A Candlelit Regency Christmas
‘You are very hard on yourself, aren’t you, Alex?’ Tess murmured. ‘You aren’t a saint, you certainly aren’t a monk, so why do you expect it of yourself?’
‘I am a gentleman,’ he said, his voice harsher than he’d intended. ‘The least I can do is try to behave like one around decent women.’
‘You are trying. Very hard, I think.’ She cocked her head to one side with that questioning look he was learning to beware of. ‘I may be a virgin, and that may have been my first kiss, but I am quite capable of recognising sensual attraction when I experience it. There is something between us, isn’t there?’
Alex found himself incapable of answering her as she wrestled so honestly with things no young lady was supposed to think about, let alone articulate.
‘I am quite capable of saying no, at least, I am when I haven’t been hit on the head and frightened half out of my wits,’ Tess said decisively. She lowered her hand and stepped away. ‘We got carried away, we both did. But the onus should not be all on you to be prudent.’
‘Prudent?’ Alex found he had to move away from her. If it was a retreat, he didn’t care, and the big desk was a reassuringly solid barrier. ‘Naturally it is down to me to behave properly.’
‘If I was the sort of young woman who has a hope of marrying, then of course it is,’ she agreed. Tess perched on the arm of a chair and he wondered if, for all her calmness, her legs were a bit shaky. ‘But I’m not, am I? So I need to make decisions based on different criteria, such as, do I want to be your mistress? What would make us happiest, while it lasted?’
‘Tess, stop this! You cannot discuss being my mistress, and happiness is the last thing we should be considering.’
‘Is it?’ She frowned at him, her brow wrinkled. ‘But what is the point of a...liaison if it doesn’t make people happy? What is the point of life, come to that?’
‘Frankly? I do not know about the meaning of life. I just get on with living it as best I can. But a liaison? It is about sex on one side and financial gain on the other,’ Alex snapped. He drove his fingers through his hair and tried to get his feet back on solid ground. This was like finding oneself knee-deep in fast-flowing water when one thought all one was doing was having a stroll beside a stream. ‘It is commerce. It is not something you should even think about.’
Her expression seemed to indicate that she was thinking about it, very carefully, very seriously.
Alex fought the urge to run his finger around a neckcloth that seemed far too tight. He coped with sophisticated ladies, wanton widows, expensive high-fliers, all without turning a hair. Why the devil was he finding it hard to deal with one outspoken innocent? ‘Look, Tess, men and women find themselves physically attracted all the time. We have to deal with it like everyone else does. You just pretend it isn’t happening.’
She nodded. ‘I can see that is usually best. But this isn’t making you happy, is it?’
‘It is making me damnably confused, if you must know.’ Did she think he expected sexual favours as a payment for giving her shelter? Did she think that in return for shelter she had a duty to make him happy, whatever she meant by that? She certainly wasn’t casting out lures or flirting, although he doubted she knew how. ‘But that is beside the point. You are a lovely young woman, Tess. I would have to be a plank of wood not to be attracted to you.’
That made her smile, at least. ‘Thank you. It wasn’t that I had decided we should have an affaire, you understand. But I don’t want you feeling guilty all the time if things happen. I expect I will learn not to notice when we touch by accident, or when I meet your eyes and I seem to read things in them.’
She could read him like a book, he was sure, even if she didn’t understand some of the long words. ‘It will do me no harm to feel guilty occasionally.’ Alex made his tone lighter. ‘We’ll not speak of this again.’ Who do I think I am deceiving? ‘Now, about Dorcas—make certain she understand she’s safe here. I’m not going to throw her out if the baby cries. I won’t have her hiding it away for fear of that. A baby should be with its mother.’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you, I will reassure her.’ Tess stood up. ‘Thank you for letting me stay. I know it is disrupting things, even if we leave aside...you know. But I work hard and I’ll earn my keep, I promise.’
‘You don’t have to work at all.’ Alex put as much bored languor into his tone as he could. ‘You could stay in your room with Dorcas to chaperon you until Hannah is well again or we find you a post. As you are well aware, if I’d delivered you where you asked, on time, none of this would have occurred.’
‘I have my pride, too, you know.’ Tess bobbed her infuriatingly proper curtsy and went out as though they had discussed nothing more momentous than a minor staffing problem.
