A Candlelit Regency Christmas

‘Hannah has been spending a lot of time with me, I’m afraid, buying clothes and settling me in. I expect she’s been distracted and forgot to check the store cupboard. And she was very quiet yesterday evening. I thought she was simply deep in thought, but perhaps it was the headache.’

‘Have you had your breakfast?’ Alex found the honey and spread it on another crust.

‘I had mine first.’ Tess began to gather up the dirty crockery and took it through to the scullery. He noticed her limp had completely vanished. ‘Hannah says a scullery maid will come in later.’

‘So I believe. Tess, come back here and sit down.’ He waited until she returned and sat, neat and composed in her new dress and clean white apron. She folded her hands in her lap and regarded him, head on one side, like an inquisitive bird or a child waiting for an eccentric adult to do something entertaining. Very meek, very attentive. Why did he have the suspicion that she was laughing at him? ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ All he had to do was put his foot down; it should be a simple enough matter.

‘I am a perfectly good plain cook.’ Now she was managing to look wounded, blast her. ‘You would never have known I was here if it wasn’t for the problem with the coffee and the toast. Your staff are highly respectable.’ Alex opened his mouth, but she sailed on. ‘And who is to know?’

‘I know.’ And I am finding it decidedly unsettling. ‘You are not a servant.’

‘I am acting as your housekeeper. That is at least as respectable as being a governess in many households.’

‘Not for an unmarried lady, it isn’t.’ Alex dusted crumbs off his fingers and stood up. ‘I’ll call a hackney to take you back to the lodging house.’

The door to the area opened and Phipps came in, gawped when he saw Alex and whipped off his hat. ‘Good morning, my lord.’

‘Good morning. And how is Mrs Semple’s headache?’

‘Not good, my lord. I didn’t see her, only Mrs Green, the lodging house keeper. She says it’s the influenza and two more of her lady lodgers have it.’

‘I must go and nurse Hannah.’ Tess was on her feet, pulling off cap and apron.

‘No, miss. Mrs Green said that she and her girl will look after the ladies and that Mrs Semple said you weren’t to go back and risk catching it. She’s had your bags packed and I’ve brought them here with me.’

‘Absolutely not. You cannot stay here,’ Alex began as the door opened and a thin woman came in.

‘Morning, all. I’ll get the copper on the boil and— Oh!’ She stopped dead at the sight of Alex and Tess. ‘Where’s Mrs Semple? I’m Nelly ’Odgkins, come to do the weekly wash.’

‘She’s sick,’ Tess said before Alex could intervene. ‘Can you carry on as usual, please, Mrs Hodgkins?’

‘Right you are, mum.’

‘Miss Ellery—’

‘I’ve got the coffee and three loaves, Miss Ellery... My lord?’ MacDonald grounded the shopping baskets and stared at Alex as a scrap of a girl slid into the room through the door behind him.

‘Mornin’, Mr MacDonald, Mr Phipps. Ooh...’ She stopped and stared, wide-eyed.

‘You must be Annie. Off you go to the scullery and start on the breakfast dishes,’ Tess said firmly.

Alex strode round to shut the door in the hope of stemming the flood of incomers and, hopefully, the evil draught of cold December air.

His shove met with resistance against a brawny shoulder and a head covered with a battered low-crowned hat appeared round the door. ‘Morning, all. I’ve got some fine mutton cuts here, Mrs Semple. Er?’

‘Good morning.’ Tess waved the butcher inside, then turned to Alex. ‘You need a housekeeper, my lord,’ she said, low voiced, then clapped her hands for attention. ‘Annie, come out here for a moment, please. Mrs Semple is down with the influenza, I’m afraid, and I am Mi—Mrs Ellery, the housekeeper in her absence. Phipps, please get a kettle boiling for his lordship’s coffee. MacDonald, pass me the loaf, then you can start making the toast. I’ll be with you directly, Mr—?’

‘Burford, mum. Don’t you worry yourself, I’ll be fine over here till you’re all sorted.’ He took himself over to a bench in the corner, grounded his basket with a grunt and sat down, hands on knees, with every appearance of settling down to watch a play, much to Alex’s irritation.

‘I’ll see you in the study after breakfast, Mrs Ellery,’ Alex said. Any trace of pleasure at being alone with Tess had vanished. Who, he thought bitterly, was going to appear next? The parish constable? He scooped up the kitten, who had bounced out in pursuit of the butcher’s trailing bootlaces, and retreated upstairs with as much dignity as he could muster.

