside first lands in the saddle. You ought to try it, Westhaven.”

“Perhaps tomorrow, if we're indeed to be traveling another day.”

“We could push it,” St. Just said as they moved away from the inn where they'd eaten a luncheon of bread, cheese, and ale. “But everybody's tale is the same: move south, and the snow is navigable. Move west, and the drifts are several feet deep in places.”

“So we give it another day to melt and continue working south.” Val's gaze went to the perfect azure sky making the day appear much warmer than it was. “At least I got a violin out of it. A little Christmas present for having been a very good boy.”

This comment was too worthy of reply to be ignored, so St. Just, cheerfully abetted by Westhaven, spent the next five miles teasing their baby brother about just how good he'd been. This led the way to a lengthy discussion regarding Christmases past, naughty deeds, pranks, and family memories.

St. Just watched the sun sink and gave thanks that this campaign was so much more joyous than others he'd endured in the past. No, they would not make London in the limited daylight available, and they possibly wouldn't on the next day, either, but he was with his brothers, traveling in relative comfort, and all was right with the world.

“Do you recall the year His Grace thought Sophie should have a pet rabbit for Christmas?” he asked his brothers.

“And Bart told her it was headed for the stew pot. I thought she'd brain him senseless,” Westhaven supplied. “I do believe it's the only time I've heard Her Grace laugh out loud.”

“But we didn't tease our sisters quite as mercilessly after that,” Val pointed out.

“Sophie has her ways,” St. Just said. “To this day, a man does not cross her with impunity.”

The talk drifted to various neighbors and other sisters before Westhaven was again complaining that his ass had frozen to the saddle, and this was hardly how the heir to a dukedom expected to spend his holidays.

When next they paused to rest the horses, his brothers washed his handsome face with snow for that nonsense.

***

All day long, as Vim's toes turned to distant, frozen memories, the wind chapped his cheeks and nose, and the food Sophie had packed for him disappeared into a bottomless well of cold and hunger, he mentally kicked himself.

He should not have left Sophie to contend with that baby by herself. She was brave and sensible but a novice when it came to babies.

He should have escorted her to the cozy, well-staffed home of some titled acquaintance and set about courting her—a display of his connections in polite society accompanied by discreet indications of his wealth would have been a nice place to start.

He should have waited for better weather to leave Town, weather fine enough that he could take Kit with him to Sidling, where the boy could be raised up secure and safe in any number of useful professions.

He should have told her that whatever her station in life—cook, housekeeper, companion, governess,
whatever
, it mattered naught to him so long as she exchanged it for the position of his baroness.

And for variety, he'd occasionally curse himself for tarrying in London, at all. If he hadn't put off going to Kent to the very last minute, he'd be cozy and snug at Sidling right now, listening to his aunt explain the subtleties of chess to a man who'd been letting his wife beat him at the game for half a century.

And finally, when he lost sensation in his fingers, the food was gone, and darkness starting to fall, he admitted he should have made love to Sophie when they'd had the chance. He should have put aside all the rotten memories he carried courtesy of the last female he'd pursued in the Yule season, gotten together his courage, and made such passionate love to Sophie that she couldn't bear to let him go.

This thought coalesced in his brain just as his foot went sideways beneath him in the snow and he pitched headfirst into a fluffy drift at least four feet deep.

“Westhaven writes that Valentine is on the trail of some sort of violin, but it will cost them a day's traveling time.” His Grace passed his wife the letter, a terse, efficient little epistle, via messengers, from a man who'd taken the disarrayed finances of the duchy and set them to rights in about a year flat.

“A violin?” Her brow furrowed as she perused the single page where she sat in serene domestic splendor near the study's fire. “A Guarneri. No small find. Do you suppose Valentine is happy?”

Women. They were forever pondering the imponderables and expecting their menfolk to do likewise.

“Valentine delights in his music, the Philharmonic is ever after him to give up his ruralizing and come to Town to rehearse them. One must conclude his rustic existence appeals to him.”

Her Grace set the letter aside. “Or being up in Oxfordshire appeals to him, or his wife appeals to him. I think Ellen is yet shy of polite society.”

If their youngest son ran true to Windham form, he was spending the winter keeping his new wife warm and cozy, and perhaps seeing to the next generation of the musical branch of the family.

His Grace reached over and patted his wife's hand. “We'll squire her around next Season, put the ducal stamp of approval on Val's choice. Care for more tea, my love?”

“No, thank you.”

She fell silent, leaving His Grace to go back to a daunting pile of correspondence from his cronies in the Lords. Damned fools were still yammering on about this or that bill, when they ought by rights to be with their own families, catching all the pretty parlor maids under the kissing boughs.

This thought, for some reason, connected two thoughts in His Grace's often nimble brain.

“You're fretting over Sophie,” he said, pushing his chair back from his desk. “This means whatever mischief she's up to, her brothers will be yet another day in retrieving her from it.”

The slight—very, very slight—tightening at the corners of Her Grace's mouth told him he'd scored a lucky hit. “For God's sake, Esther, I can saddle up and fetch the girl home. It's not that far, and I'm hardly at my last prayers.”

