Under the Mistletoe

A Family Christmas

“Well?” Lady Templar watched impatiently as her daughter folded her letter and set it down beside her plate on the breakfast table.

“Mr. Chambers will be coming for Christmas,” Elizabeth replied, rearranging the napkin across her lap.

“Here? To Wyldwood Hall?” Her mother looked aghast. “How dreadfully inconvenient.”

“It is his home, Mama,” Elizabeth reminded her.

“His father purchased it as a trophy,” Lady Templar said disdainfully, as if that fact made it less a possession. “He thought it would elevate him into the ranks of the beau monde and erase the vulgar smell of commerce from his person. He thought to make doubly sure by purchasing a well-bred bride for his son. Well, the son may have both the home and the bride, but he is as much a cit as his father, Lizzie. He is an embarrassment. I wish in my heart now that we had not invited the whole family to spend Christmas here. But it is too late to change our plans. Tomorrow everyone will be arriving. How very provoking, to be sure, that Mr. Chambers will be here too.”

We? Elizabeth thought. Our plans? It was her mother who had invited everyone to Wyldwood. She had written the invitations and sent them on their way before Elizabeth had even known about her plan for a family Christmas.

Elizabeth folded her napkin again, set it neatly beside her plate, and rose to her feet. She had not eaten, but she had lost her appetite. Mr.

Chambers was coming home.

“Will you excuse me?” she asked. “There are a thousand and one tasks I must attend to.”

“All of which you will leave to me, Lizzie,” her mother said firmly.

“You know I am far more experienced than you in managing servants and organizing large house parties.”

Elizabeth smiled at her but did not sit down again. She left the room and made her way straight up to the nursery. It was not time to feed Jeremy yet. There would have been time first to complete several of the tasks she had spoken of. But she needed to compose herself. The letter had upset her. So had her mother’s open contempt for Mr. Chambers. Lord and Lady Templar had come to Wyldwood in August to be close to their daughter during her confinement in September, and they still had not returned home. Lady Templar had taken over the running of the household, and it had run smoothly ever since.

Elizabeth could not dispute the truth of what her mother had just said about her superior competence. But oh, how she longed to have her home back to herself again, even if she was less experienced at running a large house. But how could she say anything to hurt her mother? She had never been an assertive person.

Now all of her aunts and uncles and cousins, as well as her brother and his wife and son, were coming for Christmas-and so was Mr. Chambers. She really had not expected that he would come. She had not even written to inform him of the family Christmas that her mother had planned and to which she had acquiesced after the fact because it was always easier to let Lady Templar have her way than try to fight her.

The baby’s nurse was sitting close to the window, sewing. Elizabeth indicated with one raised hand that she was not to get up. Jeremy was awake in the crib, making little baby noises, though he was not crying.

She bent over him, smiling and cooing to him, and lifted him out. She could never resist holding him; he was so soft and cuddly, even though her mother had warned her during the month after his birth that she would spoil him if she gave him too much attention. If love could spoil a person, then so be it.

It was her one little rebellion against her mother.

Mr. Chambers was coming home. Edwin. She formed his name with her lips, though she did not speak it aloud. She never had said it aloud-except during their nuptial service.

Her mother had just spoken with the utmost disdain of Mr. Chambers’s father, who had attempted to buy his way into the upper classes by purchasing a viscount’s daughter for his son. But Mama had been quite as eager for the marriage, Elizabeth thought with some bitterness, and Papa had voiced no complaint. The marriage settlement had enabled them to pay off all the considerable family debts, the result of years of gaming and extravagant living. It had not seemed to matter then that Mr. Chambers’s father was a city merchant without birth or connections and spoke with a hearty Cockney accent. The only important consideration had been that he was as wealthy as a nabob. Privately, of course, they had considered it lowering to have to marry their only daughter to his son, but sacrifices had to be made if they were to maintain the style of living to which their consequence entitled them.

Elizabeth had been the sacrifice. She had been married off to Mr. Edwin Chambers a little over a year ago, early in December, two weeks before the elder Mr. Chambers died of a heart seizure. During those two weeks Jeremy had been conceived. After the funeral of his father, the younger Mr. Chambers had settled his wife on the grand estate his father had purchased less than a year before, and returned to London to manage the family business. She had seen him on only one occasion since. He had come to Wyldwood after the birth of their son in September. He had visited her in her bedchamber for ten minutes each day, but even during those brief sessions her mother had always been present and had dominated the conversation, choosing topics-deliberately, it had seemed to Elizabeth-designed to exclude her son-in-law or demand only one-word answers from him. He had returned to London after less than a week, with only a few brief words of good-bye to Elizabeth-in her mother’s company.

He was a stiff, proud, humorless, morose man. As handsome as sin, it was true, with his blond hair and regular features and trim, elegant figure, but with no character or personality or human warmth with which to attract even the mildest affection. He had been a dreadful disappointment to Elizabeth. Nevertheless, he was her husband, and it hurt to hear her mother belittle him.

When the nurse went downstairs to fetch more mending, Elizabeth sat down. She set the baby on her lap, his head nestled between her knees.

She held him by the ankles and lifted his legs one at a time to kiss the soft soles of his feet.

“And he is your papa, my precious,” she said aloud. “He is coming home for Christmas.”

Jeremy blew a bubble.

Perhaps, she thought, if he stayed for a week or two he could leave her with child again. It was not an entirely unwelcome prospect. Jeremy gave meaning to her lonely life. Another child could only enliven her existence even more. It was only the process she dreaded. He had not treated her roughly during the two weeks following their wedding-not by any means. He had done only what her mother had warned her he would do.

It had not even been painful, except a little the first time. But she had been chilled and humiliated by the impersonality of it all.

“But I will say this,” Elizabeth told her son, taking his little hands in hers and clapping them while he cooed at her. “You were worth every minute of it. And your brother or sister would be worth as many minutes more.”

It was strange how sometimes she ached for what she had found so terribly disappointing.

Sometimes Edwin thought that perhaps he had been too fond of his father, who had loved him with every beat of his great, generous heart. His father had worked for years longer than necessary in order to make sure that his son would live the life of a gentleman. Edwin had had an expensive tutor and had later gone to one of the best schools in England and then to Cambridge. He had been given, in fact, every social and educational advantage that money could buy, as well as oceans of love.

Wyldwood Hall had been bought for him. So had his bride, with the idea that she would provide him with an entrée to the highest ranks of the society into which he had not been born but for which he had been raised and educated. If it was possible to die happy, the elder Mr. Chambers had done it.

His son had made him happy by allowing himself to be formed into the sort of person he would rather not have been and placed in the sort of world he would rather not live in with a wife not of his own choosing.

He had loved his father-perhaps too much.

It was a gray, blustery, raw day, two days before Christmas, when Edwin Chambers rode up the long driveway toward Wyldwood Hall. He looked ahead to the imposing stone mansion with a sinking heart. It was his, but it did not feel like home. It never had. He would rather be going almost anywhere else on earth to spend Christmas, he thought-except that his wife was here. And his child. And when all was said and done, he was sufficiently his father’s son that he could not simply turn from what was his or shirk his responsibilities altogether.

His father had never understood that all Edwin had ever wanted was to be proudly his son, to allow him into the family business, to speak with a Cockney accent if he so wished, to marry a woman of his own choosing from his own world and bring up sons and daughters to be proud of their heritage. But it was not his father’s fault that he had never understood. Edwin had never told him, had never been willing to dash the dearest dream of his father’s life. In addition, he had known for a number of years that his father was dying of a heart disease.

Perhaps it was wrong to allow one’s life to be manipulated, even when the motive was nothing more heinous than love. But he had done it, and he must live with the consequences.

Lord and Lady Templar would still be here, he did not doubt. They had come for a month or so and stayed for almost five. They would continue to live here, he supposed, for the rest of their lives. Their own home was shabby and in dire need of all sorts of repairs, none of which they could afford. And so Christmas must be spent, not only with his wife and son, but with his mother- and father-in-law, who had never made any secret of the disdain they felt for their daughter’s husband. They had driven him away in September. He had been unwilling to assert his will against them-most particularly his mother-in-law-while his wife was still so weak after giving birth to Jeremy. They would not drive him away this time until he was ready to leave. But the thought of the inevitable conflict was a dreary one.

He swung down from the saddle outside the great double front doors and handed the reins to a groom, who had materialized from the stables without having to be summoned. He wondered if his approach had been noted from the house too, if it had been watched for with as much reluctance as he felt. Even as he wondered, the front doors swung open from within, and the butler was bowing regally to him and welcoming him home.

Edwin nodded affably and bade the butler a good afternoon.

“Is Mrs. Chambers at home?” he asked.

But she was coming through the stairway arch even as he spoke, and he was struck again, as he had been thirteen months or so ago, when he had set eyes on her for the first time, by her breathtaking beauty. She was on the tall side, slender and yet shapely. She bore herself with an aristocratic grace that was bred into her very bones. She had dark golden hair, large blue eyes, and perfect features.

She was like an icicle, he had thought from the start-and nothing had happened since to cause him to change that initial impression-ethereally lovely, but icy cold, frigid to the heart. Everything about her bearing and manner proclaimed her contempt for the man who had allowed his father to purchase her as a trophy for his son.

She curtsied. “Mr. Chambers,” she said. “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

He inclined his head to her as he handed a footman his hat and greatcoat and gloves. She had never called him by his given name, though he had invited her to do so when he had called upon her to go through the farce of proposing marriage to her. He had deliberately called her by hers after their nuptials, though she had never invited him to do so. Her greeting chilled and irritated him. The married couples from his world did not address each another with such impersonal formality.

“Yes, thank you, Elizabeth,” he said. “You are well? You have recovered your health?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

“And my son?”

The tightening of her lips was almost imperceptible, but it suggested unexpressed annoyance. He wished he could recall his words and speak them again to refer to Jeremy as their son. But he was accustomed to boasting to his friends about his golden-haired boy-my son-whom he had last seen when the child was ten days old.

“He is well, thank you,” she said.

If, he thought ruefully, he had married a woman from his own world, she would perhaps have greeted him each evening of the past year on his return home from work with a smile and a kiss and warm, open arms and an eagerness to share her day with him and to hear about his. He would naturally have thought of their child as ours. He would have seen their son every day of the child’s life.

But he had only himself to blame that things were not so. His father had not forced him into this marriage. Indeed, he would have been horrified if he had realized that Edwin did not really want it.

“Would you like to go to your room to freshen up?” she asked, her eyes moving over him and making him intensely aware of the less than pristine state of the clothes in which he had been riding for the better part of the day. “I have guests in the drawing room.”

“Lord and Lady Templar?” he said. “I trust they are well?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said. Her chin rose a notch, and she suddenly looked arrogant as well as cold. “We decided to have a family Christmas here. All the members of my family arrived yesterday.”

What? Good Lord! Without any consultation with him? Was he to have been even informed? How disastrous his own decision to come home at such short notice must have seemed to his wife and her family. How disastrous it seemed to him! If he could, he would have turned and left the house without further ado and ridden away back to London. All her family? He had never even met most of them. Their wedding had been a fair-sized affair, but apart from Lord and Lady Templar and their son and daughter-in-law, all the guests had been his family and his friends and his father’s. He could not leave now, though.

He would not leave. This was, after all his home.

