Читать книгу Unlaced At Christmas: The Christmas Duchess / Russian Winter Nights / A Shocking Proposition - Elizabeth Rolls, Christine Merrill - Страница 6

Chapter One

Generva Marsh gave the kitchen a final sweep and sighed in resignation. It was not her job to be keeping her own house. Mrs Jordan, the housekeeper, would disapprove of her meddling. But Mrs Jordan was above stairs, transfixed by the wailing and lamentations coming from Gwendolyn’s bedroom. Generva had been more than happy to abdicate that role. The girl had cried nonstop since Sunday, and the sound preyed upon her nerves.

Perhaps it was unmotherly to admit such a lack of sympathy for one’s only daughter. Perhaps the ladylike response to the chaos surrounding them was to have a fit of vapours. She should shut herself up in a bedchamber, as Gwen was doing, and turn the whole house upside down. But it was still a damned nuisance. It might be mortifying when one’s gentleman proved himself to be no gentleman at all. But when it happened before the wedding and not after, it was cause for celebration and not tears. It would have been far worse had they married.

Perhaps it was her own, dear, John who had given Generva such an annoyingly sensible attitude. When one was the widow of a ship’s captain, one learned to sail on through adversity and live each day prepared for the worst. When she had lost him, she had cried for a day as if her heart would break. Then she had looked at her two children and dried her tears so she could wipe theirs.

Now she must do so again, for one child, at least. Little Benjamin did not need her help. When he had heard the news he had declared it good riddance, stolen one of the mince pies she’d set aside for the wedding breakfast and disappeared into the yard. Generva frowned. The boy was a terror, but at least he was out of the way. The girl could have one more day, at most, to sulk over the unexpected turn things had taken.

Then she would be ordered to pull herself together, wash her face and prepare to meet the village on Christmas morning. The congregation had been promised a wedding at the end of the service. Instead, the Marshes would be proving a veritable morality play on the dangers of pride and youthful folly. They would be forced to hold their heads high and accept the condolences of the town gossips who smiled behind their hands even as they announced that it was, ‘a terrible, terrible shame, that such a lovely girl was tainted by scandal’. The old women would cluck like chickens and the young men would look away from them in embarrassment, as though Gwen was something more than an innocent victim of another’s perfidy.

Generva’s hands tightened on the handle of the broom. If John were still alive, he’d have called the fellow out. Men were far more sensible in that way than women. They saw such problems and found a solution. But as the widowed mother of the wronged girl, there was little society would permit her to do, other than wring her hands and bear her share of the disgrace.

‘In dulci jubilo...’ From the road outside, she heard the sound of a deep voice raised in song.

For a moment, she paused to lean on the broom and listen. John would have declared the fellow to have ‘a fine set of lungs’ and thrown open the door to him and any friends who accompanied him. Then he’d have poured drinks from the hearth and matched them verse for verse with his own fine tenor voice. He’d told her that, for a sailor on land, a good, old-fashioned Christmas wassail was as near to grog and shanties as one could hope.

She smiled for a moment, then glanced at the empty pot beside the kitchen fire. It was a lost tradition in this household. If a widow did not want to incite gossip, she did not open the house to misrule and invite strangers to drink punch in the kitchen. She missed it all the same.

‘There was a pig went out to dig, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day...’ The singer had finished his first song and gone on to another. He sang alone, but the carol was suited to a troupe. It had been an age since she had seen mummers in the area, putting on skits and begging door to door. It harked back to an earlier time, when Christmas was little more than a chaotic revel. Right now, she could imagine nothing more pleasant than throwing off the conventions of society and running wild.

She forced the thought to the back of her mind. Someone must keep a cool head while they weathered the current disaster. It would be her, since she could not count on her daughter, her son or her servants to behave in a rational manner. She had no time or money to spare for seasonal beggars. Nor did she have the patience. The wedding feast she had been preparing for nearly a month would go to charity. Surely that was enough of a holiday offering. When the housekeeper came to get her, if that woman could tear herself away from the drama upstairs to answer the door, Generva would plead a megrim and tell her to send the caroller away.

She heard the distant sound of the knocker at the front of the house and waited for the inevitable. But then, the song began again, growing louder as the singer rounded the corner of the house. ‘There was a crow went out to sow...’ She saw the shadow of a large body passing the window and there was a pounding on the back door.

She turned away, so that he might not know she had seen him. Damn the man and his industrious animals. She began to sweep again with more vigour. Perhaps he would think her deaf and move on to the next house.

Behind her, she felt the rush of cold air at the opening of the kitchen door. ‘Hallo! Is anyone there? I knocked at the front, but there was no answer. Is there a drink for a humble traveller who bears good news?’

She sighed. Was no one in this house tending to their posts? Was everything to be left to her? She turned back to the short hall that led to the back door and found it full of man.

Perhaps there was a better way to describe it, but she could not think of one. The gentleman standing by the door was tall and broad shouldered, and seemed to occupy all of the available space. What was not full of his body was crowded with the sheer force of his personality. The voice that had called out had not simply spoken, it had boomed. It had not been particularly loud, but deep and resonant. There was none of the awkwardness in his step of a man uncomfortable in unfamiliar surroundings. He approached as if he owned the room.

And it appeared that he could afford to do so. She had expected some beggar in a tattered mask. But the cost of this man’s coat, with its perfect tailoring and shiny brass buttons, was probably near to the annual rent of her cottage. His boots were equal to a second year. Slowly, she raised her eyes to look into his.

They were the blue of moonlit snow, bright and clear, but not cold, or even cool. They sparkled like the first drop of water on thawing ice. Perhaps it was his smile that brought the beginning of spring. It was soft and warm, seeming to light his whole person, making him seem young for his years, as though the silver in his black hair would melt away like hoarfrost. His face was as well formed as his body: high cheeks, even planes, strong chin and a nose that was regally straight but without the disdainful flare of nostrils that some rich men had when entering a simple house such as hers.

She was gawping at him and embarrassing herself. At five and thirty, she should be past the point of noticing the finer points of the male physique. She had two children to tend to and no time to spend on daydreams. But she’d have to have been blind not to admire the fine-looking man who stood before her. Despite the fact that he had come, uninvited, into her home, at the sight of him she curtsied politely. And judging by the heat in her cheeks, she was blushing.

He noticed and responded with a knowing grin, stomping the ice from his boots and swinging his arms to force warmth to his hands. ‘My dear, you are a sight for travel-weary eyes.’ He spoke slowly and clearly, as though he suspected that she had not just ignored his knock, but truly could not hear. ‘The roads are nothing but ruts from here to Oxford. I abandoned my carriage, stuck in the mud, and rode the rest of the way myself. But by God, I am here on time.’ He reached into his pocket, withdrew a paper and slammed it down on the kitchen table. ‘Go find Mr Marsh and tell him that the day is saved! The special licence has arrived. The wedding will go on as planned. Then get me a cup of mulled wine, or whatever passes for a holiday drink in these parts. I am frozen to the bone.’ He dropped down into the best chair by the fire and removed his boots so that he might warm his feet.

For a moment, all about Generva seemed to freeze, as well. She could not decide what made her the most angry. Was it the demand for wine? To be mistaken for a servant in her own home? Or that the assumption came from this particularly attractive man? In the end, she decided it was the licence that most bothered her.

It was a pity. Until that moment, she had been managing to contain her emotions on the subject quite well. But to have the thing appear when she was holding a weapon...