She gave him a look such as a wife of many years gives the man who taught her the true meaning of patience. “It is the depths of winter, Percival Windham, and you would leave me here with four daughters to keep out of trouble by myself when every home in the neighborhood is full of mistletoe and spiked punch. Sophie is the sensible one. She's doubtless visiting elsewhere in Town, and her letter to us went astray in the bad weather.”

“Very likely you're right.” For appearances sake, he was compelled to add, “It really would be no trouble, my love. I'll take a groom or two if you insist.”

She turned her head, giving him a view of her lovely profile as she gazed out the window. “Sophie will be fine. Perhaps I will have a spot more tea after all.”

“Of course.”

Except by now, Sophie would have sent more than one letter regarding her change of plans. His Grace was reminded that all those years ago, when he'd been an impecunious younger son bent on a career in the cavalry, Esther had been considered the sensible daughter too. This had allowed them all manner of ill-advised leeway in their flirting and courtship, and accounted for Lord Bartholomew's arrival something less than nine months after the nuptials.

It gave pause to a loving papa immured in the country drinking tea, and tempted him to saddle up his charger and head for Town, miserable weather be damned.

***

Sophie's day dragged, the hours punctuated by Vim's absence more than by the chiming of the tall clocks throughout the house.

Vim wasn't there to help Sophie feed the baby.

He wasn't on hand to deal with some of the soiled nappies.

He wasn't offering the occasional opinion on the baby's situation, leaving Sophie to fret that the child was too warm, too cold, too tired, too everything.

Vim wasn't offering adult companionship at meals, complimenting Sophie's pedestrian cooking as if it were the finest food he'd ever eaten.

He wasn't there when Sophie contemplated and discarded the notion of lying down for a nap while Kit caught his midafternoon forty winks, there being memories to haunt her in both her own bed and Vim's.

Vim wasn't there, and he would never be there again.

“I have both brothers and sisters,” she told Kit as she laid him in the cradle near the kitchen hearth. “My oldest sister is named Maggie. She's several years my senior and very much a comfort to me, though she's technically a half sister.”

Would Kit have brothers and sisters? Did Joleen's footman have other children he'd created with the same careless disregard for the child's future? That Kit might have siblings and never know them, or not even know of them, made her chest ache.

“Maggie explained certain things to me when I made my come out,” she said, shifting the cradle to the worktable and putting it beside her baking ingredients. “Things no decent girl is supposed to know.” And how Maggie came upon the knowledge was something Sophie had wondered.

“She explained that people like you get conceived at certain times and are less likely to be conceived at other times.”

The baby kicked both feet and stuck the two middle fingers of his left hand in his mouth.

“I was hoping…”

She'd been hoping Vim would show her what the greatest intimacy between a man and a woman could be. She'd been hoping to be his lover, to know with him what she'd never know with any other man.

She'd been hoping a great deal more than that, actually, but hoping was as useless as wishing.

“I'll deal with Valentine's room tomorrow,” she assured the baby. “I'll clean up the bathing chamber, and I'll send along a cheery note to Their Graces.”

She wouldn't lie, exactly, but she wouldn't mention Vim Charpentier, either. Among her siblings, there was tacit acknowledgment of the occasional need to protect their parents from some unsavory detail or development. It was the kind thing to do, also the most practical, as some aspects of reality did not yield even in the face of ducal determination.

Like the reality that Vim was gone and Sophie would never see him again.

Tomorrow she'd tidy up Val's room and set the bathing chamber to rights. She'd remove every possible piece of evidence indicating Vim had been in the house.

Just… not… yet.

She started mixing another batch of stollen, though she had to pause occasionally to swipe the stray tears from her cheeks.

***

“My dear, I'm afraid it's gone.”

Essie Charpentier watched her husband rise slowly from where he'd knelt on the carpet. One foot on the floor, then while he braced himself, the second foot. A pause, then a hearty shove to gain him his feet, and another pause to recover from the effort.

“Perhaps it is simply misplaced,” she said as she'd said on an appalling number of other occasions. “Or maybe the servants have taken it downstairs for cleaning in anticipation of the holidays.”

He cast a glance at her, an indulgent glance laced with a little worry and a tinge of… pity. She hated the pity probably as much as he hated the ways she pitied him in recent years too.

“It was just an olive dish,” she said briskly. “We have several such, and the olives don't taste any better or worse for being in an antique silver dish or a piece of the everyday.” She laced her arm through his. “It's sunny today. I'm of a mind to visit the ancestors, if you'll escort me?”

“Of course, my dear.” He patted her hand and led her from the family parlor where they'd stored various items of sentimental and commercial value for years—the heirloom parlor.

“Perhaps we should take to locking the doors of certain rooms,” Essie said. “You lock the billiards room when we're not entertaining.”

“The gun cabinets are in there, my dear. I'm sure the dish will turn up, and it wouldn't do to offend the staff by locking the place up like some medieval castle. Is there someone in particular you'd like to see?”

“Christopher, I think. We must tell him his son is coming for a visit.”