“I will meet and welcome them to Wyldwood later,” he said. “But first I would like to go to the nursery. Will you come there with me?”

“Of course.” She turned to accompany him through the arch to the staircase. She clasped her hands gracefully in front of her, discouraging him from offering his arm.

“How many guests?” he asked as they ascended the stairs. He could hear the chill in his own voice. He had never been able to inject warmth into it when speaking with his wife. How could one hold a warm conversation with an icicle?

“Thirty-two adults altogether,” she said. “Thirty-three now.”

He winced inwardly. Under different circumstances he might have felt some amusement over the realization that he had made the numbers odd.

Doubtless his wife and his mother-in-law had planned meticulously in order to ensure even numbers. He would even be willing to wager that of the other thirty-two adults sixteen were gentlemen and sixteen ladies, even though normally one would not expect a family to fall into such a neat pattern.

He was surprised when he opened the nursery door and stood to one side to allow his wife to precede him inside. He had expected a hush appropriate for a sleeping baby. Instead there was a noisy, cheerful hubbub. But of course-there must be children as well as adults in her family. There was a vast number of the former, it seemed, all rushing about at play, all talking-or, rather, yelling-at once. A few nurses were supervising, but by no means subduing them.

Several of the children stopped what they were doing to see who was coming in. A few of them came closer, and a copper-haired, freckled little boy demanded to know who Edwin was.

“You must remember to mind your manners, Charles,” Elizabeth said, nevertheless showing a human touch by ruffling the hair of the offender.

“This is your… uncle. Charles is Bertie’s eldest,” she explained, naming her brother. She identified the other children in the group, all of them cousins or the children of cousins.

“What is your name?” Charles asked.

“Charles!” Elizabeth exclaimed, sounding embarrassed.

But Edwin held up a hand. “Have you noticed,” he asked, winking at the boy, “that when a lad does not know something he ought to know, adults invariably tell him he should have asked? Yet when he does ask, he is treated as if he had been impertinent?”

“Ye-e-es!” The children were all in loud agreement, and Edwin grinned at them all.

“He is Uncle… Edwin,” Elizabeth explained.

There was a chorus of requests that Uncle Edwin come and play with them.

He held up a staying hand again, chuckling as he did so. Almost all his closest friends had young families, who for some inexplicable reason always saw him as a potential playmate. His friends claimed that it happened because he was still a child at heart. He liked children.

“Tomorrow,” he promised. “We will play so hard that you will not have to be told to go to bed in the evening. In fact, you will beg your nurses to let you go there.”

There was a swell of derisive denials. Charles, who was obviously something of a leader, snorted.

“It is a promise,” Edwin told them. “But today I have come to see a certain baby by the name of Jeremy, who is mine. Has anyone seen him running around here, by any chance?” He looked around him with a frown of concentration.

“Nah,” a plump little boy told him, the utmost contempt in his voice.

“He’s just a baby.”

“I wanted to play with him,” a little girl added, “but he had to go to sleep. Is he yours? He is Aunt Lizzie’s too.”

Elizabeth led the way to a room beyond the nursery.

“You ought not to have said that about tomorrow,” she said with quiet reproach. “They will be disappointed when you do not keep your promise.

Children do not forget, you know.”

He did not answer. The room was quiet and in semidarkness with the curtains drawn across the window. But the baby was not asleep. Edwin could hear him cooing and could see him waving his fists in the air as he lay on his back in his crib. His eyes focused on his father when Edwin stepped closer. Edwin swallowed hard and was glad that his wife was standing well behind him. He had ached for this moment for almost three months.

Being separated from his child was the most bitter experience of his life. He had considered a number of schemes for bringing him closer, including buying a second house in London for Elizabeth to live in. But there would be too many awkward questions if he and his wife both lived in London but not together. Yet it seemed somehow impossible to set his family up in his own London home, formerly his father’s, even though it was large and tastefully decorated and furnished and well staffed and situated in a fashionable part of town. It was, nevertheless, well known as the home of a prosperous merchant.

“He has grown,” Edwin said.

“Of course. You have not seen him for almost three months.”

Was it an accusation?

“He has lost much of his hair,” he said.

“That is natural,” she told him. “It will grow back.”

“Do you still… nurse him?” He could remember his surprise when her mother and the doctor had been united in their protest against her decision not to hire a wet nurse. It was one issue on which she had held out against her mother’s will.

“Yes.”

She made no move to pick up the child, who admittedly seemed happy enough where he was. Edwin longed to do so himself, but he was afraid even to touch him.

“He looks healthy enough,” he said.

Why was it that with Elizabeth words never came naturally to him, and that the ones he chose to speak were stiff and banal? They had never had a conversation. They had been bedfellows for two weeks he would prefer to forget-she had been a cold, unresponsive, sacrificial lamb beneath him on the bed each night-but they had remained awkward, near-silent strangers.

“You will wish to go to your room,” she informed him. “Will you join us for tea later?”

“I believe I will forgo the pleasure of meeting our guests until dinnertime,” he told her.

She nodded. Even through the cold impassivity of her face he thought he could detect her relief. He gestured to the door so that she would precede him. He did not offer his arm.

It had been a mistake to come-and that was a colossal understatement. He should have stayed in London, where he had had numerous invitations to spend the holiday with friends whose company he found congenial and in whose presence he could relax and be himself. But he had remembered his father and imagined how sad he would be if he could see his son apart from his wife and child at Christmas, just one year after the wedding that had brought all the elderly man’s dreams to happy fulfillment.

Elizabeth, dressed with greater care than usual in an evening gown of pale blue, a color she knew became her well, went down early to the drawing room before dinner. Even so, Mr. Chambers was there before her, standing before the marble fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back, looking like the master of the house. She was relieved to see that he was clothed severely but immaculately in black and white. Had she expected otherwise? She had never seen him look slovenly or heard him speak in anything other than refined accents. He bowed formally to her and she curtsied. It seemed strange to realize that he had been her husband for longer than a year-and that this was his home.

They had no chance for conversation. The door opened again to admit Lord and Lady Templar and Elizabeth’s Aunt Martha and Uncle Randolph.

“Ma’am. Sir,” Mr. Chambers said in greeting to his parents-in-law, bowing courteously. “How do you do?”

“Mr. Chambers,” Lady Templar said with distant hauteur, her hair plumes nodding as she inclined her head. “I trust you are well?”

Elizabeth introduced her aunt and uncle, and Mr. Chambers greeted them with a bow.

“Welcome to Wyldwood,” he said to them. “I am delighted you were able to join Elizabeth and me here for Christmas.”

It was a sentiment he repeated over and over again during the next half hour as the rest of the family came down for dinner. Elizabeth stood beside him, making the introductions and feeling enormous relief. She had feared that he would allow himself to be dominated by her mother, that he would allow her to treat him as a guest-an inferior, uninvited guest. How humiliating that would have been.

He was to be put to a further test, though.

When the butler came to announce that dinner was served, Lord and Lady Templar were close to the door and proceeded to the dining room without delay. Everyone else held back until Mr. Chambers had offered his arm to Aunt Martha and followed them. Elizabeth, on Uncle Randolph’s arm, cringed at the discourtesy of her parents’ preceding a man in his own home, and hoped there was to be no unpleasant scene.

“Perhaps, sir,” Mr. Chambers said with quiet deference when they entered the dining room, addressing his father-in-law, “you would care to take the place at Elizabeth’s right hand at the foot of the table. Ma’am,” he added, addressing Elizabeth’s mother, “will you honor me by sitting to my right at the head of the table?”

With the rest of the family crowding into the room behind them, Elizabeth looked fearfully at her mother, whose bosom was swelling with outrage.

“Lizzie,” she said, ignoring Mr. Chambers, “your papa is the gentleman of highest rank here, and he is head of our family.”

But not of Mr. Chambers’s family, Elizabeth might have pointed out, and perhaps would have if her father had not saved her by exerting his authority-a rare occurrence.

“Take a damper, Gertrude,” he said, and moved off toward the foot of the table.

Lady Templar had no choice then but to proceed in the opposite direction, from which vantage point she displayed her displeasure by ignoring her son-in-law all through dinner and conversing with gracious warmth with Uncle Oswald on her other side. Mr. Chambers conversed with Aunt Martha and Bertie beyond her and looked perfectly composed and agreeable, as if entertaining a tableful of members of the ton were something he did every evening of his life.

Had she expected him to be gauche? Certainly she had feared that he might.

He also looked gloriously handsome. Elizabeth, playing the unaccustomed role of hostess in her own home, was nevertheless distracted by the sight of her husband and by the disturbing memories of their two weeks together last year, and wished he had not come to spoil her Christmas and everyone else’s-including his own, she did not doubt. At the same time, she regretted the sudden death of his father, whom she had liked.

Had he lived, she and Mr. Chambers would very likely not have lived separately for the past year. Perhaps they would have made something workable out of their marriage. She had been quite prepared to make it work. Indeed, she had been eager to move away from her mother’s often burdensome influence in order to become mistress of her own home.

And she had fallen in love with Mr. Chambers on sight.

Lady Templar was still bristling with indignation when the ladies withdrew to the drawing room after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their port.

“Well!” she exclaimed. “Of all the impertinence! I must say I am surprised, Lizzie, that you would stand by and watch your father humiliated by a man very far beneath our touch without uttering one word of protest.”

“Shhh, Mama,” Elizabeth said, mortified, since the words had been overheard by her sister-in-law and by all her cousins and aunts. “This is Mr. Chambers’s own home.” And the man very far beneath their touch was her husband.

“Lizzie!” Her mother’s voice quavered with indignation. “Never did I think to live to see the day when you would tell your own mother to hush. And did you see what happened, Martha? Did you, Beatrice? When I would have stood, as was perfectly proper given my rank and position in this family, to lead the ladies from the dining room, that man had the effrontery to set four fingers on my arm and nod at Lizzie to give the signal.”

Elizabeth was both mortified and distressed. She had never been able to stand up to her mother-not even when informed that she was to be sacrificed in matrimony to a wealthy cit in order to recoup the family fortunes. But Mr. Chambers was her husband, and she owed him loyalty more than she did anyone else-including her mother.

“Mr. Chambers has a right to expect me to be hostess in his own home, Mama,” she said. “I am his wife. It is what all men expect.”

“Well!” There were two spots of color high on her mother’s cheekbones.

“You are the most ungrateful of daughters, Lizzie! I am very vexed with you. Besides, how can you expect to be hostess of such a large house party when you have no experience? And when you have Jeremy to attend to? I have given you almost half a year of my time and this is the thanks I receive?”

“I do appreciate all your help, Mama,” Elizabeth said. “You know I do.”

But her sister-in-law set a hand on her arm and smiled at her. “Come and join the group about the pianoforte with me, Lizzie,” she said. She had had her own conflicts with her mother-in-law during the eight years of her marriage.

Elizabeth, grateful for the excuse to avoid further conversation with her mother, nevertheless felt guilty as Annabelle linked an arm through hers and led her away. She had lied to her mother. She was not grateful.

It was with dismay that she had watched September turn into October and October into November without any sign that her parents intended to return home and leave her mistress of Wyldwood again. Despite loneliness and depression over her apparently failed marriage, she had liked being mistress of her own home for a few months.