Alex sat down took a deep breath and pulled his pile of correspondence towards him. Tess had been brought up to tackle issues head-on and without hypocrisy, it seemed. But hypocrisy was one of society’s main safeguards, and without it she was vulnerable. So was he. The widow who wanted to buy pictures was looking increasingly tempting. It was too long since he had been with a woman; that was all it was, this need to hold Tess, to take the pins from her hair, the clothes from her body, to lie down with her and...
* * *
She had shocked Alex, Tess realised. Seeing the baby had upset him for some reason, and it wasn’t the fact that little Daisy’s crying had annoyed him. He was angry with Dorcas’s employer, which was understandable, for any decent person would have been, but there was something else, something deeper in his reaction.
And that moment when she had taken his hand had been...startling. She’d had no intention of flirting and she had no idea how to. She certainly hadn’t thought of trying to provoke him into kissing her again, but the energy that had flowed between their joined fingers still sparkled along her veins. It had seemed to her important to try to understand where they stood, to tell him how she felt. But that had been a mistake. He had not wanted that kind of honesty from her. And she couldn’t simply take his protection, his money, and do nothing in return. She expected to work for her living, and she owed it to Hannah to keep her from worrying about the household while she was ill.
When Tess got to her feet and went into the kitchen it was empty except for Dorcas, who was hemming handkerchiefs with the baby fast asleep in a makeshift crib by her side. She looked up. ‘Is he...is his lordship very angry?’
‘Not at all, just startled. He says we are to buy whatever Daisy needs and you are not to be afraid that he will be annoyed if he hears her crying.’ Tess sat down on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Lord Weybourn is simply not used to having women about the house, that is all.’
Chapter Ten
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come back to Half Moon Street? I could make up the room across the passage from mine, and now I have Dorcas with me we can nurse you easily.’
‘That is thoughtful of you, Tess.’ Hannah Semple groped for a handkerchief as she began to cough. ‘Oh, drat and blast this! We sound like a colony of seals I once saw on the coast.’ From the room opposite came the echo of the same sound. ‘But I’m better here in my own home with my things around me. And no one is very sick now, just laid low with this wretched chesty cough, so Mrs Green and her girls are managing to look after us easily enough.’
She curled her fingers around the cup of tea that Tess handed to her and sipped, her nose glowing pinkly though the steam. ‘Besides anything else, I’d drive Lord Weybourn mad with the coughing.’
‘He doesn’t seem to be disturbed by the baby.’ Tess poured herself a cup and settled back in the fireside chair. ‘And she cries a lot, bless her.’
‘I find it hard to imagine, Alex taking in a baby.’
‘You thought he would send her away? He wasn’t pleased, not at first, but that just was the surprise, I think.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean he would send them off into the night. But I’d have expected him to find her lodgings or something, not have them live in.’ Hannah sneezed, then sat regarding Tess over the top of the handkerchief. ‘You’ve turned his house upside down with your strays by the sound of it. I’m amazed he hasn’t reacted more strongly.’ She sat up against the pillows. ‘Has he had any visitors?’
‘No, he goes out a lot and there have been endless invitations, but there’ve been no callers. I don’t think he’s issuing invitations with me there.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he’s being so tolerant. After all, kittens and babies underfoot wouldn’t do much for his carefully maintained image.’
‘What image?’
‘Elegant, imperturbable, languid and cultivated. A fastidious pink of the ton on the surface. He’s a serious sportsman on the quiet, but unless you saw him after a hard round at Gentleman Jackson’s you’d be forgiven for not noticing.’
Tess laughed. ‘That’s just a mask. Underneath he’s funny and very kind. And the sparring explains the muscles.’
‘Hmm. You’ve noticed them, have you?’ Hannah gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘He’s thought about nothing but himself for ten years.’ Despite the thickness of her voice she sounded remarkably tart.
‘But he is kind.’
‘I didn’t say he wasn’t. He’s charming, he treats people well—and he organises his life so no one gets behind the mask or disturbs his well-ordered life.’