‘Routed from my own kitchen, Noel. Now what am I going to do with her?’

Noel yowled and bit Alex’s thumb.

* * *

A fresh pot of coffee, hot toast and the last pot of what Phipps assured her was Mrs Semple’s best strawberry conserve would surely soothe a troubled male breast at breakfast time, Tess thought. Halfway up the back stairs she remembered her apron and went down again to take it off and straighten her cap, which showed a tendency to slide on her tightly coiled hair.

‘You look the part, Miss...er...Mrs Ellery,’ MacDonald said with an encouraging smile that only confirmed that what she looked was in need of encouragement.

At Alex’s door she knocked. I must stop calling him that, even in my head.

‘Come.’ It was hardly welcoming. Perhaps the jam had been a mistake, too obvious a peace offering.

Tess walked in, wishing this was rather less like being summoned to Mother Superior’s study and that she could manage a confident smile. But that still made her cheek ache. ‘My lord.’ She bobbed a curtsy, folded her hands and waited.

‘For goodness’ sake, Tess, sit down and stop play-acting.’ He was using the point of a paperknife to flip over a pile of gilt-edged cards on his desk.

‘I am not. I am endeavouring to behave like a proper housekeeper in front of your staff and any visitors.’

‘You cannot be my housekeeper. You cannot stay here.’ Alex jammed the paperknife into a jar of pens. ‘You are most certainly not going to come into contact with any visitors.’

‘I am perfectly competent and they taught us housekeeping and plain cookery at the convent. This is a small house. I can manage very well.’

‘That is not what I mean.’ His gaze, those hazel eyes shadowed, was on her mouth, his own lips were set in a hard line.

They had felt firm, yet soft on hers. Strong, yet questioning. They had asked questions she... Tess closed her eyes and Alex made a sound, a sudden sharp inhalation of breath. She blinked and he was still staring at her.

‘It’s about that kiss, isn’t it? You think I was throwing myself at you.’ The words were out before she could censor them. She had been so certain he knew it had been a mistake, so certain that he had disregarded it with an ease she could only dream of managing herself.

‘No. Yes. Partly.’ Alex had his elbows on the arms of his chair. Now he clasped his hands together as though in prayer and rested his mouth against his knuckles, apparently finding something interesting on the surface of the desk. When he dropped his hands and looked up she could see neither amusement nor desire in his expression. ‘You should not be in a bachelor household, it is as simple as that. I am not in the habit of pouncing on my female staff and, although I can find explanations for what happened the other night, they are not excuses, not acceptable ones.’

He frowned. ‘I can’t imagine what Hannah was thinking of, sending you here. She was as set on moving you out as I was.’

‘She is ill and perhaps she’d had long enough to think about it and know I was perfectly safe here.’ Tess stopped herself pleating the fine wool of her skirt between her fingers. ‘I think she was more worried about you than about me, at first.’

‘About me?’ That at least wiped the brooding expression off his face. Alex sat up and stared at her.

‘I suspect she thought I was attempting to seduce and entrap you,’ Tess said primly. It was ludicrous, of course.

Alex threw his head back and laughed, a crack of sheer amusement. ‘You?’

‘I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ Of course it is. So why did his laughter twist inside her with a stab of what was perilously close to shame? She managed a little cackle of her own, just to show how funny it was.

‘She was obviously sickening for the influenza even then,’ Alex said, with a shake of his head for the preposterousness of it.

Yes, preposterous was the word. Teresa Ellery, as ignorant as Noel was about the big wide world, battered and bruised, dressed as a convent orphan, might arouse Lord Weybourn’s chivalrous instincts, but not his amorous ones. That kiss, the one she’d built all those castles in the air about in her dreams and daydreams, was nothing more than the instinctive reaction of any man to a woman in his arms foolishly pressing her lips to his.

‘Anyway, I cannot go back to the lodgings. As well as the risk of catching the influenza myself, the landlady is quite busy enough as it is with sick nursing,’ Tess said. ‘If I am not seen above stairs when you have visitors, who is to know?’

