A Christmas Promise (11 page)

Or perhaps, she thought, it was because she was recently married and yet was already very unhappily married. They were seated side by side in the carriage, yet they had exchanged scarcely a word since leaving London, only the essential civilities. She was curious about the countryside, anxious and eager for her first glimpse of Grenfell Park, wondering how much farther there was to go. And yet she could not ask him. They had scarcely spoken in the five days since their quarrel.

She had wanted to apologize for that. Her behavior had been unpardonable. He had been quite justified in calling her a shrew. She had started it all, she had been forced to admit. Though he had looked stunned when she had told him there were twenty members of her family coming for Christmas—and indeed she had been surprised at the number when she had added it up—he had not made any objection either about the number or the character of his guests. Perhaps he would have had she given him time, but the point was that he had not before she decided to quarrel with him—her usual self-defense when she felt nervous or embarrassed.

She had wanted to apologize also for the smashed figurine, which had been one of her favorite pieces in the house. But she had not seen him again that evening or all the next day and the day after that only briefly. And he had bowed to her with distant formality and looked at her with cold, haughty eyes and spoken in a voice to match. And she had remembered the reason she had invited so many and the reason her nerves had been so brittle in the library that evening and the evenings before it.

He had a mistress. He did
that
with another woman when he had a wife. Not that she cared, of course. She would a thousand times rather he did it with someone else than with her. But even so, for five days she had felt unlovely and unattractive and lonely, although she had told herself her life was as she wished it to be. She did not want him anywhere near her bed, except that she wanted a child. And she spent five days wanting Wilfred and trying not to think about him. And five days remembering the blond and delicate Dorothea Lovestone.

So she had hardened her heart and not apologized. And it was too late now. Too late to restore even the less than satisfactory civility to their dealings together.

She was startled out of her black thoughts by the sight of a solitary horseman beside the road, his horse held stationary while he looked toward the approaching carriage.
A highwayman
, she thought, and was about to turn to her husband to give the alarm. But the rider turned his horse’s head and galloped off ahead of them. He must have been merely uncertain of his direction, she thought.

How much farther?

“We will be at the village in a few minutes’ time,” her husband said suddenly, as if he had read her thoughts, “and at the house ten minutes after that.”

It was the most he had said all at once since their journey began. Perhaps in the last week. She did not turn her eyes away from the window.

“We will be here for the next year,” he said. “This is the place and these are the people with whom you will grow familiar, my lady. I believe it would be as well for us to forget about the past week, to put it behind us. Since we must endure each other’s company, we might as well do it with a measure of civility.”

She swallowed. He was holding out an olive branch again.

“And next week we will have guests to entertain,” he said. “Twenty-four of them, to be exact. It would be churlish of us to be so at odds with each other that we cannot give them a happy Christmas. Do you not agree?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Very well, then,” he said. There was a short silence. “I put an end to my liaison with Alice Freeman a few days before you spoke to me about her. I beg your pardon for not having done so before our marriage.”

She felt only humiliation. When she had spoken so shrewishly, he had already finished with his mistress. And he had begged her pardon. She wanted to beg his for having broken their agreement, for having given them both a week of silence and unpleasantness. She searched around in her head for suitable words.

But her attention was distracted. Bells? Even over the noise of the carriage and horses, she could hear bells pealing.

“Oh, Lord,” her husband said, “I was afraid of this.”

She looked at him inquiringly.

“If you have any smiles in you, my lady,” he said, “you had better don them now. We are about to be given a traditional country welcome.”

“What?” She stared at him blankly.

“The Earl of Falloden is arriving home with his new bride,” he said. “We must be greeted accordingly. I wonder how they knew we were approaching.”

The horseman
, Eleanor thought. And she felt her heart thumping as the carriage entered a village street and she saw that every window and door was hung with white bows and every inhabitant seemed to be out on the street, some of them waving handkerchiefs, all of them smiling broadly.

“Smile!” her husband commanded. “And raise your hand in greeting.”

Eleanor obeyed. And for the first time had some realization of how her marriage was to change her life, of what it meant to be a countess.

The carriage drew to a halt outside the village inn and a clerical gentleman was bowing to her as her husband handed her out and a lady was curtsying at his side. The Reverend Jeremiah Blodell was honored to make the acquaintance of her ladyship, the Countess of Falloden, and he begged the honor of presenting his good wife, Mrs. Blodell. Eleanor checked her first impulse, which was to reach out her right hand, and inclined her head instead, smiling at the vicar and his wife.

And then her husband extended his arm and led her through the lobby of the inn, where two maids in mobcaps curtsied to the ground, up the stairs to the assembly rooms, and out onto the balcony that overlooked the street. It was not a large village, but it seemed to Eleanor that every inhabitant must be in the street below. To her it looked to be a dense enough crowd. Someone called for three cheers, and the crowd complied with enthusiasm.

When they quieted down, her husband took her by the hand and presented her to the crowd as his bride and the new Countess of Falloden. After the cheer that greeted his announcement and his brief words of thanks for the warm welcome home, the Reverend Blodell delivered a lengthy speech, which Eleanor was too agitated to listen to. It was succeeded by more cheering. She raised her hand in one brief wave, and someone in the crowd whistled.

The two maids in mobcaps and two menservants were carrying trays of champagne and cakes into the assembly rooms when they left the balcony and came back inside. And the village’s leading citizens and some of the more prosperous tenant farmers were coming upstairs.

For the next ten minutes she clung to her husband’s arm as he presented her to what seemed like a dizzying number of people and she tried desperately to store names and their matching faces in her memory. It was a skill her father had always impressed upon her. In business, he had said, it was a wise practice to remember the name even of someone one had met once ten years before. It made a good impression. It suggested to people that one cared for more than just deals and money.

