Winter Wonderland (4 page)

“No, but I had you to turn to.” Miranda threw a tremulous smile at the older woman with heartfelt gratitude. “I thank the Lord for that.”

Letty's belongings were already packed. Miranda's abigail and the one remaining housemaid had done the packing this morning, their last household chore before leaving to find other employment. (Miranda had written to Belle and Charles to ask if the maids and Higgins, the groom, could be retained on their household staff:
They have been employed here for years
, she'd written,
and not only are they familiar with the requirements of the house, they are very loyal, honest and deserving employees
. But Belle had written back that she would rather choose her own staff.) Higgins, the last remaining servant in Miranda's employ, would be leaving, too, after he conveyed Letty to her cousin in Surrey and brought back the carriage.

Higgins carried down Letty's things just as the draymen were bringing in the new owners' baggage. The entryway, the passageways and the stairs were scenes of complete confusion. Miranda and Letty could hardly manage a coherent goodbye. To postpone the parting as long as possible, Miranda went out with her aunt to the carriage. There they stood clinging together until Higgins coughed to remind them that the horses should not stand in the cold too long. But even he was tearful at this leave-taking.

Miranda stood there on the windy drive long after Letty's carriage disappeared into the dusk. Then she went in and, ignoring the draymen and the boxes and the disarray of her once-quiet domicile, climbed slowly up to her room, threw herself down on her bed and wept unconsolably.
It isn't fair
, she cried in childish self-pity.
It just isn't fair!

She knew it was self-pity, but this once she was going to wallow in it. Life had been hellish for the past eleven years, and indeed it
wasn't
fair that her future held no prospects for improvement. How ironic life could be, she thought. She'd started out with such high hopes. She'd won the envy of all her friends when she'd married Rodney, who'd been so handsome, so very well-to-pass, and so determined a bachelor. Winning him had been a triumph for a young woman with no title and very modest means. But her feelings of triumph were short-lived. Within a month of her romantic honeymoon in Italy, after she'd moved into this very house glowing with happiness, she discovered that her new husband had a strong tendency toward drunkenness and lechery.

She'd not wept in those days. Her pride hadn't allowed it. She'd tried other kinds of cajolery: anger, sympathy, warmth, coldness, giving and withholding. But she'd not tried tears. Not at first. But when nothing else seemed to work, she'd even sunk to tears. All to no avail.

And tears are no avail now
, she reminded herself, sitting up on her bed. It was all spilt milk. All the tears in the world would not change the past. She dashed them away, got up and went to her dressing table. If her brother-in-law and his wife should appear on the doorstep soon—as seemed likely—she was in no condition to receive them. She took off her apron, brushed the dust from her skirts and turned her attention to her unkempt hair. Hardly glancing at her reflection in the mirror (for her pale, gaunt face gave her little pleasure these days), she gathered her flyaway locks into one long, ropy coil, twisted it into a bun and began to pin it up to the back of her head.

She remembered how Rodney had disliked this way of doing up her hair. He'd always liked it hanging loose. Of course, after the glow of romance had worn thin, he rarely bothered to look at her. By the end of the first year, he was already accusing her of being nagging and burdensome. In fact, the more she indulged in pleas or scolds, the greater was his dislike of the married state. He began to come home at night badly foxed, and sometimes he did not come home at all. Still, she'd found it hard at first to believe that he'd taken a mistress. Later, of course, it was easy to believe. Over the years, he'd kept a succession of them.

She glanced at herself in the mirror. Her hair was neat enough, and her dress—a muslin roundgown with long sleeves and a high neck—was suitable for an evening at home. It had seen better days, but it would have to do. Rodney's brother and his wife would not expect her to greet them in formal attire. But she would make one concession to the occasion and wear her cameo. She took it out of her jewel-box, slipped it on a silver chain and hung it round her neck. It was a lovely piece—a miniature of a lady with a small diamond at her neck. Rodney had bought it for her on their honeymoon. It was not very valuable, Miranda supposed, but it was precious to her. It was her only reminder that she'd once been very, very happy.