They made a slow, careful progress up the main stairs, a majestic cascade of oak whose grandeur was dimming in Essie's eyes as her knees increasingly protested the effort of climbing it.

“We hope Wilhelm will grace us with his presence,” the viscount said, pausing at the top of the stairs. “There's been no word, Essie, and he should have been here by now.”

She paused, as well, and surveyed the front hall below them. All was cheerfully laden with swags of pine. A wreath graced the inside of the front door, and a fat sprig of mistletoe wrapped with red ribbon was temporarily hanging from a coat rack in the corner.

“Kiss me, Rothgreb.”

He smiled down at her, a trace of his old devilment in his blue eyes. “Naughty girl.” But he bussed her cheek and patted her hand. “My lovely, naughty girl.”

“Vim will be here,” she said as they resumed their progress toward the portrait gallery. “He keeps his word.”

“He keeps his word, but his associations with Sidling are not cheerful, particularly not his associations with Sidling at Yuletide. Watch the carpet, my love.”

“His associations with Sidling
are
cheerful. He passed his early childhood here cheerfully enough.”

Rothgreb held the door to the portrait gallery open for her. Down the length of the room, some eighty feet, a fire was laid but not lit in a huge fieldstone hearth, and the cavernous space was chilly indeed.

“Shall I fetch you a shawl, Essie?”

He was not going to argue with her about Vim's past, which was a small disappointment. Arguing warmed them both up.

At the rate they moved around the house lately, by the time he fetched the shawl, she'd be frozen to the spot she occupied. She smiled at him. “Bellow for Jack footman. Trotting around will keep him from freezing.”

“He won't move any faster than I will, and you know it.” Nonetheless, Rothgreb strode off and could be heard yelling in the corridor. The man had a good set of lungs on him, always had, and no amount of years was going to take away from the broad shoulders favored by the Charpentier menfolk.

“He misses you,” Essie said to the portrait occupying the wall to the right. She let her eyes travel over blond hair, blue eyes, a teasing hint of a smile, and masculine features so attractive as to approach some standard of male beauty.

“Christopher was the best looking of us three boys,” Essie's husband said, slipping his arm around her waist. “He would have made a wonderful viscount.”

“You make a wonderful viscount, and to my eyes you were and still are the pick of the litter.” She let her head rest on his shoulder, sending up a prayer of thanks that, for all their years, they still had each other and still had a reasonable degree of health.

“You need spectacles, my lady.” He smiled down at her then resumed perusing his brother's portrait. “Vim never comes here, you know. When he visits, he doesn't come say hello to his old papa, nor to his grandfather, either.”

“He will this time.” She decided this as she spoke, but really, Vim was not a boy any longer, and certain things needed to be put in the past.

“No scheming, Essie, not without including me in your plans.”

This was the best part of being married to Rothgreb for decades—though there were many, many good parts. Another man might have become indifferent to his wife, the wife who had been unable to provide him sons. Another man might have quietly or not so quietly indulged in all manner of peccadilloes when the novelty of marriage wore off.

Her husband had become her best friend, the person who knew her best and loved her best in the whole world, and Essie honestly believed she'd come to know him as well as she knew herself. It made up for advancing years, white lies, misplaced olive dishes, and all manner of other transgressions.

She hoped.

“Let's say hello to Papa while we're here,” Rothgreb suggested. “He always did have great fun at the holidays.”

Essie let him steer her down the gallery at a dignified pace. The point of the outing had been to get away from the family parlor and wipe the concern from Rothgreb's eyes. If she had to freeze her toes among previous generations of Charpentiers, then so be it.

“If Vim comes, we will have great fun again,” Essie said. “His cousins will mob him, and the neighbors will come to call in droves. Esther Windham still has five unmarried daughters, Rothgreb. Five, and their papa a duke!”

“Now, Essie, none of that. The last thing, the very last thing Vim will be interested in is courting a local girl at the holidays, and given how his previous attempt turned out, I can't say as I blame him.”

Essie made a pretense of studying the portrait of Rothgreb's father. The old rascal had posed with each of his four wives, the last portrait having been completed just a few months before the man's death.

He was a thoroughgoing scamp of the old school, a Viking let loose on the polite society of old King George's court. She'd adored him but felt some pity for his successively younger wives.

“I believe I shall send Her Grace a little note,” Essie said.

His lordship peered over at her, his expression the considering one that indicated he wasn't sure whether or how to interfere.

“Just a little note.” She patted her husband's arm. “I do think Vim inherited the old fellow's smile. What do you think?”

“I would never argue with a lady, but I honestly can't say I've seen Vim's smile enough to make an accurate conclusion.”

True enough. They tarried before a few other portraits, and by the time Essie's teeth were starting to chatter, Jack footman tottered in with a cashmere shawl for her shoulders.

***

Sophie's first day tending Kit without Vim's assistance went well enough as far as the practicalities were concerned. She made more holiday bread and a batch of gingerbread, as well, took care of the baby, folded the dry laundry, placed stacks of clean nappies and rags in strategic locations about the house, and successfully avoided going into the room where Vim had slept.