Tess kicked off her shoes and curled up in the chair. Outside the rain was threatening to turn into sleet and the wind howled in the chimney, making the flames dance and reminding them that December had most definitely arrived. Inside all was snug and comfortable, she had thought. Now Hannah was making her uneasy.
‘His mistresses must,’ she suggested with the sensation of jabbing her tongue against a sore tooth. ‘Get close, I mean.’
‘I very much doubt it. They can get inside those well-cut clothes, they can rumple his sheets—but lay bare the man underneath? No.’
‘But...’ But I get to the real man sometimes. I can touch more than his skin. She almost said it, then realised how pathetic it would sound. I’m different. He lets me in. He trusts me. And Hannah, who has known Alex for most of their lives, will smile and be kind about my illusions. She might even think I’m developing a tendre for him. How humiliating.
‘Why does he need a mask?’ she said instead. ‘What is he hiding?’
Hannah laughed and set off a coughing fit. She waved Tess back to her chair when she reached for the water glass. ‘I’m all right. He isn’t hiding, he is creating. He has remade himself from scratch these past ten years.’
‘Ten? But he’s twenty-seven now. What happened when he was seventeen?’
‘He left home.’ Hannah frowned at a harmless print hanging over the fireplace. ‘For good, I mean. He’d been at university for one term. He came home for...he came home for a visit, and when he returned to Oxford he never went back to Tempeston again.’
‘But seventeen is very young.’ What had she been like at seventeen? Full of questions and uncertainties, her body no longer that of a girl, her emotions torn between a yearning to be back in the safety of childhood and an uneasy impatience to discover the world. What must it be like for a boy, out by himself in that big, dangerous world?
‘Yes, it is young,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But he had friends and anger and intelligence to keep him going.’
Anger. ‘What happened? What drove him away?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘As I said, it is not my story to tell. If Alex ever does tell you about that Christmas, then you will know you really have got under the mask, under his skin. If he trusts you with that, then he has entrusted you with his soul and everything fragile within that tough carapace he has built around himself.’
They sat in silence. Hannah seemingly worn out after her outburst, Tess unable to find words. So it had been Christmas. Was that why he was so cynical about the festival? Eventually she said, ‘But don’t his parents want to be reconciled with him?’
‘Have you ever wounded someone badly?’
Tess shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’
‘If you had, then perhaps you would understand. If you injure a person close to you so cruelly that your own conscience is riven, then sometimes you become angry with them for making you feel so guilty. His father did something inexcusable, something that resulted in a death, something that slashed Alex to the heart. Lord Moreland is a man who never found himself at fault, who has never been known to own a wrong or to apologise. I expect nothing has changed.’ She shrugged, a complicated heaving of blankets and shawls. ‘Therefore, if he is not at fault, then Alex must be. If he had hurt Alex, then Alex must have been to blame. Do you understand?’
‘I think so. How dreadful.’ The words were inadequate, but she could find no others. Tess reached out a hand to the fire for some warmth. ‘Could Alex not make the first move to reconcile?’
‘You know those horse-drawn tramways? There are iron or wooden rails and the horse can draw a heavy load quite easily along them?’ Hannah did not wait for an answer. ‘To move from that exact track would need huge effort and would most certainly overturn the cart, injure the horse, possibly kill the driver. Should the driver try to leave the tracks, drive a new path, risk that injury, just on the off chance it might work?’
The silence stretched on. Tess looked up and found Hannah’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and deep. She had fallen asleep, worn out, perhaps by emotion.
Tess uncurled herself and put on her shoes, found her things and tiptoed out.
* * *
‘I don’t think Mrs Semple is well enough to come back to work, not this side of Christmas. I know it is almost three weeks away, but there is all the preparation to be thought of.’ Tess folded back the notebook she was using to keep lists of things to be done. Now a fresh page was headed Christmas?? and she had caught Alex just before William Bland, his secretary, arrived. She was determined to pin him down for some answers.
‘I thought she was not seriously ill.’ He stopped mending the end of his pen with a pocket knife and looked up. ‘I must send the doctor round again.’
‘She is getting better, but the infection seems to have settled on the lungs of all of the sufferers and they are worn out with coughing. She needs a holiday somewhere she can be looked after. What would she usually do at Christmas?’