He scrubbed one hand across his face, an oddly clumsy gesture for such an elegant man. ‘I suppose I can hardly send you off to an hotel. There’s a bedchamber above mine you could use,’ he said with evident reluctance. ‘None of the male staff sleep on that floor and it has a door that locks. We must get a maid for you, one to sleep in the dressing room.’ He reached out and pulled the bell, then fell silent until MacDonald came in. ‘Take Mrs Ellery to our usual domestic agency and assist her in finding a suitable lady’s maid.’

‘A lady’s maid?’

‘You are a lady, aren’t you?’ One brow lifted.

‘Well, yes.’ No, I’m not. ‘But a housemaid would do.’

‘We have two housemaids. They come in three times a week to do the cleaning. We do not require any more.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ To wrangle in front of the staff was impossible. Tess stood up, dropped a neat curtsy and waited for the footman to open the door for her. ‘We will go immediately, if you have finished your current tasks, MacDonald.’

* * *

‘It’s a very good agency,’ MacDonald confided as they stood outside the door with its neat brass plate. ‘His lordship gets all his staff here.’

Twinford and Musgrave Domestic Agency. Est. 1790. It certainly sounded established and efficient, Tess told herself. They would guide her, which was a good thing, because she had only the vaguest idea of the details of a lady’s maid’s duties.

MacDonald opened the door for her. ‘Mrs Ellery from Lord Weybourn’s establishment, requiring a lady’s maid,’ he informed the man at the desk, who rose after a rapid assessment of Tess’s gown, pelisse and muff. She was grateful for Hannah’s insistence on good-quality clothes or presumably she would have been directed to join the queue of applicants lined up on the far side of the hall herself.

‘Certainly, madam. Would you care to step through to the office? My assistant will discuss your requirements and review the available—’

He was interrupted by a baby’s wailing cry. The door opposite opened and a young woman backed out, clutching the child to her breast. ‘But, Mr Twinford, I can turn my hand to anything. I’ll wash, I can sew, scrub—’

She was of medium height, neatly and respectably dressed, although not warmly enough for the weather, Tess thought, casting an anxious look at the baby who was swathed in what seemed to be a cut-down pelisse.

‘You’ve turned your hand to more than domestic duties, my girl.’ The voice from the office sounded outraged. ‘How can you have the gall to expect an agency with our reputation to recommend a fallen woman to a respectable household?’

‘But, Mr Twinford, I never...’ The woman was pale, thin and, to Tess’s eyes, quite desperate.

‘Out!’ The door slammed in her face and she stumbled back.

‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs Ellery. Shocking!’ The clerk moved round the side of the desk. ‘Now, look here, you—’

‘Stop it. You are frightening the baby.’ Tess stepped between them. ‘What is your name?’

‘Dorcas White, ma’am.’ Her voice was quiet, genteel, exhausted. Close up, Tess could see how neatly her clothes had been mended, how carefully the baby’s improvised coverings had been constructed.

‘Are you a lady’s maid, Dorcas?’

‘I was, ma’am. Once.’

‘Come with me.’ She turned to the spluttering clerk, who was trying to get past her to take Dorcas’s arm. ‘Will you please stop pushing? We are leaving.’ She guided the unresisting woman out to the street and into the waiting carriage. ‘There, now at least we have some peace and we are out of the wind. You say you are a lady’s maid and you are looking for a position?’

‘I was, but I can’t be one now, not with Daisy here. I’ll do anything, work at anything, but I’ll not give her up to the parish.’

‘Certainly not.’ All that was visible of the baby was a button nose and one waving fist. ‘Where is her father?’

Dorcas went even whiter. ‘He...he threw me out when I started to show.’

‘What, you mean he was your employer?’ A nod. ‘Did he force you?’ Another nod. ‘And his wife said nothing?’

‘He told her I’d... He said I had...’

She would get the full story later when the poor woman was less distressed. ‘Well, we won’t worry about that now. I need a lady’s maid. You can come and work for me. Or for Lord Weybourn, rather.’

‘You are Lady Weybourn?’ Dorcas was staring at her as though she could not believe what she was hearing.

‘Me?’ Tess steadied her voice. ‘No, I am his new housekeeper, but it is an all-male household and I need a maid for appearances, you understand.’ She looked at the thin, careworn face, the chapped hands gently cradling the baby, the look of desperate courage in the dark eyes. ‘It would be more like a companion’s post, really. Would you like the position?’

‘Oh, yes, ma’am. Oh, yes, please.’ And Dorcas burst into tears.