It was later in the evening, after they were all assembled in the drawing room, that trouble struck again. There were two tables set up for cards. Another group was gathered about the fireplace, conversing. A crowd of younger people was clustered about the pianoforte, listening to young Harriet perform. Elizabeth was on her feet watching the card games and reflecting on the fact that Christmas was already shaping up to be its usual predictable, tedious self. With what high hopes she had embarked upon a totally different life last year. She really had been happy about her arranged marriage, especially after meeting the jolly Mr. Chambers and then receiving his son. But nothing had come of her bright hopes after all, except that she had Jeremy.

Mr. Chambers was moving away from the fireside group and stopped beside her.

“We will be decorating the house tomorrow?” he asked.

“Decorating?” She looked blankly at him.

“For Christmas.” He raised his eyebrows. “With holly and ivy and pine branches and mistletoe and all that.”

“Oh,” she said.

“And a kissing bough.”

Harriet had just finished playing. At the same moment a lull had fallen on the conversation by the fire. His words were generally audible.

“A what?” Lady Templar asked, looking up from her cards.

“A kissing bough, ma’am,” Mr. Chambers repeated. “And other decorations to make the house festive for the season. Have you made no plans, Elizabeth?”

“We have never used Christmas decorations,” she said. She had sometimes wished they had. The assembly rooms in the village at home had been decorated one year for a Christmas ball. They had looked gloriously festive, and they had smelled richly of pine.

“Then we will this year,” he announced.

There was an audible stirring of interest from the direction of the pianoforte.

“A kissing bough,” young Sukie said, and there was a titter of self-conscious male laughter and the higher trill of girlish giggles.

“I always did like a few tasteful Christmas decorations in a house,”

Aunt Martha said with an apologetic glance at Lady Templar. “We had some one year when we remained at home for the holiday. Do you remember, Randolph? But never a kissing bough, I must admit. I believe that might be vulgar.”

“There will certainly never be one in this house,” Lady Templar said in the voice her family recognized as useless to argue with. “Such bourgeois vulgarity would not be tolerated in this family. I will direct the servants tomorrow, Lizzie, to bring in some greenery, if it is Mr. Chambers’s wish, but I will give strict instructions about what is suitable.”

“Oh, it is my wish, ma’am,” Mr. Chambers assured her. “But the servants need not be burdened with the extra task when I daresay they are already far busier than usual. Half the fun of Christmas decorating is doing it all oneself. I will go out and gather the greenery tomorrow morning. There should be more than enough in the west woods. Would anyone care to join me?”

A number of the young people spoke up with cautious enthusiasm, and a few others stole self-conscious glances at their parents and Lady Templar and would have spoken up if they had dared, Elizabeth thought.

She stared silently at her husband, marveling that he would defy her mother yet again. He had seemed so quietly obedient to his father’s will last year that she had concluded he was a man easily dominated.

“I must ask the gardeners,” he said, “if there is mistletoe anywhere in the park. It would not be Christmas without mistletoe.”

The young people tittered and giggled again.

“The children must come too,” he said. “I promised to play with them tomorrow. I also promised to exhaust them. Gathering greenery and then decorating the house will serve both functions.”

“The offspring of this family,” Lady Templar said with awful civility, “will remain in the nursery with their nurses, where they belong, Mr.

Chambers. Children may be allowed to romp about the houses you are accustomed to frequent, but such is not the case in genteel society.”

Elizabeth bit her lip. She dared not look at her husband.

“Well,” he replied amiably, “we must allow their parents to decide, ma’am. Now, we will need to be up and out early.” He held up a staying hand when there was a collective groan from the direction of the pianoforte. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. There will be all the decorating to do afterward, and it must be done well. It is going to be a busy day.”

Uncle Oswald cleared his throat and set down his hand of cards. “I do some whittling now and then,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I daresay I could put together some sort of Nativity scene if you wish, Chambers. It seems to me that I did it a few times at Christmas when the children were young.”

“Yes, you did, Papa,” Sukie said. “Please, please may I go out gathering greenery with Cousin Edwin? May I, Mama?”

“I used to help you, Papa,” young Peregrine added. “I would help again this year, except that I don’t want to miss the outing.”

“You can do both,” Mr. Chambers assured him. “You can help your father in the afternoon while the rest of us hang up the greenery.”

“Martha and I were planning to take a drive into the village tomorrow morning,” Aunt Beatrice said. “I daresay we will find some satin ribbon in the shop there if we look. Will we, Lizzie? It will be needed to make the decorations pretty,” she added without looking at Lady Templar.

“I doubt you will be able to take the carriage anywhere tomorrow, Beatrice,” that lady said, a note of triumph in her voice. “Neither will anyone be able to set foot beyond the door to gather greenery. It is almost certain to snow before morning, and we will all be housebound.”

“But I am counting upon its snowing, ma’am,” Mr. Chambers assured her.

“All work and no play would make for a thoroughly dull Christmas Eve. A snowball fight would be just the thing to lift our spirits, get the blood moving in our veins, and yet not slow us down fatally. We will definitely need to make an early start, though.”

There was a smell of unabashed excitement from the younger people at the mention of snow.

Lady Templar got to her feet and surveyed the gathering with haughty disdain. “I, for one, will not stand for such vulgar nonsense,” she declared. “And if Lizzie will not assert herself as mistress of this house, then I-”

“Mama!” Elizabeth cut her off sharply. “If Mr. Chambers says that our home is to be decorated for Christmas, then it will be decorated. Even with a kissing bough.”

“Lizzie!” Her mother’s bosom swelled with outrage.

“Stow it, Gertrude,” Elizabeth’s papa advised from the other card table, exerting his authority briefly for the second time in one evening, without raising his eyes from his cards.

Elizabeth met her husband’s gaze but then looked sharply away. Her heart was beating a wild tattoo in her bosom. She had just openly defied her mother! But how could she not have done so?

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. “I must go up to Jeremy.” He would be ready for his night feeding. She just hoped her milk had not been soured.

She had never seen Mr. Chambers smile before today, she thought as she hurried up the stairs. But he had smiled at the children this afternoon, and he had done more than that to all her young cousins in the drawing room-he had actually grinned at their enthusiasm over his plans for tomorrow. And he had suggested something that sounded so much like fun that her heart ached with longing.

Fighting in the snow.

Gathering greenery in the woods.

Decorating the house.

Making a kissing bough.

She had never been kissed-a ridiculous truth in light of the fact that she was a wife and mother. But he had never kissed her. And she had never had a beau before him.

They were going to decorate the house for Christmas-they, not the servants. They were going to have a kissing bough. She hurried lightly along the corridor to the nursery.

They were going to have fun.

At least, she thought, amending the idea as her footsteps slowed, the children and young people were going to have fun. But she was not in her dotage, she reminded herself. She was not even twenty yet. It just seemed that somehow, somewhere, she had misplaced her youth.

She was a matron with a child. She would be expected to remain at the house.

Lady Templar’s prediction had proved quite correct. Yesterday’s gray, raw day had been transformed into today’s magical white world. A few inches of snow blanketed the outdoors, and more was falling. They were to enjoy that rare phenomenon, Edwin realized early-a white Christmas.

All the parents of young children not only had given permission for them to join the expedition to gather greenery but also had decided to go outside themselves. Only two babies, Edwin’s own included, stayed in the nursery. The remaining children, their parents, and most of the younger cousins gathered in the hall soon after breakfast, bundled up warmly, chattering and laughing and in exuberant high spirits.

Most of the parents and young people were there, Edwin saw. One was conspicuously absent. Had he expected her to come? She had surprised him the evening before by defending him against her mother, but she had done so with a cool dignity that had proclaimed only wifely obedience. There had been no indication that she was enthusiastic about his plans or that she intended to participate in them in any way. It would be as well to take no notice of her absence. She was still the ice maiden he had married, even though she was a maiden no longer. Her cool demeanor had kept him from going to her bed last night, though he had wondered before he arrived at Wyldwood if he would. They were not officially estranged, after all.

But despite himself he hesitated, even as the crowd in the hall looked to him for direction.

“I have forgotten something,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”

He hurried through the arch and ascended the stairs two at a time, imagining with a certain feeling of amusement what Lady Templar’s reaction would be if she should happen to see him. She had ignored him with haughty dignity at breakfast.

Elizabeth was not in her room. She might be anywhere, but he took a chance on finding her in the nursery. He was not mistaken. She was standing at the window of Jeremy’s room looking downward, as if she expected the outdoor party to emerge from the door below at any moment.

The baby was asleep in his crib.

“We are about to leave,” he said.

“Are you?” She turned toward him, straight-backed and regal and unsmiling.

He had wasted his time coming up here to talk to her, he thought. He had probably ruined her Christmas, in fact.

“Does the baby need you?”

“He has just been fed,” she told him. “Your eagerness to see him has certainly diminished since yesterday.” She spoke softly, but the rebuke was unmistakable.

“I came up here early,” he said, feeling a stirring of anger against her. Why had she married him if she despised him so? But the answer to that question was obvious, at least. It had certainly not been from personal choice. “His nurse was changing his nappy, and he was as cross as blazes, though she assured me that he could not possibly be hungry. I held him for half an hour.” He had held his tiny son against his shoulder with an intense ache of tenderness. “He almost deafened my right ear for a few minutes, but he finally found amusement in chewing on the brocade collar of his papa’s dressing robe.”

Not for the first time he wondered how his son would grow up. Would he, too, despise his father and be embarrassed by his origins?

“I did not know that,” his wife said. “Nurse did not tell me.”

“I suppose,” he said, “you do not want to come outside with us?”

“Gathering greenery?” she said. “And engaging in a snowball fight?” She sounded shocked.

“No.” He nodded briskly and turned back to the door. “I did not think so. We will probably be back late for luncheon. You may wish to have the meal set back an hour.” If her mother would permit such a disruption of the household routine, that was.

He was at the door of the outer nursery-deserted this morning-when her voice stopped him. She had stepped out of Jeremy’s bedchamber and was closing the door behind her.

“Mr. Chambers,” she called, her formal words of address increasing his irritation, though he turned politely toward her, “do you want me to come?”

She looked different somehow, less serene, less sure of herself. There was an expression almost of longing in her eyes. She looked suddenly youthful, and he remembered that indeed she was little more than a girl.

She had been eighteen when they married, five years younger than he.

He swallowed his first impulse, which was to tell her that she might please herself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. And it was true. He was as irrationally head-over-ears in love with her as he had been when he first set eyes on her. If she still despised him for his origins and his willingness to have his father purchase her for her birth and rank, well, so be it. But he had come here to see if something could be made of his marriage before their separation had continued for so long that it would be virtually irreversible.

“Very well,” she said, her cool, reserved self again. “I will go and change. You need not wait for me.”

Had he imagined that look of longing? Was she coming merely because he had asked? Merely because she owed him obedience? Would she be miserable outside in the snow and the cold? Would she spoil the outing for everyone else?

“We will wait outside for you,” he said.

It was still snowing. Thick white flakes fluttered down from a heavy gray sky. The steps outside the front doors had been swept recently, but there was a thin film of snow on them again. Elizabeth stepped out onto the top step and felt as if she were walking into an alien, enchanted world.