Most of the people who had come to drink toasts to her health and her husband’s and to eat cakes were the village businessmen—the butcher, the blacksmith, the haberdasher, and others. Eleanor gradually relaxed when she realized that there was nothing at all threatening about these people, that they were prepared to like and even admire her. Even if they knew her origins, she thought, they seemed not to care. Perhaps they liked the idea of having a countess who might be more accessible to them than the daughter of a peer might have been.

She slipped her hand from her husband’s arm and engaged the butcher and a farmer and their wives in conversation. And then she was talking with the spinster daughter of a former vicar and the schoolteacher and Mrs. Blodell, and then with another group of people.

Suddenly she felt very happy. Almost deliriously so. She felt as if she was coming home, even though she had never been to this place before or seen any of these people. And even though she had not yet seen Grenfell Park. And she was glad that they were to stay there for a year, that they would not be returning to London after Christmas. Even though London had always been her home and she had thought that she could not possibly be content anywhere else for very long, she no longer wanted to be in London. She had been unhappy there for the past month.

Perhaps, she thought with a hope born of the moment, things would be different now they were in the country. She glanced across the room at her husband, who was laughing at something the innkeeper was telling him. She could not remember seeing him laugh before. He looked boyish and carefree and very, very handsome. Something inside her turned over, painfully and unexpectedly.

They were on their way again eventually, leaving behind the village and turning almost immediately between massive stone gateposts and past twin gatehouses and proceeding along a winding elm drive through a heavier dusk.

“I should have warned you,” her husband said from beside her. “But I had no idea the old custom would still be observed. The last bride to be brought here was my grandmother. I hope you were not dreadfully embarrassed. You did well.”

Condescension again. Had he not expected her to do well? “They were my kind of people,” she said. But she heard the sarcasm in her voice and regretted it. Perhaps she really would turn into a shrew if she were not careful, she thought. “I like them, my lord. They were very kind.”

“Well,” he said, “you had better not relax too much, my lady. If preparations were made for an elaborate welcome in the village, I am quite sure the same will hold true of the house. The servants will doubtless be lined up in the great hall and we will be expected to inspect them and to stop and speak with some of them. There will be more cheers and applause. Don’t put your smile away just yet.”

She looked at him, but he had the side of his face almost against the glass and was gazing ahead—probably for the first sight of the house. All the servants of a grand house to greet? There was a fluttering of nervousness in her stomach. And a certain welling of excitement too.

For one moment she felt a deep regret that theirs was not a normal marriage, that he could not share with her his excitement at seeing his home again, that she could not share with him her excitement at discovering that this new home of hers felt like home even before she had seen it. It would have been lovely to be able to hold hands and smile at each other.

But at least, she thought, his words earlier had restored the civility to their relationship. She must be thankful for small mercies.

And he no longer had a mistress. And had apologized for having one at all after his marriage to her.

A
LL THEIR GUESTS WERE TO ARRIVE FOUR DAYS
before Christmas. The earl’s own friends were to have come a week before, but he had put them off. He had even given them the chance to withdraw altogether, being careful to explain that Christmas at Grenfell was to be a large family gathering—his wife’s family. And yet, incredibly, all four of them were still planning to come.

“After all, Falloden,” Lord Charles Wright had said, more honest than the other three, “none of us has anywhere else to go, and Christmas is the most dreary time of year to be alone.”

He was right. It was the worst time of all. Lord Charles had no family to speak of, certainly none that would welcome him for the holiday. Bertie had a mother and sisters, but their lives centered around their children, he always said. He always felt out of place and wary of their matchmaking energies turning on him. Badcombe had quarreled with his father and brother years before and had been told never to come home again. Sotherby had been married for two years when his wife died in childbed. His family lived close to the Scottish border.

Only Bertie had seemed a little wary of coming. “Perhaps your wife won’t like it, Randolph,” he had said. “Newly married and all that.”

“But she knows of my four guests,” the earl had said, “and has invited twenty of her own.”

Sir Albert had looked taken aback. “I don’t know,” he had said. “Perhaps I had better lay my head on the chopping block before Mama and the girls this year after all.”

“Bertie,” the earl had said, “don’t desert me in my hour of need. Four against twenty. Think of it. And you are supposed to be my best friend.” It was the closest he had come to breaking the confidentiality of his marriage and admitting that all was not well. “She obviously was not Pamela Hutchins’s vulgar friend after all, by the way, was she?”

“No,” his friend had said vaguely. “These twenty people are your wife’s family, Randolph? I didn’t know she had brothers and sisters.”

“Aunts and uncles and cousins, I gather,” the earl had said. “Apparently they are a close family, Bertie. They spend holidays together and all that. I am looking forward to meeting them all,” he had added gallantly and not quite truthfully. “All twenty of them, including two children.”

“Lord.” Sir Albert had winced and scratched his head. “They will probably all be asking favors of you, Randolph. It must seem a grand thing to them that one of their number has crashed into our ranks. There are probably all sorts of eligible and hopeful female cousins among their number.”

The earl had stiffened. “It must be remembered,” he had said, “that my wife’s father gave me Grenfell, Bertie, and a great deal besides.”

“Ho.” His friend had eyed him with interest. “Prickly, are you, Randolph? Touchy on the subject? Sorry, old chap.”

“She is my wife,” the earl had said. “My countess, Bertie.”

Sir Albert had exhaled loudly. “It is important to you that I come, then, Randolph?” he had asked. “And I did promise, did I not? Oh, well, it will be an experience, I suppose.”

It was not exactly an enthusiastic acceptance, but the earl felt the need of those four friends of his, especially Bertie, his closest friend.
And it should indeed be an experience
, he thought in the days leading up to the arrival of their guests. Loud and boisterous, she had called them. And vulgar. Sometimes he felt almost panic-stricken.