Chapter Nine

‘Where is Miss...Mrs Ellery?’ After the chaos of the morning, the previous day had passed uneventfully. Alex had dealt with his paperwork, visited some art dealers and then gone to his club, where he had dined and spent the evening catching up with acquaintances and what gossip there was in London in early December. A good day in the end, he concluded, one mercifully free from emotion and women.

He’d had some vague thought of calling on Mrs Hobhouse, a particularly friendly young widow. When he had last been in London she had sought him out, had been insistent that only Lord Weybourn with his legendary good taste could advise her on the paintings she should hang in her newly decorated bedchamber. It was so important to get the right mood in a bedchamber, wasn’t it? It had impressed Alex that she could get quite so much sensual innuendo into one word.

At the time he had considered assisting her with viewing some likely works of art from a variety of locations, including her bed, and yet somehow, when it came to the point of setting out for Bruton Street, he found he’d lost interest.

This morning’s breakfast had been excellent. Alex folded his newspaper and listened. Everything was suspiciously calm. It was surely too much to hope that Hannah had made a miraculous recovery and was back at her post.

‘Mrs Ellery is in the kitchen, my lord.’ Phipps balanced the silver salver with its load of letters and dipped it so Alex could see how much post there was. ‘Shall I put your correspondence in the study, my lord? Mr Bland said to tell you that he has gone to the stationer’s shop and will be back directly.’

‘Very well.’ Alex waved a vague hand in the direction of the door. His secretary could make a start on it when he got back; he wasn’t ready to concentrate on business yet.

So Tess had spent the night upstairs in the bedchamber above his own, had she? Alex picked up the paper, stared at the Parliamentary report for a while. Hot air, the lot of it. The foreign news didn’t make much more sense.

Spain, West Indies, the Hamburg mails... He hadn’t heard so much as a footstep on the boards overhead, but then she’d doubtless been fast asleep when he’d arrived home and had risen at least an hour before he was awake. So far, so good. The heavens hadn’t fallen and he had obviously been worrying about nothing.

Alex tossed down the Times. He was wool-gathering, which was what came of having his peace and quiet interrupted. What he needed to do was turn his mind to the possibilities for offloading a collection of rather garish French ormolu furniture that he was regretting buying. He made his way down the hall towards the study, then stopped dead when an alien noise, a wail, wavered through the quiet.

A baby was crying. Alex turned back towards the front door. Surely no desperate mother had left her offspring on his blameless front step? Well, to be honest it was hardly blameless, but he had made damn sure he left no by-blows in his wake.

The noise grew softer. He walked back. Louder—and it was coming from the basement. Then it ceased, leaving an almost visible question mark hanging in the silence.

When he eased open the kitchen door it was on to a domestic scene that would have gladdened the palette of some fashionable, if sentimental, genre painter. Tess was sitting at the table with a pile of account books in front of her. Byfleet was standing by the fireside, polishing Alex’s newest pair of boots, while Annie sat at the far end of the table, peeling potatoes.

And in a rocking chair opposite Byfleet was a woman nursing a baby while Noel chased a ball of paper around her feet. The stranger was crooning a lullaby and Alex was instantly back to the nursery, his breath tight in his chest as though arms were holding him tightly.

A family. They look like a family sitting there. Alex let out his breath and all the heads turned in his direction except for the baby, who was latched firmly on to its mother’s breast. The woman whipped her shawl around it and stared at him with such alarm on her face that he might as well have been brandishing a poker.

‘My lord.’ Tess sounded perfectly composed, which was more than he felt, damn it. ‘Did you ring? I’m afraid we didn’t hear.’

There was a pain in his chest from holding his breath and he rubbed at his breastbone. ‘No. I did not ring. I crossed the hall and I heard a child crying.’

The stranger fumbled her bodice together, got to her feet and laid the baby on the chair. ‘My lord.’ She dropped a curtsy and he noticed how pin neat she was, how thin. ‘I am very sorry you were disturbed, my lord. It won’t happen again.’ Her voice was soft and her eyes were terrified.

‘Babies cry,’ he said with a shrug. Admittedly, they weren’t normally to be found doing so in the kitchen of a Mayfair bachelor household. Himself, he’d been brought up in a nursery so remote from the floors his parents occupied that a full military band could have played there without being heard and he’d had his earliest lessons in a schoolroom equally distant where no parent would have thought of dropping by. ‘I was not disturbed, merely curious.’

