Holiday House Parties (11 page)

“You
are
a great gowk,” she said, coming up behind him. “You were never odious to me, Geordie, haven't you guessed that? I only pretended—to myself as well as to you—to find you odious. It was a kind of self-protection. I was afraid to let myself believe that such a tall, winning, beautiful Corinthian—with a head of lovely red curls and a brogue that would charm the birds from the trees—would ever take notice of such a little bookworm as I.”

Though these words set his heart bouncing about in his chest, he did not turn. “Michty me!” he said to the horse. “Can the lass be so daft as to call hersel' a bookworm? Bookworm, indeed! But did ye hear yer yatterin' on about
me
? Do ye think it means she loves me?”

Caroline laid her hand softly on his arm. “Wheesht, laddie, what else can my yatterin' mean?”

He turned back to her at that and lifted her high in the air, swinging her round in triumphant if crazed delight. Then he lowered her gently to his chest. “Look at me, Caroline Woolcott. I am the same man I was when you ordered me out of your London house. Do you truly mean to say ye love me?”

Two tear-sparkled eyes looked into his. “Yes, I do love you. Truly.”

“Harken to the lass!” he crowed, grinning at her foolishly. “Then like as no ye'd not object to my kissin' ye here and now? Ye've no idea how I've been achin' to do it. 'Tis an age since the last time.” Without waiting for a response, he tightened his arms about her and, while the horse neighed in approval, repeated what he'd done under the mistletoe.

After a long while, a flushed and starry-eyed Caroline brushed back his tousled curls fondly and reminded him that there were people back in the great house waiting for their dinner. “I suppose we'd better go. We don't want your aunt Maud to be angry with us.”

“My aunt Maud will be beside hersel' with joy. What with her Bella findin' a beau, and her other matchmakin' scheme lookin' successful, she's about to enjoy a completely triumphant Christmas. All ye need do is tell her that ye'll have me. Will ye, lass?”

She buried her head in his shoulder. “Aye, Geordie, lad, I will.”

“Even if I sometimes gamble? Or if I occasionally refuse to read Greek poetry with you?”

“I'll take you just as you are, Geordie McAusland. Just remember to call me dautie every now and then.”

He kissed her once more before they started out of the stable. “I had the distinct impression, lass,” he remarked, slipping his arm about her as they walked, “that ye didna ken the meaning of the word dautie when I used it last.”

She threw him a glinting smile as they stepped out into the frosty night. “It seems, my love,” she murmured happily, “that I've learned a great deal since then. And none of it Greek.”

A Sneeze on Tuesday

Sneeze on Monday, sneeze for danger;

Sneeze on Tuesday, kiss a stranger;

Sneeze on Wednesday, get a letter;

Sneeze on Thursday, something better;

Sneeze on Friday, sneeze for rue;

Sneeze on Saturday, God Bless you.

—
From an Old Nursery Rhyme

1

While precariously perched on the highest rung of a six-foot ladder, attempting to fasten the end of a long festoon of evergreens to the top of a twelve-foot-high window, Elinor Selby sneezed. It was an ordinary sneeze, only mildly explosive and accompanied by the slightest bodily tremor, but it set off an ever-widening ripple of reactions that affected not only the entire Christmas celebration but the whole direction of Elinor's life.

The sneeze occurred on a Tuesday, five days before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 1816, in the large, high-ceilinged but otherwise unpretentious (some called it shabby) drawing room of Selby Manor, Leyburn, North Riding. It was early afternoon, and from the tall windows one could see a light snow falling from a luminously gray sky. But the two occupants of the room were too busy hanging the festoon (intricately fashioned of interwoven juniper branches) between the pair of windows to take much note of the weather or the landscape that was slowly being covered with a thin veneer of winter white.

Elinor stood at the top of the ladder on tiptoe, stretching out her arms to their fullest extent in her attempt to nail one end of the festoon to the far corner of the window's cornice. Across the room at the other window, her cousin Felicia held the other end, waiting. “Oh, dear,” Elinor said, pausing in the act of reaching out, “I think I'm going to … to …
ah … ah … CHOO
!”

The first effect of Elinor's sneeze was to make the ladder wobble under her. This, in turn, caused one delicately shod foot to slip from the step. For a frozen moment Elinor, arms outstretched, stood poised on the toes of her other foot like a bird about to take flight. But the ladder, refusing to right itself, swung crazily to the left, and Elinor's tentative foothold was disastrously undone.