Snow had always meant being housebound. Snow was something one could slip and break a leg on. Worse, snow was something that had to be waded through with an accompanying loss of dignity, especially if one skidded inelegantly. Walking out into the snow, making slides of it, sledding over it, building snowmen with it, clearing it from a frozen pond or lake in order to make a skating surface, were all activities designed for the lower classes, who had no dignity to lose. Fighting with snowballs was simply beyond imagination, even for children.

There were times when she was a child that Elizabeth had guiltily wished she had been born into the lower classes.

They were out there on the great white expanse that was the south lawn-all the children, most of the cousins who were in Elizabeth’s own age group, her brother Bertie, Annabelle, and Mr. Chambers. The children were dashing about and screeching as they chased one another. The ladies were laughing; the men were whooping as they tried sliding on snow that was too deep, and kept coming to grief. They were all very obviously enjoying themselves.

Even Aunt Amelia and Uncle Horace were outside, standing in the snow on the terrace, watching the activities and laughing.

It was a scene so alien to Elizabeth’s experience, so full of wild, uninhibited joy that she felt overwhelmed by it. Could she ever give herself up to such sheer fun? She had been brought up to think that having fun and lacking ladylike dignity were synonymous terms. She almost turned and hurried back inside before anyone saw her. But Mr.

Chambers must have been watching for her. He came wading toward her, his eyes bright with animation, his face already flushed from the cold and exertion. He looked incredibly virile and handsome.

“Take my hand,” he said when he reached the bottom step.

She set her hand in his outstretched one and remembered with almost painful intensity her first enchanted sight of him when he had come to offer her marriage. He would be her escape, she had thought naively then, from her dull, restricted life into a world where warmth and love and laughter would transform her. She had already met his father and had liked him immensely, despite-or perhaps because of-those qualities her mother had despised as vulgar. Absurdly, she had wanted him as her father. The son was so very handsome, and younger than she had expected.

It had not taken her long, though, to realize that his very correct, unsmiling demeanor hid scorn for her for allowing herself to be bought.

But this morning she would not think of that. He had chosen to come to Wyldwood for Christmas, and he had come to the nursery this morning with the express purpose of inviting her out here.

He released her hand as soon as she was safely down the steps, set two fingers to his lips, and let out a piercing whistle. Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment, as did everyone else.

It was easy to believe over the next couple of minutes that he was a successful businessman, accustomed to organizing and commanding. He announced that the snowball fight was about to begin and soon had everyone divided into two teams of roughly equal numbers and firepower.

Elizabeth would gladly have stood watching with her aunt and uncle, but she was given no choice. She was named to a team and waded gingerly out onto the lawn to join her teammates. Annabelle caught her by the hand and squeezed it.

“Lizzie,” she said, “I am so glad you have come to enjoy the snow. But however did you escape from Mama-in-law?” She laughed and slapped one mittened hand over her mouth. “Forget I said that. Oh, goodness, I have to face both Bertie and Charles on the other team.”

The snow was soft beneath Elizabeth’s feet and not as slippery as she had expected it to be. It reached almost to the top of her boots.

“It sparkles,” she said, “even though the sun is not shining, as if someone has sprinkled the surface with thousands of miniature sequins.

How beautiful it is.”

But she was not given long to admire her first real experience of snow.

The two teams were facing each other across a neutral expanse of it, and Mr. Chambers whistled again, the signal for the snowball fight to begin.

Most of the players, it soon became obvious to Elizabeth, had armed themselves in advance. Snowballs zoomed through the air, and squeals and shouts and laughter revealed that many of them had found their mark.

Elizabeth shied away from all the vigorous action, uncertain what to do herself. She felt the beginnings of misery in the midst of such bubbling animation. She had never been allowed to play and enjoy herself-she did not know how. She was a lady.

And then a snowball collided with her chin and dripped down inside the collar of her cloak before she could brush it away. Another struck her on the shoulder. She could think only of her discomfort, of getting back indoors, where it was warm and quiet and dry and sane and all was familiar to her.

“The best defense is invariably offense,” her husband advised from close beside her, and he struck Peregrine, her chief tormentor, on the nose with a large, wet snowball.

Elizabeth laughed and felt suddenly, unexpectedly exhilarated. She stooped to gather a handful of snow, formed it into a ball, and hurled it, also at Peregrine, who was still sputtering and trying to clean off his face. It struck him in the chest, and Elizabeth laughed with delight, even as another snowball from an unidentified assailant shattered against her shoulder.

After that she forgot about discomfort and cold and dignity and hurled snowballs as fast as she could mold them at any foe within her range.

Soon, without even realizing it, she was helpless with laughter. She was also liberally caked with snow from head to foot. But several minutes passed before she spared a moment to slap ineffectually at her cloak with snow-clogged mittens.

By the time the fight was losing momentum, the children having discovered an even more amusing activity. They had captured Mr.

Chambers, two of them hanging off each arm, one off each leg, while a few others pushed and shoved. With a ferocious roar he went down on his back.

“Bury Uncle Edwin!” Charles shrieked over and over again, and the other children took up the cry until it became a chant.

They proceeded to heap snow over him until only his shoulders and head were visible-and his hat, which had tipped to a rakish angle.

“Poor Mr. Chambers,” Aunt Amelia remarked.

“He is a jolly good sport, I must say,” Uncle Horace commented. “You would not catch me letting them do that to me.”

Elizabeth stood and watched while the other adults and young people slapped themselves and one another relatively free of snow and recovered their breath. Mr. Chambers was laughing good-naturedly and putting up only enough of a struggle to amuse the children. She felt as if she were gazing at a stranger. Where was the cold, humorless, dour man she had married? By some instinct, the children had picked out the very adult who would indulge them and play with them and allow himself to be played with. How had they known?

For the first time Elizabeth could see her husband as the son of that hearty, jolly man who had arranged the marriage with her own parents and insisted upon having a private word with her in order to assure himself that she was not being coerced into anything against her will. Her husband, it seemed, possessed the same generous, fun-loving nature, though he had never displayed it for her benefit.

She felt plunged into sudden depression again. He had not wanted to marry her, of course. He disliked her. He very probably despised her.

Five minutes later the play portion of the morning was over and they were all trudging off in relatively good order toward the west woods.

Mr. Chambers had accomplished the transition without any apparent effort, Elizabeth noticed. And indeed, there was no feeling among them that they were now off to dull work. It was as if they were merely heading off toward some new game.

Mr. Chambers had divided them into four groups, two to cut down pine boughs, one to gather holly, and a group of four to search for the mistletoe the gardeners had assured Mr. Chambers was to be found growing on the older oaks. He was himself a part of the last group, as was Elizabeth. The other two were Cousin Miranda and Sir Anthony Wilkins, her betrothed.

Elizabeth could not quite believe she was doing this. The snow was deep and heavy underfoot, her fingers inside her gloves were tingling from the cold, her cheeks and nose were almost numb and must be unbecomingly red, and yet at this point in the morning she would not go back to the house for all the inducement in the world. She knew suddenly that she had never enjoyed herself even half as much as she was enjoying herself today. And there would be only today, and perhaps tomorrow, though Christmas Day had always been one of her least favorite days of the year. After that Mr. Chambers would surely return to London, and it might be a long time before she saw him again. She might never see him quite like this ever again.

“Perhaps you can lead us to where the oaks are,” he said to Elizabeth.

But although she was familiar with the park, she had never ventured deep into the woods. They searched for many minutes before finding what they had come for. Fortunately the snow was not as deep here, as the canopy of branches overhead acted as a sort of roof.

“As I suspected,” Mr. Chambers said when they were all standing beneath a particularly stout, ancient oak. “It is rather far from the ground.”

It was the mistletoe he was talking about. Elizabeth tipped back her head and saw it an impossible distance overhead. Surely he was not intending…

“Are you willing to risk your neck?” he asked, looking at Sir Anthony.

Anthony was in love with Miranda, as everyone knew, and was eager to impress her. And so the two men swung up into the branches of the tree while Miranda gasped nervously and Elizabeth pressed one gloved hand to her mouth. They would kill themselves!

“Don’t slip,” Miranda admonished her betrothed. She lowered her voice.

“Oh, Lizzie, I do so admire Mr. Chambers. He is not at all stuffy, is he? Yet he is not vulgar either. I am very happy for you. Mama said last year that it was a great shame you were forced to marry a cit only because Aunt and Uncle were improvident, but this year I do not doubt she will declare that you were fortunate. He is such fun.”

Yes, he was. With other people. Not with her, though. He did not like her.

“Oh, Edwin, do be careful!” She clapped a hand to her mouth again. His foot had slipped, but he recovered his balance almost immediately and grinned down at her.

Her knees turned weak. Because he had almost fallen?Or because he had smiled at her? And she had, she realized in some embarrassment, called him by his given name.

Anthony was the first down. He held a clump of mistletoe triumphantly in one hand.

“Now, then,” he said while Miranda laughed again, “the victor claims his prize.” And he raised his hand aloft, dangled it over her head while he caught her by the waist with his free hand, and kissed her with smacking relish on the lips.

“Tony!” she scolded. “Mama would have a fit of the vapors.”

“But we have Mrs. Chambers to act as chaperon,” he said.

“Lizzie is younger than I,” she told him.

He turned to look at Elizabeth in some surprise. She was feeling so embarrassed that she would have been blushing rosily if her cheeks had not already been bright red from the cold. She had never before seen two adults kiss. Mr. Chambers had just reached the ground and was looking down ruefully at a deep scuff mark along the inside of one boot.

Elizabeth hoped he had not seen the kiss.

“In that case,” Anthony said, grinning, “you must chaperon Mrs.

Chambers, Miranda.”

“Absurd!” she said, laughing too. “Lizzie is married to Mr. Chambers.

He may kiss her whenever he pleases.”

Elizabeth scarcely knew where to look. She had not stepped away from the tree as the gentlemen descended, with the result that she was suddenly almost toe-to-toe with Mr. Chambers, and he was looking into her face, a question in his own. He was holding mistletoe. Did he think she had held her ground deliberately? Did he think…? She stared back at him.

She was having trouble with her breathing.

“A man really ought to be rewarded,” he murmured, “for risking both his life and his boots.”

He intended to kiss her?

She had shared the intimacy of the marriage bed with him on fourteen successive nights. She had taken his seed into her womb and borne his child. Yet she felt suddenly as if they had never touched at all.

Certainly he had never kissed her.

“Oh, how foolish!” she said in what she hoped was a light tone, turning sharply away. “All the magic will be gone from the mistletoe even before we take it back to the house.”

“Well, there is something in that,” her husband said from behind her, his tone matching her own. “But I reserve the right to be the first to test it there after the kissing bough has been made and hung-with the lady of my choice.”

Miranda and Anthony laughed. Elizabeth forced herself to turn her head back toward her husband and join in their laughter. Had he really wanted to kiss her? He was looking at her with narrowed eyes, an unreadable expression in them.

Had she ruined the morning?

But he strode up beside her, and they led the way out of the deeper woods. Soon they could hear other voices and see the other groups busy about their tasks. Indeed, when they reached their starting point, they found an impressive mound of greenery waiting to be hauled to the house.

“How are we going to get it there?” Cousin Alex asked, lifting his beaver hat in order to scratch his head through unruly chestnut curls.

“Carry it?” Peregrine suggested.

But Mr. Chambers, as they might have expected, had organized everything in advance. Gardeners were to bring carts drawn by teams of horses, he explained. Indeed, they came into sight, raising clouds of snow, almost before he had finished explaining.

