Tangled (27 page)

"The question is," Rebecca said, "can you sing?"

194 Mary Balogh
There was another roar of laughter.

But many of them could and did sing and those who could not joined in anyway so that it did not matter that some sang too loudly or too hoarsely or too far off-key. It really did not matter at all.

Rebecca joined them, and she could hear David's voice close to her ear. Louisa was singing too, she saw when she looked her way. The earl was looking his usual stern self. But his foot was tapping.

Carolers usually sang three or four carols before taking some refreshments and going on their way. These carolers sang on and on until after about twenty minutes when David signaled to their butler, and a few minutes later the cider and the mulled wine were carried out by footmen and trays of mince pies and cakes by maids. The sounds of music gave place to jovial chattering voices and laughter.

"Are you tired?" David asked quietly. "Shall I take you back up?"

"Not yet," she said, turning to look at him. "Just a little longer, David."

He nodded and set a mince pie on a plate for her.

Their people were too shy to come to speak to them personally, but there were several jokes made for the general amusement of all. The most popular was made by Joshua Higgins, one of the young men who had helped in the garden during the autumn.

"What's this, then?" he said when there was a lull in the general noise as everyone seemed to be preparing to leave. His voice was bewildered. "Where did this come from? How did it get in my pocket, eh? Who put it here?" He drew a little sprig of greenery from the pocket of his large coat.

"Looks like mistletoe to me, Josh," another of the men said. "P'raps Miriam put it there. P'raps she was telling you that you're too slow by half."

There was general laughter and blushes and loud protests from Miriam. Joshua moved toward the fire as if to drop the wilting little plant into the flames, but he turned at the last moment, a grin on his face, and the laughter swelled and was accompanied by whistles.

Oh, dear, Rebecca thought, it was above her head. He

Tangled 195

was not going to kiss her, was he? Well, she would not become flustered. It was Christmas, after all.

And then her husband's arm tightened about her shoulders and his free hand cupped her chin to turn her face toward him, and he kissed her. Lightly, on the lips. As he had kissed her at the altar on their wedding day. A public kiss. A Christmas kiss. The whistles became piercing.

On her wedding day she had been oppressed by the knowledge that he was David, that she had freely married him, that she owed him all of herself for the rest of her life. She had been terrified by the thought of intimacy with him. And now . . .

And now? He was David. He was her husband. She had given herself to him and was carrying his child within her womb. She was his for the rest of her life. Nothing had changed. Except the terror.

And the sense of oppression. It felt good—oh, it felt so very, very good to belong. To belong to this house and these people. To belong to a man again. To be living in renewed hope of being able to have a child of her own.

They were going to be a family. A real family.

Suddenly the past seemed no longer painful, no longer to be pined for. Suddenly the present seemed very good and the future something to be anticipated with hope and pleasure.

"Happy Christmas, David," she said quietly when he raised his head.

He made a short speech of thanks to the carolers for coming and giving such a lovely start to their Christmas. Then he announced he was going to carry his wife back upstairs before they opened the doors and let all of winter inside. Rebecca smiled at them all and would have cried, she felt, if it had been a suitable thing for a viscountess to do. She noticed suddenly new scarves and mittens—a few new woolen caps—and directed a special smile at Miriam, who was now standing beside Joshua.

They were silent on the way up to her room. She felt all the anticlimax of leaving such a warm gathering. And a little embarrassed to be alone with David when he had just kissed her. The last time he had kissed her had been on the third night of their marriage, after he had had that

196 Mary Balogh
nightmare. She both hated that memory and was fascinated by it. It seemed hardly possible that it had really happened. That perhaps it was then their child have been conceived.

He sat her on the edge of the bed and unwrapped the blanket from about her. He stood in silence as she removed her dressing gown and handed it to him. She was lying down when he returned from her dressing room.

"I'll send your maid to brush out your hair," he said. "We will probably be late back from church. I'll try not to wake you when I come to bed."

"David," she said and then did not know what she wanted to say to him. It was not words she wanted to speak. She wanted ... Oh, she did not know what she wanted. It was Christmas and she had been infected with that longing Christmas always brought for something wonderful, something lasting, something beyond imagination.

"Yes?" He stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind him, waiting. Such a very elegant, correct, stern-looking gentleman, she thought, with his black frock coat and starched linen.

David. She had always yearned to know him, had always been hurt by his aloofness and puzzled by his cruelties, had always disliked him because she could not understand him. Because he was unknowable, beyond the realm of her experience. And now he was her husband and the yearning was becoming rather painful.

"It was lovely of them to come, wasn't it?" she said.

"Yes," he said. "I think you have found a way into their hearts, Rebecca. I think I did a wise thing indeed when I married you. Good night. And happy Christmas."

Tears came when he had gone. Tears of happiness. Tears of frustration. Tears of . . . She did not know why they came. And she did not know whether she felt happy or sad. Perhaps both. Was it possible to feel both? /
did a wise thing,
he had said. What a very typically dispassionate thing for David to say. Wise. Because she had won the hearts of their people? Had she? Had he not exaggerated a little? She had not done a great deal for them after all.

Tangled197

Were tears spilling over onto her cheeks because he saw her that way? Because he thought he had done a wise thing to marry her?

Were they tears of happiness? Or was it because he had not said he was glad he had married her? Because he had not thought to kiss her good night when they were alone together? Because those blue eyes of his had not smiled at her?

She wished she could know him. She wished he could let down the barriers and let her see him as he was. She wished that the affection he had spoken of could grow between them. She would like to see affection in David's eyes.

He had cried with her once. Because he had thought his baby was dying? Or because she had panicked and he knew she was suffering?

She had thought the latter at the time. She still thought it. But one never quite knew with David.