‘This is Dorcas White, my lord.’ Tess moved over to stand beside the woman. Did she think she needed to protect her from him? ‘She is my new lady’s maid.’

‘And the baby?’

‘Is mine, my lord.’ Dorcas looked ready to faint.

Alex looked down at her hands, clutched together in front of her. No ring. He met Tess’s blue gaze and read a steely defiance in it that took him aback.

‘The baby’s name is Daisy, my lord.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Ellery. I am aware that babies are people, too.’ She coloured up. Annoyance, he supposed. That made two of them. ‘So we have acquired another stray, have we? I suppose I must be thankful that the baby is already with us or I have no doubt I would be expected to house oxen and a donkey in my stables come Christmastide.’

Tess drew in a deep breath through her nose and narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I suspect that verges on blasphemy, my lord. Dorcas is very well qualified as a lady’s maid.’

‘And comes with excellent references, no doubt?’ It came out sharply and Tess’s chin jutted. So she didn’t like his tone? There was still an ache in his chest that he didn’t understand, memories of childhood he thought he had locked away in his head. His tight, small, bachelor household had become full of women, virtually a crèche. He was entitled to snap—he was amazed he wasn’t shouting.

‘Might we have a word, my lord?’ Tess enquired with a sweet, false smile. ‘Upstairs?’

He held the door for her and followed her stiff back along to the study. Tess did not wait for him to get behind the barrier of his desk and sit down before she attacked. ‘No, Dorcas White does not have references. A man who forces himself on a servant and then tells his wife that the slut flaunted herself at him when he’d had a few drinks, that she’d been asking for it, is not someone who writes a reference for his victim.’

‘Are you certain?’ Even as he said it he felt ashamed of himself. Those thin, desperate hands, those wounded eyes, the way she had held her child... No, that was not some little hussy who had taken advantage of Tess’s good nature. ‘Yes, of course you are, and I can see you are right,’ he said before the angry rebuttal was out of her mouth. ‘What does she need for the child? Buy it for her, whatever it is.’

If he had been looking for a reward, which he hadn’t, he told himself, he would have got it in the smile that transformed Tess’s face.

‘Who is the father?’ He suppressed his own answering smile. This was not a laughing matter.

‘I have no idea. I didn’t ask her. Why?’

‘Because he needs dealing with,’ Alex said, startling himself. What was he, some knight errant, dispensing justice for wronged damsels? ‘Still, I suppose you’ll never get the name out of her and I don’t want her worried that the swine will find out where she is.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Tess said and clutched his hand. ‘Thank you for understanding. I knew you were Sir Lancelot really, however much you grumbled about Noel and things.’

Her hand was small and warm and strong in his and he closed his fingers around it, even as he said, in tones of loathing, ‘Sir Lancelot? Do I look like some confounded idiot clanking around in armour? And besides, he was a decidedly dubious type—making love to his king’s wife like that.’

‘I thought when you hit that sailor that you were a storybook knight and then you were grumpy with me so I changed my mind. But it is all a front, the grumpiness, isn’t it?’ Her eyes were dancing; it seemed she was as amused by her nonsense as he was.

His meek little nun was teasing him, he realised, and this time could not suppress the answering smile. Alarm bells were ringing even as he lifted her hand and pressed the back of it against his cheek, her pulse rioting under his fingers. Charm and sweetness. You cannot let yourself enjoy them, not for your sake and definitely not for hers.

‘Yes,’ Alex agreed. ‘It is all a front, but behind it is not your preux chevalier, there’s a real, live, flawed man with many masks and many, many faults.’ He moved her hand so he could nip lightly at her fingertips in warning and felt, more than heard, her shuddering indrawn breath. ‘A man who is hypocrite enough to despise the father of the child down there and yet who cannot forget the feel of your mouth under his, your body in his arms.’

Tess became still, her eyes wide and questioning. She’s an innocent, he told himself. Even if she can deal with illegitimate children and speak frankly about what has happened to Dorcas. She needs warning, scaring a little, even.

He loosened his grip on her fingers and her hand slid up to cup his cheek. She was not wary, not at all alarmed by him. The touch was not sexual, not even sensual. It was intended, he realised with something like shock, to comfort. When was the last time anyone had touched him like that?