And so they all trudged empty-handed back to the house, having to wade through snow that was considerably deeper than it had been when they set out. Elizabeth did not know who it was who began singing “The Holly and the Ivy,” but soon they were all singing lustily and not particularly musically and following it with other Christmas carols. Mr. Chambers, who was walking beside her, four-year-old Louisa perched on one of his shoulders, had a good tenor voice, she discovered.

Elizabeth felt awkward and shy with him. Why had she avoided his kiss?

She had wanted it. But had he laid claim to kissing her later beneath the kissing bough? With the lady of my choice. Surely that must be what he had meant. He was not angry with her, then?

She would not think of his being angry. She would not think of her own lost opportunity. There was much to look forward to for the rest of the day. At this particular moment she was chilly, untidy, weary, heavy with milk-and suddenly so filled to the brim with happiness that somehow it seemed more painful than pleasurable.

The children were shooed off to the nursery as soon as they returned to the house. They ate luncheon up there, and some of the younger ones, despite loud protests, were put to bed for a sleep afterward. But all were promised by Edwin, who stayed with them while Elizabeth was feeding Jeremy, that they could come down and help afterward.

“Children have never been allowed out of the nursery during our family gatherings,” his wife told him as they made their way downstairs later.

He did not know if she was rebuking him for the promise he had made the children or for suggesting that they bring Jeremy downstairs with them now since he had not gone back to sleep after his feeding. He was tucked into the crook of one of Edwin’s arms.

“I was brought up with the idea that children are to be enjoyed as an integral part of a family,” he said. “Am I spoiling your Christmas, Elizabeth?”

“No.” She spoke quickly, though he was not convinced that she meant it.

And yet he could have sworn that she had enjoyed the morning outdoors after the first few minutes, when he had expected her to return to the house at any moment. She had looked startlingly, vividly lovely while engaging in the snowball fight and laughing helplessly. He had found himself aching with longing to have all that animation and joy focused on him.

“What are your family Christmases usually like?” he asked.

She walked down half a flight of stairs before answering. “There is a great deal of eating,” she said. “And drinking.And card playing and billiards.And sleeping.”

“Do you enjoy them?”

“I have always hated Christmas,” she said with quiet vehemence.

There was no chance for further conversation. They were entering the dining room, where everyone else was already gathered. There was a minor sensation, as Edwin had expected, over the appearance of Jeremy.

Predictably, Lady Templar, completely ignoring her son-in-law, ordered Elizabeth to summon his nurse to take him back to the nursery.

“It is Mr. Chambers’s wish that Jeremy stay with us until he becomes cross or tired, Mama,” his wife explained with her usual quiet dignity.

“That child will be ruined,” her mother said tartly.

“By spending time with his papa?” Elizabeth said. “Surely not.”

“Well, do not say I did not warn you,” her mother told her.

Edwin realized suddenly in just how awkward a situation he had placed his wife, who had always obeyed her mother without question, he guessed, and yet who must also have been brought up to believe that she must give the same unquestioned obedience to her husband after she married. Now he was forcing her into making a difficult choice. So far it seemed that she was putting duty to her husband ahead of compliance with her mother’s will.

What her will was he did not know. Had she ever exercised it? Had she ever been given a chance? If he had a daughter, he thought, he would want to raise her to think and act for herself, to have opinions, to balance personal identity against duty.

If he had a daughter…

He wished suddenly that he could go back and deal differently with his marriage after his father’s death last year. He wished he had persevered more to make something workable of what had begun so inauspiciously.

He sat at the table, Jeremy nestled in the crook of one arm, and proceeded to eat his luncheon one-handed. Only for a short while, though. The baby went from hand to hand about the table during the meal, to the delight of most of the lady guests and the silent, haughty disapproval of Lady Templar.

When it came time to decorate the house later, Lady Templar and a few of the other older relatives retreated to the morning room. Elizabeth’s uncle Oswald removed to the library with his son, Peregrine, and a couple of the children to work on the carving of the Nativity scene. It would be as well, Edwin thought with an inward chuckle when he peeped in there once, if his mother-in-law did not stray in that direction. There were wood shavings, tools, and unrecognizable wooden objects strewn everywhere.

The drawing room was a hive of industry. A few ladies were tying lavish bows out of the satin ribbon from the village shop and attaching the little brass bells that had been found there too. A few of the more intrepid young people were risking making pincushions out of their fingers as they fashioned wreaths and sprays out of the holly and then attached a bow to each. A large group was earnestly engaged in designing a kissing bough, using all available materials and weaving in the all-important mistletoe. Three young girls, too old for the schoolroom set but not quite old enough to be accepted as adults, took turns holding Jeremy and the other baby, who had also been brought down. A few children darted happily about doing nothing in particular and getting under everyone’s feet. A couple of men were balanced on chairs, pinning decorations to wall sconces and pictures and door frames while their womenfolk tilted their heads from one side to another and advised raising the decoration half an inch to the right and then one and a half inches to the left. In the dining room much the same thing was going on.

On the grand staircase two footmen and a parlor maid, who had jumped eagerly into the spirit of things, were twining ivy about the banister.

Elizabeth was moving from group to group, helping, advising, encouraging. In the absence of her mother, she had come naturally into her own as hostess, and glowed with what appeared to be pure pleasure.

Edwin did his share of climbing and precarious leaning. But he also recognized the yearning of some of the children to feel useful. He took several of them astride his shoulders while they reached high to balance a pine bough along the top of a picture frame or to spread holly along the top of the mantel. He could do the job at least twice as fast without their “help,” of course, but there was no hurry. This was what Christmas was all about.

They were almost finished when Lord and Lady Templar and the others who had retired from the chaos entered the drawing room with the announcement that the tea tray had been sent for. But the kissing bough group had just declared that it was ready for hanging.

“Do let us put it up before the tray arrives,” Elizabeth said, looking flushed and animated and quite incredibly beautiful. “In the center of the ceiling between the two chandeliers, I believe. Does everyone agree?”

There was a buzz of acquiescence, a smattering of applause, and a few stray giggles. The family had livened up considerably since the day before, Edwin thought.

“If you believe, Lizzie, that I am going-” Lady Templar began.

“Cut line, Gertrude,” Lord Templar said.

Edwin smiled at his wife. “The lady of the house must be humored,” he said. “The center of the ceiling it will be, and now, before tea. We will need the ladder. Is it still in the dining room? Jonathan, would you fetch it, please? With Charles to help you?”

Five minutes later, he was perched in his shirtsleeves at the top of the high ladder beneath the coved ceiling, securing the gaily decorated kissing bough in its place while a chorus of conflicting advice came from below. Elizabeth stood at the foot of the ladder, her face upturned, Jeremy asleep openmouthed against her shoulder.

“Oh, that is perfect,” she said before he descended carefully.

“Now,” he remarked when he was safely down, “kissing boughs are not merely pretty decorations, you know. They have a practical function. And there is an obscure law, I believe, that the master of the house must be first to put it to use.”

Elizabeth turned that look of beauty on him. She also blushed and looked the nineteen-year-old she was, even though she was holding the baby. Her lips parted. She did not, as she had done in the woods during the morning, turn abruptly away or try to avoid what was coming.

She closed her eyes just before his lips touched hers. Her lips were trembling. They were also soft and still slightly parted, warm and moist. It was strange that after his wedding to an aristocratic iceberg he had performed his duty in the marriage bed but had never found the courage to kiss her. He had wanted to quite desperately.

But she was not an iceberg after all, he realized-perhaps he had been realizing it all day. Perhaps she did not like him, perhaps she resented his coming here with such little notice, but she was not frigid.

The kiss, very public and therefore very chaste, lasted for perhaps ten seconds.

Then it was over.

Their first kiss.

He slid one arm about Elizabeth’s waist, the baby nestled between them, and smiled into her eyes while several members of her family laughed or whistled or clapped their hands. Was it just Christmas that was putting this flush in her cheeks, this glow in her eyes, this warmth in his heart? he wondered.

But this was not the time to muse on the answer.

“I would have to say,” he said, looking about him and grinning, “that the kissing bough works very well indeed. I invite any skeptics to try it for themselves.”

Bertie drew a laughing Annabelle beneath the bough, and Lady Templar haughtily demanded her husband’s arm to lead her to a chair by the fire.

Edwin organized the removal of the ladder and other clearing-up tasks, and the tea trays were carried in while cousins and fiancés and a few older spouses merrily jostled for position beneath the kissing bough.

Elizabeth disappeared upstairs, the baby having woken up at the increased noise to the discovery that he was very hungry indeed.

This family, Edwin thought, was really not very unlike any other of his acquaintances once the repressive influence of Lady Templar was challenged and busy activities were offered. There was beginning to be both the look and the feel of Christmas about Wyldwood.

By dinnertime, Elizabeth was feeling quite weary from the unaccustomed activity and excitement, but she also knew that she did not want this day to come to an end. It was by far the happiest of her life. It was also the day during which she had really fallen in love with her husband. Oh, it was true that she had been dazzled by him the first time she saw him, only to be disappointed and disillusioned soon after. But she had been wrong about him for a whole year. He was not humorless or without character or personality. Quite the contrary. He was far more like his father than she had realized.

She wondered if he understood just how totally he had transformed their usual Christmas.

She wondered if he realized how very affected she had been by her first kiss, public and brief as it had been. She had relived it over and over again while feeding Jeremy afterward, her cheeks hot with pleasure. But it was not only the kiss she had recalled, startlingly intimate and wonderful as it had been. She had also remembered his smile, warm, almost tender, and directed fully at her, while his arm had circled her waist and their child had been safely nestled between them.

It was the sort of memory on which she would feed during the lonely times ahead.

But the happy novelty of this Christmas was still not over, as she discovered after dinner, even before she rose to lead the ladies to the drawing room so that the gentlemen might be left to their port. Uncle Oswald cleared his throat and spoke up for everyone at the table to hear.

“The Nativity scene is completed,” he announced, “and will be set up in the drawing room after dinner with the help of the children. I have been up to the nursery to arrange it. They will all come down, with your permission, Lizzie.”

“Definitely not again today, Oswald,” Lady Templar said. “It is far too close to their bedtime. I daresay that even in the homes of the middle classes children are not allowed into the drawing room during the evening.”

But Elizabeth had spoken up at the same moment. “Oh, yes, certainly,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom. “What a lovely surprise!”

“It is Christmas Eve,” Uncle Oswald continued, “and the story of the Nativity must be told. Edwin has agreed to do it.”

So Mr. Chambers had been a part of these secret plans too, had he? He smiled at Elizabeth along the length of the table, and she felt her heart turn over. Was it possible that he liked her a little better today than he had before? But he was speaking to her.

“For such an important family celebration,” he asked, “shall we have Jeremy brought down too, Elizabeth?”

“Yes,” she said quickly before her mother could finish drawing breath to answer for her. “Having our children about us must be a part of all future family gatherings at Wyldwood. Especially Christmas. Christmas is about children-about a child.”

“Oh, I do agree with you, Lizzie,” Annabelle said fervently. “Don’t you, Bertie?”

“You know I do, Bella,” he said, though he cast a swift, self-conscious glance at his mother as he spoke.