She had always known with Julian. Julian had always worn his heart on his sleeve. She felt a stabbing of longing for the openness of the love they had shared. An openness like that with David—how lovely it would be. And then she opened her eyes wide. There could never be anything like that with David, or with any other man. Only with Julian could she ever have felt such closeness. Julian had been the love of her life. She felt a sudden fear that perhaps time would dim the memory of that love. She had loved him with a love that could happen only once in a lifetime. She did not want to forget that.

It was not that she wanted with David. She wanted friendship and affection with David. And the security of a home and a family with him. Not love. Not that all-pervading emotion that had held her to Julian—that would always hold her to him in the depths of her heart.

He would try not to wake her when he came to bed, he had said.

Rebecca smiled. Did he not realize that she would not sleep properly until he did come?

******************************************************************

Louisa had supervised the decorating of the house with greenery, at David's request. It was his first real Christmas in a long while too.

Rebecca's last one had been spent in London with Julian, she had said. He had spent

198Mary Balogh

the same Christmas with his father at Craybourne. He had been in the hospital at Scutari the year after.

Christmas excited him this year. For the first time in his life he was to spend it in his own home. His father and his father's wife were to spend it with him. And his own wife. She was to come downstairs on the afternoon of Christmas Day—for tea and the exchange of gifts.

And for something else too though that was to be a surprise for her.

He helped decorate the drawing room himself, most notably the Christmas tree, an item that had his father frowning and Louisa laughing. A Christmas
tree?
A whole tree? But yes, he had said, had they not heard of such a thing? Prince Albert, the queen's consort, had introduced the custom to England several years ago. David filled a pail with soil himself, planted the tree in it, and decorated it with bows and bells and candles. He wanted something special for Rebecca to see when she came downstairs.

Rebecca. It would be their first Christmas together as man and wife. And things were going well, he thought. She was past the danger time, though he still suffered from anxiety. She was going to be able to have her child. They were going to be a family of three. She was already quite noticeably pregnant, though not nearly as large as Louisa, of course. Sometimes he woke during the nights to find her cuddled in against him. Unknown to her he often turned toward her on those occasions so that he could feel the swelling of her abdomen against his stomach. He found the feeling wonderfully—oh, not erotic. Definitely not that. Tender. He found it wonderfully tender.

She seemed almost happy despite the tedium of the month in bed and the anxiety she must have felt every single moment—it had erupted dreadfully during that terrible morning when she had thought she was miscarrying again. Last night she had seemed happy—happy to be taken downstairs, happy to be at Stedwell, surrounded by their people, sharing Christmas with them.

And he was happy. Everything he had hoped to accomplish when he came home from the Crimea seemed to have been accomplished.

He had persuaded her to marry

Tangled 199

him, he had been able to offer her a life of security and usefulness, even though the house still looked woefully shabby when one took a good look at it, and now it seemed that she was going to have a child.

He had atoned, he sometimes thought cautiously. He had given something worthwhile back to her in place of the invaluable something he had taken away. And in the process he was being healed. His wounds had not bothered him for months. And his other wounds appeared to be filming over too. He still had the dream, but not so frequently. When it did come, he simply got up from bed and left the room so that he could recover from it in private without involving Rebecca should she awake.

He knew that he had had no choice but to kill Julian. He knew that he had killed him only because he had had to. Not because he had hated him. Not because he had wanted Rebecca. He knew that he loved Julian. Despite everything. He knew that love is unconditional, that he had not stopped loving Julian merely because Julian had weaknesses of character and had been married to the woman David loved. He knew that he had nothing really to feel guilty about.

He waited patiently for full healing, for the time when he could forget and could look at Rebecca without even the smallest twinge of guilt. The time would come, he told himself.

In the meantime there was Christmas to be celebrated— the birth of the Christ child and now the promised birth of his own child.

Rebecca had dressed—for the first time in a month— in a new deep blue dress that was of a far looser fit than her other dresses. Her hair, smooth over her head, shone gold. Her waist had disappeared; her breasts looked larger; her face was fuller. She looked unbelievably beautiful to the husband who went to carry her downstairs early in the afternoon of Christmas Day.

"You look beautiful," he told her, picking her up as he had the evening before. He spoke the simple truth, though he did not hug her and kiss her as he ached to do. He was trying very hard to treat her with quiet affection, not to make any demands on her emotions that she

200Mary Balogh

might find disturbing. He always remembered with some horror the passion with which he had once used her.

The Christmas tree delighted her. When he would have set her down in the most comfortable chair beside the fire, she begged him to set her down in the one opposite it so that she could gaze at the tree.

"It is magical," she said. "What a wonderful idea, David. Was it yours?"

The first surprise was the arrival of all the neighboring gentry for tea. All of them had gatherings and parties of their own to organize and attend, but all had been so concerned for Rebecca's health that he had persuaded them to come just for an hour so that she would know that she had been missed, that she was now an accepted and valued member of a community.

He would not allow her to move from her chair, and of course this gathering was far quieter and more refined than last evening's in the hall had been. Even so, he looked anxiously at her when everyone had left and the earl had brought a stool for her feet, despite her protests that she was no invalid. He hoped that his plans for the day would not overtax her strength.

The children arrived a short time later—all the pupils from the school with the schoolmaster. All of them were frightened and excited and gazed about them in awe. They had performed their concert two days before, but this afternoon they were to do it again for the exclusive pleasure of the Earl and Countess of Hartington and Viscount and Lady Tavistock. Mostly for the viscountess, who had spent many hours at the school helping them with their reading and sewing, teaching them that singing could be fun. The Countess of Hartington, of course, was to accompany them with some of their songs, as she had at the school two days ago.