‘Go back to her husband’s family in Kent. It’s a big family and she’s very fond of them.’ Alex squinted at the pen nib, then stuck it in the standish. ‘I could send her down early, in the coach with rugs and hot bricks and one of the men to escort her.’
‘That sounds like a good idea. Shall I arrange it?’
‘No. I’ll go and talk to her, if that dragon of a landlady will let me, a dangerous man, into her female fortress. Anything else in that very efficient little notebook?’
‘I need to know exactly what happens here at Christmas. What the arrangements for the rest of the staff are, whether you’ll be entertaining, whether you’ll be out much. I need to plan for meals, shop for provisions,’ she added when he looked at her blankly. ‘Phipps and MacDonald tell me they don’t have family in the south and then there’s the coachman and your grooms.’
‘What happens is that I don’t expect to see them from the morning of the twenty-fourth until the evening of the twenty-sixth. They fill the coal scuttles and leave the place tidy and I eat out at my clubs. I can cope with making my own bed once a year,’ he added, presumably in response to her opening and closing her mouth like a landed carp. ‘I told you—I spend Christmas by my own fireside with a pile of books and a bottle or so of good brandy. All of my friends of a sociable disposition will be out of town.’
‘Then, you do not mind what happens below stairs so long as it does not disturb you?’
‘Or burn the house down or bring in the parish constable. Exactly.’
‘Right.’ Tess closed her notebook with a snap. This house was going to have a proper Christmas regardless of what his lordship expected. ‘And above stairs you just want appropriate preparation made?’
‘Certainly. You can manage that?’
‘Oh, yes, especially if you are out most of the time.’
‘That would be helpful, would it?’ Alex asked absently. He was already running one finger down a column of figures. ‘I’ll be at the club a lot of the time.’ He flipped open his desk diary and made a note as there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in!’
‘My lord?’ Mr Bland looked in, his arms full of papers. ‘I have the auction catalogues from Christie’s you wanted, but I can come back when it is convenient.’
‘No, we’ve finished, haven’t we, Mrs Ellery?’
‘Indeed we have, my lord.’
When she went down the indoor staff were all below stairs. ‘MacDonald? Please ask the stable staff to join us. All of them. Annie! Leave the scullery cleaning a moment and come in here.’
They crowded into the kitchen, Annie still clutching her scrubbing brush, Byfleet the flatirons he’d been about to set on the grate. The grooms brought the rich, warm smell of horses to mingle with the aroma of baking bread as they stood awkwardly by the back door.
How long had she been here? Tess wondered as she surveyed their faces. Scarcely a week? It was hardly much more since she had staggered in, battered and exhausted, and yet this was beginning to feel like home, and she was gaining a confidence she never expected to find. In the new year, when Hannah was well again, she could set out on her quest for employment feeling so much better equipped.
The staff were waiting patiently. Tess jerked her thoughts away from the prospect of employment agencies and smiled. ‘I have been discussing Christmas with his lordship. Mrs Semple is much better, you’ll be glad to hear, but she’ll be going off to her in-laws in Kent very soon to recover. Now, how many of you will be spending Christmas at home with your families?’
Annie held up her hand, realised it was holding a dripping brush and gulped. ‘Me. I’ll be at me lodgings, I s’pose, Mrs Ellery, ma’am.’
‘No one else?’ Heads shook. ‘And who’s at the lodgings, Annie?’
She shrugged. ‘The other lodgers, ma’am.’
Tess had a fairly good idea what home must be like for Annie. ‘Do you think you would like to join us for Christmas, Annie?’ The girl’s jaw dropped, then she nodded energetically. ‘You can have one of the upstairs rooms for a few nights. What do the rest of you usually do?’
‘Make do,’ Byfleet volunteered. ‘We’re all men, so we get in some food from the cook shops, his lordship lets us have extra money and plenty of beer and a bottle or so from the wine cellar. We smoke, play cards, yarn a bit.’
‘We’ll be a mixed party this year,’ Tess said briskly. ‘I can cook a proper Christmas dinner if I have some help.’ I hope. She glanced at the row of cookery books on the mantelshelf. ‘Then we can go to church afterwards, for midnight service. Christmas morning we’ll exchange presents and enjoy ourselves for the rest of the day.’ She looked around the room. ‘What do you say?’