Half an hour later all the adults and children, except those involved in the unveiling of the Nativity scene, were seated expectantly in the drawing room, one large family group, sharing together the warm anticipation of the approaching holy day.

Finally the door opened and Mr. Chambers came inside. He stepped to one side and opened the great leather-bound Bible he carried, while a hush fell on the gathering.

“ ‘And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,’ ” he read in a rich, clear voice.

As he read Saint Luke’s account of the arrival of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, two of the children came through the door, one carrying a folded piece of sacking, which he proceeded to spread out on the floor beneath the center window, and the other a roughly carved manger filled with straw, which she set down on the sacking.

“ ‘And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manager; because there was no room for them in the inn.’ ”

Three more children entered, one carrying Joseph, another Mary, and the third the baby Jesus, wrapped tightly in a piece of white cloth. He was laid carefully on the straw, and his parents were set down on either side of the manger.

A group of shepherds, all carved together out of one piece of wood, came next.

“ ‘And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone ’round about them: and they were sore afraid.’ ”

Two children entered, bearing a paper angel and a paper star, which they pinned to the curtain above the stable.

“ ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ ” Mr.

Chambers closed the book as Uncle Oswald stepped quietly into the room.

There was no applause. It was perhaps the best compliment to the skill of Uncle Oswald, whose figures were large and rudely carved and yet evocative of the ageless wonder of the Christmas story.

There was a moment of silence, during which Elizabeth, holding Jeremy, fought tears and failed to stop one from trickling down each cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. She swallowed and spoke more firmly. “Oh, thank you so very much, Uncle Oswald, children, and M… and Edwin. This is the crowning moment of a truly wonderful day.”

There was a chorus of voices then-the adults complimenting the performers and the carver, the children explaining loudly to anyone who would listen how they had been told to walk slowly and had almost forgotten but had remembered at the last moment and then could not remember whether Mary went at the right side of the manger or the left or whether the angel went above or below the star. Someone wanted to know why there were no Wise Men, and Uncle Oswald explained that they appeared only in Saint Matthew’s gospel, and he had had no time to carve them anyway.

Aunt Maria got to her feet and seated herself on the pianoforte bench.

She did not have to call for silence. Somehow it fell of its own accord as she played the opening bars of “Lully, Lulla, Thou Little Tiny Child.”

They all sang. And they all surely felt the wonder and warmth and healing power of love in the form of the baby, invisible inside his swaddling clothes, and of Christmas itself. Oh, surely they all felt it, Elizabeth thought. She could not be the only one.

She was aware as Aunt Maria proceeded to a second Christmas carol that Mr. Chambers was standing beside her chair. His hand came to rest on her shoulder as he sang with everyone else, and then, when Jeremy began to fuss, he leaned over her and picked up the baby, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Elizabeth swallowed against the lump in her throat. How would she ever be able to face her life when Christmas was over and everyone had left except her mother and father? But she would not think of that yet. Not tonight.

They sang for half an hour before the tea tray was brought in.

“There is a service in the village church at nine o’clock in the morning, I have been told,” Edwin said after the children had all been sent off to bed, yawning and protesting.

Everyone looked at him rather as if he had sprouted a second head. They were not much of a churchgoing family. But several people had an opinion.

“Much too early,” Michael said.

“The carriages could not be taken out in all this snow.”

“We could walk, silly. It is less than two miles.”

“Go to church? On Christmas Day?”

“Peregrine, you will not call your sister silly.”

“That is the whole point, my dear.”

“I’ll come,” Elizabeth said, smiling at Mr. Chambers, and remembering how unexpectedly pleasant it had been to speak his given name a few minutes ago.

The chorus of comments continued.

“It would be fitting, after all we have done today.”

“We could have another snowball fight on the way home.”

“The service could not come even close to being as affecting as this little ceremony here this evening, though, could it?”

“And build an appetite for the goose and the plum pudding.”

“Does the vicar give long sermons, Lizzie?”

“You never lack for appetite, exercise or no.”

“Oh, yes, let’s go to church,” Annabelle said. “Let’s walk there through the snow. Together, as a family. What a perfectly delightful Christmas this is turning out to be. The best ever. Thanks to Lizzie and Edwin, that is. You can invite us here every year, you two.”

There was a burst of hearty laughter and even a smattering of applause.

“Consider the invitation extended,” Mr. Chambers said with a twinkle in his eye. “And after we have feasted and stuffed ourselves tomorrow, we will go down to the lake and make a slide. Unfortunately we have no skates, though I promise there will be some next year. But a slide we will have-and a contest to see who can skid the farthest without coming to grief.”

They drank their tea and finally dispersed for the night with warm, cheerful good-nights. Mr. Chambers was talking with a group of uncles and aunts when Elizabeth slipped away to the nursery to give Jeremy his night feeding. Her mother caught up with her on the stairs.

“It is to be hoped, Lizzie,” she said, “that tomorrow you will exert more control over your own home than you did today. I cannot tell you how shocked I have been-and all this family has been-over the indiscretion of allowing the children out of the nursery to mingle with the adults when their nurses are being paid to keep them under control in the nursery. And the vulgarity of all those decorations, including the embarrassingly amateurish efforts of Oswald to produce a Nativity scene.And the kissing bough. I never thought to live to see such a day in any home occupied by the members of my own family. It comes, of course, of the unfortunate circumstance of your having to marry a cit.

Tomorrow you must look to me for guidance. I will not be overpowered by such a domineering man.”

Elizabeth stopped outside the door of the nursery. She had been hoping to avoid her mother tonight. Mama had been looking sour and outraged all day. Elizabeth still did not know when she drew breath to speak if she would have the courage to say what she wanted to say, what she had been longing to say for the past month or two, in fact.

She had never been able to stand up to her mother.

“Mama,” she said, “will you and Papa be returning home after Christmas?

You have been kind enough to stay with me here far longer than you originally intended, but you must be longing to be at home again.”

“Leave you?” Lady Templar said. “When you do not have any idea how to be mistress of your own home, Lizzie, or how to be a good mother to your son? I would not dream of being so selfish. You must not fear that I will desert you when you have such need of me.”

“But Mama,” Elizabeth said, her heart thumping loudly in her chest and her throat and ears, “I do not. I have much to learn before I can run a household as efficiently as you, but Wyldwood ran smoothly enough before you came here and will do so after you leave. You trained me well when I was a girl. And truth to tell, I look forward to the challenge of managing on my own again. I have been very grateful indeed for your help when I needed it, but I do not need it any longer. And I believe I am a good mother.”

“Lizzie!” Lady Templar’s bosom swelled, and her face was blotched with red patches. “Never did I think to hear such words of ingratitude from you of all people. It is the influence of that dreadful man, I expect.

You were always an impressionable girl.”

“I am grateful to you,” Elizabeth said again. “But I would not keep on expecting you and Papa to sacrifice your own comfort for me, Mama. It would be selfish of me. And against my inclinations,” she added lest she weaken.

“You will allow him to make you as vulgar as he is,” her mother said disdainfully.

“I do hope so, Mama,” Elizabeth said quietly. “A wife ought to allow herself to be influenced by her husband, especially when he was chosen for her by her own parents. Just as I hope Mr. Chambers will allow himself to be influenced by me.”

She did not know if her marriage stood any chance of becoming a real one. But she would prefer the aloneness of being a neglected, half-abandoned wife, she had realized today, than the oppression of living under her mother’s thumb, as she had all her life except for the few brief months between Christmas last year and her confinement.

Her mother turned and walked away without another word, her back stiff and bristling with righteous indignation. Elizabeth fought the wave of guilt that swept over her. She had been polite. She had been grateful.

But she had said what she had wanted and needed to say for a long time.

She wanted her home to herself again, to herself and Jeremy and Mr.

Chambers whenever he chose to visit them.

Separation from him after Christmas this year was going to be very much more painful than it had been last year, she thought as she let herself quietly into the nursery. Last year she had been upset, but she had also been disillusioned too. Part of her had been relieved to find herself alone. This year, though, she had seen another, warmer, more charming, more fun-loving side to her husband’s personality. This year he had kissed her beneath the kissing bough and smiled at her. The house was going to seem empty indeed when he left.

Her life was going to seem empty indeed.

But she had been firm with her mother. She had asserted herself as mistress of Wyldwood. She had made progress. She was proud of herself.

Jeremy was waiting for her with noisy impatience, she heard even before she entered his room. She smiled. For longer than three months he had been her world, her life. He would continue to be after Christmas. How could she even think of emptiness when there was a baby to nurture and love?

Edward Chambers’s baby and hers.

Elizabeth was sitting by the window of Jeremy’s room in the dim light of one flickering candle, the baby at her breast. She looked up when Edwin opened the door from the nursery quietly and stepped inside, and pulled hastily at Jeremy’s blanket in order to cover herself.

“I beg your pardon.” He moved a few steps closer to her. “I did not intend to embarrass you.”

But he was not going to go away either-not unless she directly asked him to. They had circled about each other for too long, he and his wife. He wanted to be a part of their son’s life. Oh, yes, and of hers too.

She gazed at him tensely for a few moments before lowering her eyes and relaxing back into the chair. She smoothed her free hand over the soft golden down of the baby’s hair, just visible above the blanket.

Edwin clasped his hands behind his back and watched.

They did not talk. The only sound that broke the silence was the hungry sucking of their child.

If only this moment could be immortalized, carried with him forever, Edwin thought. He felt absurdly close to tears. But he wondered which Elizabeth would leave the nursery with him when she had finished feeding the baby. The cold, dignified aristocrat he had known her as until today? Or the warm, smiling, quietly assertive woman she had been for much of today?

Was it just Christmas that had effected the change in her? Would she be herself again once Christmas was over? Even tomorrow, perhaps? But who was her real self? He really did not know her, did he? He had met her twice before their wedding, there had been the two weeks after it, and he had spent a few days here after Jeremy’s birth, always with her mother in attendance. They were essentially strangers.

He had never been particularly shy with women. He had not known many sexually, but he was acquainted with many as friends and had looked forward to making a marriage for companionship and affection as well as for physical gratification. He still had female friends. But Elizabeth was different. It was not so much that he was shy with her as that he was a little in awe of her-though he was not in awe of her mother.

Elizabeth seemed the perfect lady to him, someone far above him in some indefinable way. The feeling annoyed him. He had never been awed by social rank.

The sucking noises gradually slowed and then stopped altogether. Edwin stepped forward and lifted the sleeping baby from his wife’s arms as she set the bodice of her dress to rights. He turned and set the child down gently in his crib after kissing his soft, warm cheek and breathing in the baby smell of him.

It was Christmas Eve, he thought. He did not want to end it.

He held the door open for Elizabeth to precede him into the nursery and then the door into the corridor beyond. He closed it behind them.

She turned to say good-night to him. He could read her intent as she drew breath.

“Elizabeth,” he said quickly, before he could be caught again in the grip of his eternal awkwardness with her, “may I come to you tonight?”

He knew even as he asked that she would not refuse. She had always been the perfectly obedient wife-he must grant her that. But he desperately wanted to see the light of something more than duty in her eyes.

“Yes, of course,” she said with her customary quiet dignity.

He offered his arm and she took it, her hand exerting very little pressure on his sleeve. They did not speak a word as he led her to her room, opened the door for her, and bowed. She stepped inside, and he closed the door from the outside.