The ladder wavered for a moment before collapsing noisily to the floor. Felicia tried to scream as Elinor flapped her arms helplessly in the air. The younger girl watched in wide-eyed horror, utterly bereft of the ability to move during that time-stopping moment before the inevitable pull of gravity would bring her cousin crashing down. Everything, even her scream, froze in that breath of time just before catastrophe.

At that very instant, however, a broad-shouldered gentleman appeared in the doorway. Though he wore no hat, he'd obviously come in from outdoors, for his hair and the shoulders of his coat were spattered with snowflakes, and a long muffler was wound about his neck. In his hand he carried a basket loaded with eggs. He'd come through his home woods and across the Selbys' east lawn on foot—in complete disregard of the light snow—to deliver them. He'd been striding past the drawing-room door on his way to the back stairs when the sound of the collapsing ladder struck his ears.

He did not freeze. Immediately perceiving the situation, the gentleman took one quick leap over the threshold in Elinor's direction and, dropping his eggs, reached out and caught her in his arms. “Elinor!” he croaked, tottering under her weight. “Good God!”

Felicia's momentarily frozen scream now rent the air. The gentleman, unable to keep his balance under the unexpected force of Elinor's fall, toppled to his knees. But this time he succeeded in doing what he'd failed to do with the eggs; he did not drop her. Instead, he managed to ease her gently to the floor in front of him, his arms still supporting her back and legs.

“
Miles
!” Elinor clutched him about the neck. “Are you all right?”

“My condition is not the question,” he responded curtly, although the eyes he'd fixed on hers showed real concern. “
Yours
is.”

Elinor released her hold on him, her face turning pink in embarrassment. “I'm fine, thanks to you.”

Miles Endicott nodded, a frown hiding his relief. He got to his feet and helped Elinor to hers. He was the Selbys' closest neighbor, a bachelor of seven-and-thirty years, stockily built, with powerful shoulders and strong hands. His short-cropped, grizzled hair, back-belted tweed coat, and squared-toed boots made him appear to be a country squire, which indeed he was. But while country squires were usually expected to be jolly fellows, ruddy-faced, and ever ready for a chuckle, Miles Endicott could not be so described. The sardonic look in his dark eyes and a certain worldly disillusionment in the twist of his mouth gave him the appearance of a blasé London cosmopolite, despite his country clothes.

“Oh, Miles,” Elinor pressed anxiously, “are you certain I didn't injure you?”

“Quite certain,” he said, frowning at her, “though no thanks to you. I fail to understand why you must climb ladders and risk life and limb when your mother has a perfectly adequate staff to do such things for you.”

“Miles, don't scold. You know I always do the Christmas decorating myself.”

“You do everything yourself. You're the only young lady of my acquaintance who won't have an abigail to dress her.”

“What need has a country girl like me for an abigail? Stop glaring at me, Miles. Since neither one of us is hurt, no harm's done.”

“Some harm, I'm afraid,” he said, looking down at the contents of his basket, which were now sprawled on the carpet. “The eggs I was bringing to your mother have suffered massive contusions.”

“Oh, pooh, who cares about eggs!” exclaimed Cousin Felicia, dashing across the room. Felicia Fordyce was a lively girl of nineteen, with auburn curls framing a face whose perfect features and delicate coloring glowed with youth and spirit. “Oh, Mr. Endicott, you were
magnificent
!” she cried. “Your quick thinking saved the day!”

“Nonsense, child,” the squire said snappishly, “don't make a to-do!” There was something about Felicia's enthusiasm that always made him testy. Although Martha Selby, Elinor's mother, had often remarked that Felicia and her daughter Elinor were as alike as two peas—“Almost like sisters in their looks,” she was wont to exclaim—Endicott did not see the resemblance. Similar they might be in features and coloring, but their personalities were completely at variance. To him, Elinor had the subtlety and refinement of a Mozartean sonata, while Felicia was nothing more than a country dance played in a public house.

Elinor knelt down and, not noticing that her skirt brushed over a badly smashed egg that was oozing yellow liquid, began to gather up the still-whole eggs that had rolled hither and yon across the floor. “The contusions are not so massive,” she said, looking up at her savior with a grin. “Only three have actually cracked open.”