But she'd not been at all happy since. Nor did she have any prospects of a change for the better. She wondered, as she stared at the pale, unfamiliar face in the dressing-table mirror, if she should have tried harder to change her life—to leave the man who'd so consistently humiliated her. But what could she have done? She had no parents to run to. Aunt Letty had no home of her own. Miranda had once thought of running off to become an actress on the stage, but it was a childish impulse; she had no talent for such an enterprise. Most women who tried it became, in the end, little better than lightskirts.

All those years, she'd felt quite hopeless. In a society in which divorce was almost unheard of, and where a wife had no rights, there was no way to free herself. Nevertheless, she felt inadequate. She'd failed in the one thing in which a woman was expected to succeed—as a wife. With this awareness of her failure, she had grown more withdrawn. She lost all interest in what had once been her major preoccupation: the pursuit of pleasure. She neither gave nor accepted invitations. She rarely went from home. She withdrew from society in shame.

Was it my fault?
she asked her reflection in the mirror.
Was I not charming enough, or beautiful enough, or clever enough?
She knew she'd bored her husband. Her affection bored him. Her disapproval bored him. But then, everything bored him. He was so bored with his life that he could only find relief by gambling. Taking wild risks. Cards, horses or the market, it didn't matter which. All her attempts to reason with him failed. In an attempt to compensate for her husband's wild profligacy, she practiced economy in her home as much as possible, keeping the number of servants to a minimum, ceasing to buy anything but the most necessary items of clothes and household goods, hoarding the household money as best she could. But when, a year ago, her husband was killed—in a final irony, shot in a duel with a man he'd cuckolded—his man of business informed her that there was nothing left of his estate but debts. She had no dower, no jointure, nothing.

She shut her eyes, shuddering at the memory of the day they'd carried him home, everything hushed and secret to prevent the magistrates from learning of the illegal duel. And the poorly-attended funeral during which, numb from shock, she heard not a word of what was said to her. And the reading of the will, in which in the whole of the lengthy document her husband had not made one mention of her name.

She rose from her chair abruptly, for she heard the sounds of carriage wheels on the drive below. They were here! Charles and Belle Velacott had arrived. The moment she'd been dreading for the past year was now upon her. She had to go down, and smile, and make them welcome. There was no time now to dwell on the past.

It was just as well. Remembering the past was too disheartening. But then, contemplating the present was just as disheartening. Once, her hopes for her future had soared as high as the sky. Now reality had brought her down to this: bleak widowhood, impoverishment and the necessity of accepting the charity of Charles and Belle Velacott.

She could hear their voices at the doorway. It was time to go down. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and went from her room to face her new life.

How those who knew her before her marriage would laugh if they knew. The Magnificent Miranda, indeed. What a joke!

Three

With a smile fixed on her face, Miranda reached the last turning on the stairs, but there she paused in surprise. The sight of the confusion in the entry hall below caused her to gasp. The hall was crowded with boxes, crates, pieces of furniture and bulging portmanteaux. Around this mountain of baggage scurried an army of servants that Charles and Belle had brought with them. Miranda counted at least two footmen, four maids, a dignified butler who seemed to be directing traffic, and several other persons whose functions she could not guess.
They must have had to rent a veritable caravan of carriages to transport them all!
Miranda thought.

In the midst of the confusion stood the new owners, Charles and Belle Velacott, happily surveying their new abode. Charles, tall and ruddy-faced, and still wearing his greatcoat (although it hung open to reveal his protuberent midsection), was giving orders to a coachman for the disposition of the horses. Belle, as small in stature as her husband was large, was gazing admiringly at the crystal chandelier over their heads. She was dressed to the nines in a velvet, fur-trimmed pelisse, and, in an apparent attempt to appear taller, carried on her head a high-crowned bonnet with the most enormous plumes Miranda had ever seen. The plumes bobbed about disconcertingly with every motion of the woman's head.