‘I say yes,’ MacDonald said with a broad grin. ‘I’ll get out my fiddle and Will there has got his flute. And with the youngsters we’ll have a proper Christmas.’ He started counting heads. ‘There’s the three from the stables, me and Phipps, Mr Byfleet, Dorcas and little Daisy, Annie and you, ma’am.’ He grinned. ‘That’s ten, a snug little party, Mrs Ellery.’
‘It is indeed,’ Tess said. And if I can work a miracle there will be eleven of us. So far, so good. We have a party. Now we need presents.
* * *
Alex tossed the sale catalogue aside. Nothing in it got his acquisitive juices flowing. He felt bored, he realised incredulously. No, not bored exactly. Stale? Tired of London, tired of routine. Unsettled. It was ridiculous. He was normally so involved with his work and with his social round that Christmas was a welcome opportunity to sit back and relax. He regarded his drawing room with disfavour. It was too damn tasteful, too blasted orderly.
It was Tess who was responsible for this mood, he suspected. She was turning the place upside down. Hannah had been efficient, but mostly invisible. She left him to himself except for the occasional evening when she would shed her housekeeper’s cap and come and curl up in a chair in the drawing room and gossip over a glass of wine. She was an old friend, she had a busy life of her own beyond his front door and she left him alone to live his life as it suited him.
But Tess was there, in the house, day and night. And she expected things of him beyond the regular payment of housekeeping money and a list of meal times when he wanted to be fed at home. She expected him to react, to involve himself with the concerns of the other staff. And she was up to something with this Christmas obsession of hers. And that was leaving aside the nagging awareness of her physically, the effort it took not to think of the slim figure, the soft mouth, those wise, young, blue eyes.
There was a tap on the door, the modest yet definite knock he was learning to associate with his temporary housekeeper.
‘Come in.’ Yes, it was his little nun with her confounded notebook. He got up from the sofa where he’d been sprawled and waved her to the chair opposite.
Not such a little nun now, he thought as she settled her well-cut skirts into order. With good food and a warm house she had lost that pinched, cold look. Taking command suited her, put a sparkle in those blue eyes and a determined tilt to that pointed chin. And the food had done more than keep her warm, it had given her curves that were most definitely not nun-like.
My staff, my responsibility, he reminded himself, sat down and dumped the Christie’s catalogue firmly onto his lap.
‘Are you all right, my lord? I thought you winced just now.’
‘Alex, for goodness’ sake.’ He smiled to counteract the snap. ‘And it was just a touch of...er...rheumatism.’
‘Rheumatism?’
He shrugged and the catalogues slid helpfully, painfully, into his throbbing groin. ‘What can I do for you, Tess?’
‘Christmas presents,’ she said. She flipped open her notebook, produced a pencil and stared at him as though expecting dictation.
‘Whose Christmas presents?’
‘For the staff. The men, of course, Dorcas and little Daisy. And Annie. I think Annie should stay for a few nights, I don’t like to think of her having to go back to that lonely lodging house.’
‘Who the blazes is Annie? The scullery maid? No, don’t answer that. Do what you want about staff meals, but why presents? I give them all money on St Stephen’s Day.’
‘Of course you do and I am sure it is very generous. But Christmas presents are special, don’t you think? Personal.’
Alex considered a range of things he could say and decided it was probably safer not to utter any of them, not when faced with a woman armed with a notebook. ‘I’ll give you some money and you can buy them.’
‘I think the staff would really appreciate it if you chose them yourself.’ He could feel himself glowering and could only admire her courage as she continued to smile. ‘It is more in the Christmas spirit, don’t you think?’
‘Tess, you know perfectly well what I think about Christmas spirit. Codswallop. Humbug. Ridiculous sentimentality.’ Anyone else would have backed down in the face of that tone and his glare. All the men he knew certainly would have done. They obviously raised them with backbones of steel in convents.
‘But I know you value your staff,’ she said in a voice of sweet reason. ‘We could go out this afternoon unless you are very busy.’ By not so much as a flicker did her eyes move towards the pile of discarded journals, abandoned catalogues, crumpled newspapers and the other evidence of a lazy morning. ‘It isn’t raining. And I have a list.’