What had happened to the warmly happy woman he had seen a few times in the course of the day? he wondered. She seemed to have disappeared. Was this to be an ordeal to her? And why would he want it when the two weeks following their wedding had brought him no pleasure at all?

But he was mortally tired of wondering and guessing. He wanted her. It was up to him, he supposed, to bed her in such a way that at least it would not be a repulsive experience for her. But damn it, that was exactly the attitude with which he had approached her bed during those two ghastly weeks. It was up to him to see to it that their coupling was a pleasurable experience for her.

He turned in the direction of his own room, next to his wife’s.

Elizabeth stood looking out through the window. The snow had stopped falling, but the sky must still be cloudy. There was not a star in sight. The snow made the landscape unnaturally bright, though. It was Christmas Eve, soon to be Christmas Day

She shivered. Not that she was really cold. There was a fire burning in the hearth, and she was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked nightgown-the lace-trimmed one she had worn on her wedding night last year. Indeed, she felt almost too warm.

With what high expectations she had awaited him on that night just a little over a year ago. She had fully expected a happily-ever-after. How disappointed she had been.

And this year? Did she have expectations now? She knew what it would feel like, not unpleasant but… disappointing. She longed for it anyway, for that touch of intimacy, that illusion of closeness.

And what were her expectations of the future? Was there a future? It was best not to think of it. After all, there never was a future, only an eternal present moment, all too often lost because human nature had a tendency to yearn toward the nonexistent future. What did it matter that he might leave the day after tomorrow and not return for months or even a year? Tonight he was here, and he was coming to her bed.

There was a light tap on the door of her bedchamber even as she thought it, and it opened before she could either cross the room or call out.

He was wearing a long dressing robe of green brocade with slippers. His blond hair had been brushed until it shone. He was freshly shaved.

It was like their wedding night all over again. Elizabeth could hear her heartbeat thudding in her ears. She clasped her hands loosely before her and concentrated upon relaxing, or at least upon not showing any of the turmoil of her feelings.

“You told me you have always hated Christmas,” he said, coming closer to her. “Are you hating this one too, Elizabeth?”

“No, of course not,” she said.

He stopped a foot or so away from her.

“Because I am the one asking you, and it would not be at all the thing to say yes?” he asked her, tipping his head a little to one side and looking closely at her.

She frowned slightly before smoothing out her expression again. What did he mean? She did not know how to reply.

“I am enjoying it more than I expected when I arrived,” he said.

“I am glad,” she told him.

“Are you?” He reached out one hand and took one lock of her hair between his fingers-she had had her maid leave it loose.

It was one of their usual conversations, saying nothing and leading nowhere. She had always felt more awkward with him than with any other man of her acquaintance.

He bent his head then and kissed her.

She was taken totally by surprise. This was different from their wedding night.

He did not immediately draw back. Instead he parted his lips and settled them more comfortably over her own. She tasted heat and moisture and wine. At the same time he settled his hands on either side of her waist and drew her against him. She lifted her hands and set them on his shoulders-broad, solidly muscled shoulders. He was solid everywhere, she noticed as if for the first time. He seemed terribly male.

She had never really touched him before, she realized. Not with her hands-she had kept them flat on the bed during all their encounters last year. And not really with her body-she had felt his weight and his penetration, that was all.

She felt his tongue prodding against the seam of her lips and jerked back her head-and then wished she had not done so. He stared into her eyes, his hold still firm on her waist, his expression unreadable.

“Is this just duty to you, then, Elizabeth?” he asked her. “Is this what the whole of today has been about for you?”

What did he expect her to say? What did he want her to say? Last year had been easy in a way. He had spoken scarcely a word to her in her bedchamber-or out of it, for that matter.

“I have tried to do my duty,” she said. “Have I not pleased you? I am sorry about… about just now. I was not… expecting it. I am sorry.”

He took a half step back from her, though he still kept his hands where they were.

“If this is duty and nothing else, Elizabeth,” he said, “say so now and send me on my way.”

It was not just duty. She would not have dreamed of saying no to him anyway, of course, but it was not just duty. She had wanted him to come.

She wanted him in her bed again even though she knew now from experience that the encounter would not measure up to her dreams. It did not matter. She wanted him inside her again. She wanted to feel like his wife.

She had taken too long in answering. He dropped his hands abruptly, turned, and strode toward the door.

“Mr. Chambers,” she said sharply.

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth.” He stopped and turned back to her, anger in his face. “Call me Edwin or nothing at all.”

“I am sorry.” She tried not to show her distress. He was angry with her.

He had spoken sharply to her. He had said for God’s sake in her hearing.

“Don’t be.” He lifted one hand and ran the fingers through his hair.

“There is no need to be eternally sorry. You owe me nothing. You married me in obedience to your parents’ will, you lay with me in the weeks following our marriage, and you presented me with a son in due course.

Your life is essentially your own now. You are not my slave. I have never believed in slavery, especially the marital kind.”

“I owe you obedience,” she said.

“You owe me nothing.” For a moment his eyes blazed. Then he shook his head slightly, and his anger faded. “I would far rather hear you consign me to the devil than tell me you owe me obedience. But no matter. It is late and we are both tired. Good night, Elizabeth.”

All the joy of the day had been drained away, leaving only an intense pain behind it. His hand was on the doorknob. In another moment he would be gone-and they would be forever estranged. She would not be able to bear it.

“Mr. Chambers,” she said. She lifted one hand to her mouth even as he paused without turning. “Edwin. Please don’t leave.”

He turned his head to look at her.

“Please don’t,” she whispered.

He did not move and so she did. She crossed the room to the bed, removed her slippers, and lay down on her back, all without looking at him. He stood there at the door for a few moments longer before walking to the mantel and blowing out the candles. There was still plenty of light from the fire and the window to illumine his way to the bed.

And enough light for Elizabeth to see when he removed his dressing robe that he wore nothing beneath it. At first she was shocked, but she did not look away. She had never thought of any man as beautiful. Handsome, yes, but not beautiful. Edwin was beautiful-all well-muscled, perfectly proportioned male beauty.

He lay down beside her and turned to her. He raised himself on one elbow, leaned over her, and kissed her again, his hand cupping her cheek, his fingers pushing into her hair. This time when he parted his lips and touched hers with his tongue, she did not flinch-though she did feel a raw and unfamiliar sensation in her mouth, in her breasts, in her womb, down between her thighs. She parted her lips and opened her mouth, and he pressed his tongue deep inside.

For a few moments she hardly noticed that his hand had moved down to fondle her breasts. She did notice, though, when the hand moved to the ribbons that held her nightgown closed to the waist and pulled them loose one by one. His hand slid along bare flesh to cup her breast. He ran his thumb lightly over her nipple.

She thought she would surely die of pleasure. She heard herself make a sound deep in her throat.

“Touch me,” he whispered against her lips.

She set one hand tentatively against his chest-it was hard and dusted with hair. The other arm she set about his waist. She had always wanted to touch him, she realized, but she had never laid claim to him as her own. Hers had always been the passive role of obedient wife. Was it possible for a woman to claim a man? Was it right? Was it seemly?

He was not simply going to lift her nightgown tonight, bring himself down on top of her, and penetrate her. That was already clear. She was enormously thankful. It had always been over so very quickly, long before she could even begin to draw any secret pleasure from it.

She was not prepared, though, for all the things he did before the inevitable moment came. He touched her everywhere, with his hands, with his mouth, even with his teeth, first through her nightgown, then beneath it. Finally he slid both hands beneath the gown and lifted it up her body and over her head and along her lifted arms.

And they were both naked.

She should have been horribly shocked, especially as there was so much light in the room and the bedcovers had been pushed back. But her body was humming with pleasure, and his hands and his mouth and his eyes made her feel beautiful. She was having a hard time containing the sensations that were pulsing with her blood into every nerve ending in her body.

She throbbed between her thighs and up inside, longing for his penetration, not wanting it too soon, knowing that all would be over within moments once it did happen.

She touched him lightly with her hands-above the waist-and said nothing.

When his hand slid between her legs and explored and caressed the soft secret folds, she knew that she was wet and hot-his fingers felt contrastingly cool. He slid a finger up inside her. She kept her eyes closed and tried to concentrate upon her breathing.

And then he moved over her and lowered his weight on her and spread her legs wide with his own. Familiarity returned as he slid his hands beneath her buttocks and she spread her arms across the bed and pressed her palms into the mattress and drew a slow, deep breath.

He came inside slowly, sliding into wetness, stretching her, filling her. He felt gloriously hard. She fought the urge to tighten inner muscles about him, and lay still.

It lasted far longer than she remembered. He worked her with a slow, deep, firm rhythm for a long time, filling her with himself, filling her, too, with a longing so intense that she wondered if indeed there was any difference between pain and pleasure. By the time he quickened and deepened the rhythm, she was digging into the mattress with her fingers and biting hard on her upper lip in an effort to control herself-though what it was she controlled or stopped from happening she did not know.

He made a guttural sound of satisfaction against the side of her face, and she felt the remembered heat at her core. She was taking his seed into herself again. Despite the slight, unidentified dissatisfaction she felt as all his weight relaxed down onto her and he fell still, Elizabeth smiled and felt happiness well inside to replace the raw discomfort of physical desire not quite allowed to complete itself.

They were not estranged.

Perhaps there would be another child.

When he came for an occasional visit to Wyldwood-and surely he would come for Jeremy’s sake-they would perhaps share a bed for a few minutes each night and she would be able to feel this pleasure again.

She tried not to feel dejection when he drew free of her and moved off her. He would return to his room now, and she would feel the remembered emptiness of being alone once more. But differently from all those other times, she would have pleasant memories with which to warm herself until she slept. And perhaps he would come back tomorrow night.

He lay beside her for a while, turned toward her. Then he rested a hand on her stomach and made light circles with it. He sighed audibly.

“For a while,” he said, “I thought it was perhaps more than duty.”

She turned her head sharply to look at him. He was half smiling.

“It was not duty,” she said.

“You just do not like me very much, do you?” he said. “Or is it sex you do not like? Or both?”

Joy went crashing out of her again, and she felt her eyes fill with tears.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I did not satisfy you. I did my best. I am sorry.”

“Damn,” he said so softly that she was not even sure he had uttered such a shocking word.

He turned sharply away and sat up on the side of the bed, his elbows on his knees, the fingers of both hands pushing through his hair. Elizabeth felt two tears spill over, one to pool against her nose, the other to plop off onto her pillow.

“I am sorry,” she said again. “What did I do wrong? Tell me, and I will do better next time.”

“What has she done to you?” he said. “This is all her doing, is it not?”

“Whose?” she asked, bewildered.

“Your mother’s,” he said. “You are not naturally frigid, are you? I thought so until today, but I have seen you laughing and flushed and happy. You are warmly maternal with Jeremy. Do you hate me so much? Or are you merely a product of your mother’s rigid ideas of what a lady should be?”

But she had heard only one thing. She stared at his back in horror.

“I am not frigid,” she protested. “I am not. I feel things as deeply as anyone else. How could you say such a cruel thing? I am sorry if I do not satisfy you, but I am not frigid.”

She turned over onto her side, spread her hands over her face, and tried-unsuccessfully-to muffle the sobs she could not control.