Mr. Endicott knelt beside her. “But I see that several others are showings signs of at least partial damage. Your mother will surely take me to task for—” He suddenly peered at Elinor closely. “Good God, girl, you are dreadfully pale. The fall must have upset you. Leave this clearing-up to the housemaids and lie down on the sofa at once!”

“No, truly, I'm fine,” she insisted.

But he refused to pay attention to her words. Over her repeated objections he lifted her in his arms once again and carried her to the sofa. “You do not look at all well,” he told her bluntly as he laid her down.

Felicia took a stand beside him and peered down at Elinor as he was doing. “Mr. Endicott is right, Elinor. You do not look well. And, you know, you
did
sneeze.”

Elinor sighed. She knew she was looking peaked. Her appetite had not been good lately, and she'd noted when she'd glanced into the mirror that morning that her nose was red and her cheeks sunken and pale. But she knew she'd recover in a day or two. There was nothing at all to make a fuss over. “It's only a mild case of the sniffles,” she insisted, sitting up. “I've had it for a few days, but I'm quite over it now.”

The squire pushed her back down and eyed her dubiously. He'd known Elinor Selby since birth, and he could see she was worn out. There was too much company at Selby Manor, that was the trouble. Her cousin Felicia, with her parents, her twelve-year-old sister, and her two little brothers (aged ten and eight), had come up to North Riding from London for the Christmas holidays, and the visit was probably more burdensome to Elinor than to anyone else in the Selby household. Elinor was “giving”—that was the word people used to describe her. She could never refuse to do a favor or to help someone who needed it. Generosity was a fine thing, Endicott thought, but even good qualities can be overdone.

The Fordyces, all six of them, had arrived a few days before, and the squire knew upon whom the care of the unruly youngsters had fallen. It irritated him to see Elinor used so. She was not a governess, after all! He would give her mother a piece of his mind at the first opportunity. Martha Selby should not permit her daughter to be taken advantage of. “You
must
have been overdoing things to have become so completely done in,” he scolded. “It's less than a sennight since I last saw you, my girl, and at that time you were in your best looks.”

He did not exaggerate. He'd come upon her walking through the woods that edged the two estates, and he'd watched her appreciatively as she'd approached him, her pace unusually relaxed and unhurried. How beautiful she'd been that morning, smiling, at ease, and vibrant with life! Her full lips had been ripely red, and the wind had whipped bright color into her cheeks and torn her bonnet from her head so that it hung by its ribbons against her back. Her shiny brown hair had come loose from the knot in which it had been tied and had tumbled in tousled abandon about her shoulders. He remembered how long, wild strands of it had blown across her cheeks. But now that same hair was carelessly pinned back, and the few strands that had worked themselves loose in her fall hung lank and lackluster about her thin face. Even her lips were pale as death. Only her eyes—those bright, glowing eyes that always seemed to say more than her lips ever uttered—were unaffected by weariness.

“I say, Mr. Endicott,” Felicia spoke up in brave objection (for the glowering Squire Endicott was a formidable personage to oppose), “aren't you being a little unkind about Elinor's looks?”

“I am merely being honest,” Miles Endicott said coldly. “A little honesty never does ill.”

“Neither does a little kindness,” Felicia retorted.

“It's all right, Felicia,” Elinor put in gently, surrendering to the squire's urging and permitting herself this few moments of rest. “Miles is like an uncle to me, you know. He can speak truth to me, if anyone can.”

“Thank you for the permission,” the squire said dryly, turning away to evaluate the condition of his eggs, “but I'd speak my mind whether I had permission or not.”

He
was
like an uncle to her, he realized as he bent down to collect the eggs that were not actually leaking. Acting as her uncle was a position that he'd quite enjoyed over the years. He'd been looking after her in an avuncular way ever since her father had passed on, when the child was only ten. She was now twenty-six, however, and had been betrothed since her twenty-first year to the handsome Lord Lovebourne. Shortly after their betrothal, Julian Henshaw, Lord Lovebourne, had gone to the West Indies to manage his father's estates. (It was another sign of Elinor's generosity that she'd agreed to spend five precious years of her vanishing youth in a lonely wait for his return.) But Lovebourne's five-year excursion would soon be over. Any day now he'd return and claim his bride, and when that happened, he, Endicott, would be a part of her life no longer. He was aware that this significant fact—this crucial circumstance that would deprive him of a prized relationship—had a depressing way of knotting up his stomach when he thought about it. It was, he supposed, how a father felt when giving up his daughter in marriage.