Suddenly Charles caught sight of his sister-in-law on the stairs. “Miranda, my dear,” he bellowed, “
there
you are! We are a day early, as you can see. We were too eager to settle in to wait another day.”

“Yes, Charles, I quite understand.” Miranda ran down the remaining stairs and circled the impedimenta that stood between her and the new arrivals. “Good evening, Belle,” she said, bestowing a formal peck on her sister-in-law's cheek. “I hope your trip down from Bedford was pleasant.”

“As pleasant as travel with a train of four carriages can be,” Belle replied, handing her fur-trimmed pelisse to one of the maids. “I'm glad the journey is over.”

“You must be tired. Do go into the sitting room and rest yourselves, while I go and make some tea.”

“No need for you to do that any more,” Charles said grandly as he shrugged out of his greatcoat. “Our staff is quite ready to work.” He signaled to the butler to see to the tea, threw his greatcoat to a footman, and led his wife and his sister-in-law into the sitting room, where one of the maids was already making a fire.

A few moments later, Miranda was enjoying the unusual luxury of being served her tea by a butler and two maids (who had so quickly settled in that they were already in uniform). She began to wonder if her alarm at the prospect of living with the Charles Velacotts had been premature. They were being very cordial. And she had to admit that it was very pleasant to be waited on like this, especially after all those years of caring for this large house almost single-handedly. Perhaps matters were not as desperate as she feared. She sat back in her chair, let the hot drink make its soothing way down her throat, and studied with new eyes the pair with whom she would now be living.

Charles Velacott, Rodney's younger brother and heir, looked older than his thirty-one years, but he had the handsome Velacott profile: aquiline nose, cleft chin and high forehead. Miranda acknowledged that she didn't really dislike him, despite his tendency toward pomposity. Nor did she resent his being Rodney's heir, for his inheritance had added little to his wealth. In truth, he owed his success to no one but himself. He'd gone to the West Indies as a young man and made a small fortune in the molasses trade. This he'd invested wisely, and he was now quite solidly wealthy. All he'd inherited from Rodney were huge debts and some badly-managed family properties which were heavily mortgaged. He'd dealt with the problem by simply selling off the inherited properties—all but this one—to pay the debts.

The Velacott London town house was the one property he'd kept because, as he'd told Miranda later, Belle wanted so much to live here. They would take a year to close up their country home and arrange the move. This, of course, Charles had every right to do. It was not his fault that the house had been Miranda's home for the past eleven years, and that she now had no place to call her own.

Miranda stirred her tea as she threw her brother-in-law a surreptitious glance from under lowered lids. Soothed by the warmth of the fire, the tea and the companionable silence, she was hopeful enough to admit that Charles, though pompous and self-important, was a good-natured, sober fellow, aware of his familial duty, though—and here was the rub!—often prevented by his wife from doing it generously. It was Belle who was the greater problem.

Miranda turned her glance to her sister-in-law, who sat opposite her in a wing chair, still wearing her ridiculous bonnet. The plumes waved every time the woman lifted her cup to her lips. There was no denying that Belle Velacott was a grasping sort who could make even an act of generosity seem vulgar. Miranda's recollection of their conversation after the reading of the will, several months ago, still chilled her blood.

The incident had occurred in this very room. They'd been gathered round the fire just as they were now. It was a few minutes after Mr. Baines, Rodney's solicitor, had departed. Miranda was trying very hard not to weep. “Poor dear Miranda,” Charles had murmured, taking her hand in his, “do not add to your grief by believing we do not think of your plight. I quite agree with Mr. Baines that
something
is owed to my brother's widow.”

“Though nothing is
legally
required of us,” his wife had quickly pointed out.

“But Belle and I have already spoken of this,” Charles went on, “and we've decided to offer you a home.”

Belle had smiled at her smugly. “A rather generous offer, you must agree.”

Miranda, too choked with grief, could not respond.

“A place in our household,” Charles had gone on with more than his usual pomp. “A place in our household for the remainder of your lifetime.”