“Elizabeth-”

“Go away,” she wailed. “Go away. You are horrid, and I hate you. I am not fr-frigid I wish you would… I wish you would go to the devil.” She had never, ever said such a thing aloud, or even thought it, until now.

For a few moments she did not know what he was doing. She waited for the sound of the door opening and closing. But then the bed beside her depressed. He had come around it and sat down. He was wearing his dressing robe. He set the backs of his knuckles against her hot, wet cheek and rubbed them back and forth lightly.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

She turned her face into the mattress, shrugging his hand away.

“No,” she said. “How could you say such a thing after… after what happened. I thought it was wonderful. Obviously I know nothing. It was not wonderful at all, was it? Go away, then. Go away and never come back. Jeremy and I have lived without you for three months. We can live without you for the rest of our lives.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, and she had the satisfaction of hearing distress in his voice. “My dearest, I had no intention of hurting you. Curse me for a fool that I ever said such a thing. I do not believe it. We did everything wrong from the start, did we not? We allowed this marriage to be arranged for us. There was nothing too wrong in that-it happens all the time. But we made no attempt to make it our own marriage. We allowed awkwardness and perhaps some resentment to keep us almost silent with each other. And then my father died and everything fell to pieces. It was all my fault. I should have persevered. I should have been more patient, gentler with you. I should have tried to talk with you.”

Again, she had heard only one thing, her face still buried in her pillow. My dearest. He had called her my dearest. No one, in her whole life, had ever called her by any endearment, except the shortened form of her name-Lizzie.

“Is it too late for us?” he asked her. “Is there any chance of making a workable marriage of this one we are in together?”

She shrugged her shoulders but said nothing. She did not trust her voice yet.

“How have you thought of me all year?” he asked her. “I have thought of you as a beautiful, unattainable, aristocratic icicle. You cannot have thought of me in any more flattering terms.”

“Morose,” she said into her pillow. “Dour, humorless.Wondrously handsome.”

“Am I still all those things?” he asked after a short pause.

“You are still wondrously handsome,” she said.

“I have assumed,” he said, “that you despise me for marrying social position.”

She turned her face out of the pillow, though she did not look at him.

“I have assumed,” she said, “that you despise me for marrying money.”

“Lord God,” he said after another pause, “you would think that two reasonably intelligent adults who happen to be married to each other would have found a moment in which to talk to each other in a whole year, would you not?”

“Yes,” she said.

He sat there looking down at her for a while. She lay still and did not look directly at him. She felt that a great deal had already been said.

But what, really, had changed?

He got to his feet suddenly and turned to slap her lightly on one buttock.

“Get up,” he said, his voice brisk and cheerful. “Get dressed.”

“Pass me my nightgown, then,” she said. He had dropped it over the other side of the bed.

“Dressed,” he said with more emphasis. “Put on your warmest clothes.”

“Why?”

“We are going out,” he said.

“Out?” She stared at him with wide eyes. “Why?”

“Who knows why?” He looked down at her and grinned-her stomach turned a complete somersault inside her, she would swear. “We are going to talk.

Perhaps we will build a snowman. Or make snow angels. That would be appropriate for the occasion, would it not?”

“The doors are all bolted,” she said foolishly. “It is almost midnight.”

He said nothing. He merely continued to look down at her and grin at her.

He was mad. Wondrously, gloriously mad.

Elizabeth laughed.

“You are mad,” she said.

“You see?” He pointed a finger at her. “That is something you have not known about me all year. There is a great deal more. And I have not known that you could possibly laugh at the prospect of being dragged outside on a cold, snowy night in order to make snow angels. I daresay there is a great deal I do not know of you. I am going out. Are you coming with me or are you not?”

“I am coming,” she said, and laughed again.

“I’ll be back here in five minutes,” he told her, and he strode to the door and left the room without a backward glance.

Elizabeth gazed after him and laughed again.

And jumped out of bed.

Five minutes! Never let it be said that she had kept him waiting.

“You lie down on your back,” he explained, “and spread out your arms and legs and swish them carefully back and forth. Like this.” He demonstrated while she watched and then got to his feet again and looked down at the snow angel he had made. “Rather a large one.”

“The angel Gabriel,” she said softly.

She was wearing a pale, fur-lined cloak with the hood drawn over her head. She looked ethereally lovely in the reflected light from the snow.

She also looked very much on her dignity. But she lay down carefully on the snow beside his own angel and made one of her own with slow precision and downcast eyes.

He was so much in love with her that he wanted to howl at the moon. He was also afraid, uncertain. Was this his dutiful wife he had with him?

Or was she the repressed daughter of a humorless tyrant, ready to break free, like a butterfly from the cocoon? But would she simply fly past him when she discovered her wings?

“Ah,” he said after she had got back to her feet again, “a dainty angel.

A guardian angel, I believe. Jeremy’s, perhaps. Mine, perhaps.”

She looked at him and smiled-and then her eyes went beyond him to the sky.

“Oh, look,” she said, “the clouds are moving off. Look at the miracle.”

The moon was almost at the full, and suddenly, it seemed, the sky was studded with stars. They looked unusually bright tonight, perhaps because he was in the country rather than in London, as he usually was.

One in particular drew his eyes. He stepped a little closer to her and pointed, so that she could look along the length of his arm to that particular star.

“I believe the Wise Men are on their way after all,” he said.

“Edwin,” she said softly, “have you ever known a more perfect Christmas?”

The sound of his name on her lips warmed him. No, he never had-he had never known a more perfect Christmas or a more perfect moment. If he held his breath, could he hold on to it forever?

“I have not,” he told her.

He was about to set one arm about her waist, to draw her to him, to begin, perhaps-one year late but surely not too late-to speak the words of the heart, so difficult for a man who spent his days speaking the practical words of business and commerce. But she spun around to face him before he could lift his arm, and in the semidarkness he could see that her body was tense and her expression agitated.

“Take us back with you,” she said. “When you go home to London, take us with you.”

The words were so stunningly unexpected, so exactly what he wanted to hear that he stared stupidly at her for several moments without speaking.

“Why?”

She stared back at him, still tense, before closing her eyes and turning away from him.

“Jeremy needs you,” she said.

Again there was a long pause, during which he dared not ask the question whose answer might shatter his newfound, fragile dream. How foolishly hesitant he was with his wife-so different from the way he was in all other aspects of his life. But she answered the question before he could ask it.

“I need you.”

“Do you?” His heart felt as if it might burst.

“Edwin,” she said in a rush, her voice breathless, her face still turned away, “I should have said no. Even though Mama and Papa were in desperate financial straits, I should not have agreed to buy their reprieve at the cost of your freedom and happiness. But I had met your father and liked him enormously, and I knew that he really wanted me for you. And so I persuaded myself that perhaps you wanted me too. But it was purely selfish of me. I thought I could leave behind the cold, loveless world in which I had grown up and become part of your father’s warm, joy-filled world. Instead I killed any joy you might have had. I am so sorry. But let us go home with you, and I will try…”

His hand closed tightly about one of her arms, and she stopped talking as he turned her to him and gazed down into her face, bathed in the light of the moon and the Christmas star.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “I am the one who destroyed your happiness, taking you away from your own world only because I knew my father was dying and I could not say no to him. I despised myself for agreeing to that bargain when you must have dreamed of making a dazzling match with a titled gentleman of the ton, someone who was your social equal. All I could think to do after my father died was to bring you here, to a home that at least would be familiar to you in size and grandeur, and to give you a measure of freedom from me and my world. Yet now you want to come back to me?”

She bit her lip. “You did not despise me?”

“Despise you?” He took both her arms in his hands and drew her closer.

“Elizabeth, I fell head over ears in love with you the moment I set eyes on you. I tried to… treat you with restraint and respect. I thought that perhaps after you had grown accustomed… But you seemed to turn to stone. And then my father died.”

When she lifted one gloved hand to cup his cheek, he could see that it was trembling. He could also see stars reflected in her eyes.

“Edwin,” she whispered, “I thought you despised me. I wanted that marriage so very, very much-with you, with your father’s son. You were to be my escape from a life I had ever enjoyed, and I was so very enchanted when I first saw you. But when you said nothing after our marriage about love or even affection, but were so… respectful, I thought you despised me.”

“We have been such idiots,” he said, raising her hand to his cheek and holding it there. He grinned at her. “I thought it was just me, but it was you too. I know so little about pleasing a woman, Elizabeth, especially the woman I love.”

Her eyes looked even brighter suddenly, and he knew they were filled with tears.

“You do know,” she said. “Today has been the happiest of my life-to see you smile and laugh, to see you hold Jeremy, to have you kiss me beneath the kissing bough, to-” She stopped abruptly and bit her lip again.

He turned his head and kissed her gloved palm.

“I will teach you to enjoy what happens in our marriage bed, Elizabeth,” he said. “I promise. Just give me time. I have to learn how to please you.”

“You pleased me.” She snatched her hand away from his cheek to set it, with her other hand, on his shoulders. She gazed earnestly into his face. “You pleased me, Edwin. I thought I would die of pleasure. But I did not show it, did I? Perhaps I ought to have done so. Mama told me-before our nuptials-that I must always lie still and pray for it to be soon over. But tonight I did not want it to be over. I prayed for it never to end. You pleased me, Edwin. Oh, you did!”

He chuckled and then wrapped his arms about her and held her tight. He laughed aloud, and she joined him.

“I must tell you,” she said, “that I have told Mama that she and Papa must leave Wyldwood after Christmas. Even if I must stay here alone with Jeremy, I will be happier without Mama’s influence. I want to be your wife, even if I am to see you only once or twice a year.”

He caught her to him even more tightly.

“My dearest,” he said. “Oh, my love. I will not let you out of my sight again for longer than a day at a time-and even that will be too long.”

She drew back her head and smiled at him. He smiled back before lowering his head and kissing her. This time there was no audience, as there had been in the drawing room before tea, and this time there was no anxiety or uncertainty, as there had been in their bedchamber earlier. This time there was all of love to be shared openly and joyfully. And the knowledge that a future together stretched ahead of them even after Christmas had passed into a new year and a new spring and a new hope.

When he lifted his head, they smiled at each other again. The house-their house, the house his father had purchased for him, really a rather lovely house-was behind her at the top of the snow-clad lawn. In fancy he could almost see the rudely carved Nativity scene behind the dark drawing room windows. He knew exactly which window Jeremy slept behind, warm and safe in his crib. Their son.

Above them, the sky was moonlit and starlit, the Christmas star beaming softly down on their heads-or so it seemed.

“It must be after midnight,” he said, his arms still about her waist, hers about his neck. “Happy Christmas, my dearest.”

“Happy Christmas, Edwin,” she said.

“I do not know about you,” he said, grinning down at her, “but I am frozen out here. Whose idea was this, anyway?”

She smiled back at him, a radiant smile that lit her with beauty.

“It was the most wonderful idea in the world,” she said. “I have seen Christmas angels and the Christmas star, and I have taken all the love and joy of Christmas into my heart and my life. But I am chilly,” she admitted.

“We had better go back to bed, then,” he said, “and see if we can warm each other up.”

Even in the moonlight he knew that she blushed. But she did not stop smiling or gazing into his eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, Edwin. Let’s do that.”

The Christmas star shed its radiant light onto Wyldwood long after they had gone inside and warmed each other and loved each other and fallen asleep, twined together beneath the rumpled bedcovers.