Once Upon A Regency Christmas. Louise Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ with a muttered oath. ‘I’ll take this chamber, I’m used to the cold. I’ll see if there’s another room with a clear chimney, otherwise you ladies will be better together in the first chamber.’

      The army had certainly been good training for this house. He’d been in more comfortable tents in the snow before now, he mused as he followed Miss Chalcott into the next room along. The chimney there obliged by drawing steadily. It was a small room, but that made it easier to heat, he pointed out as he helped her make the bed.

      ‘Thank you, Captain.’ Her smile was enchanting, he thought, discovering that he was admiring her as he might an exquisite artwork, not a living woman.

      On the other hand there was certainly one of those next door, judging by the sounds penetrating the wall. ‘Smithers, is there another mattress? Captain Markham cannot sleep on that—the mice have been in it.’

      ‘Lady Julia is obviously used to dealing with servants,’ he remarked as Miss Chalcott draped blankets over a chair in front of the fire.

      She laughed. ‘She has had a great deal of practice.’

      ‘You had many servants?’ he asked, puzzled. A borrowed carriage, plain, sensible gowns, this frightful house her only legacy from her husband… Something did not add up.

      ‘Seventy, perhaps. Look at this fabric! Moths, I suppose, though by the size of the holes I would not like to meet one.’

       ‘Seventy?’

      ‘Oh, everyone in India has servants if they have any kind of a household at all. Inside servants, outside servants, the grooms, the gardeners, the sewing women and the laundry, my father’s business… It all adds up and it costs a fraction of what it does in England.’

      ‘Your father was a man of business, then?’

      ‘My husband was a merchant, a trader in many things.’ He had not heard Lady Julia’s approach. ‘But, despite the common misapprehension here, not every man who trades in India is a nabob, wealthy beyond compare. Or even wealthy at all.’

      ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. I allowed the informality of our circumstances to lead me into curiosity.’ He really had been in the army, and in the wilds, too long if he had forgotten not to discuss money or trade. As an earl’s daughter Lady Julia’s marriage might have been deemed acceptable if sweetened by vast wealth, but a mere merchant would put her firmly on the wrong side of the social dividing line. Why had her family allowed it?

      ‘No matter. India makes everyone curious, I find.’ Lady Julia came further into the room and he saw how weary she was, for all the firm voice and straight back. Then she smiled and he realised something else. He had been quite out in placing her in her thirties. Surely she could not be more than twenty-five or six, at the most. And Miss Chalcott was, what? Twenty, twenty-one? Which meant her husband, unless he had been sowing his wild oats in India at a precocious age, must have been in his late forties at the very least when he married her.

      An earl’s daughter marrying a not very successful India merchant twice her age. How had that come about? He felt the curiosity stir like the flick of a cat’s tail at the back of his mind and bit down on the question he had nearly allowed to escape.

      She ran one hand over the draped blankets and wrinkled her nose. ‘This house had been in my husband’s family for years. I had no idea it had been so neglected.’

      Considering that she had travelled thousands of miles to discover her expected security was a ramshackle house miles from anywhere, Lady Julia was showing remarkable resilience. Perhaps she was planning to go back to her family.

      ‘Mrs Smithers should have water heating, although I doubt it will run to a bath. I will have some sent up to your chamber, Captain. Until seven o’clock and dinner.’

      ‘I’ll see to the water myself.’ Giles almost told her to go and rest, then decided that telling any female that she looked weary was not tactful. ‘Until dinner time, ladies.’

      * * *

      Captain Markham had shaved, donned a clean, if rumpled, shirt and neckcloth, and made some improvement to the state of his breeches and boots. He also looked as though he had managed to snatch some sleep, which was more than Julia had, she thought resentfully as she regarded him across a dinner table much in need of polishing.

      She had lain on the bed in her dusty, draughty chamber and willed herself to sleep, but oblivion would not come. What had kept her awake was the sickening realisation that she had allowed a sentimental memory of childhood Christmases to blind her to reality. She had set out on this journey in a temper, clinging to the belief that at the end of it would be a charming country house, complete with its charming staff. It would all be modest but comfortable, warm and safe.

      Instead she and Miri were stranded in a cold, neglected house, miles from anywhere, with three nervous servants. Plus a turkey they couldn’t even eat. Plus one down-at-heel army captain who looked at her in a way she could not decipher, but which made her both irritated and… aroused, damn him. She had rescued him from a snowstorm. He should be as exhausted as she was and yet he just looked tough and competent and ready to lead a cavalry charge if necessary. Just as soon as he had finished reducing her to idiocy with one glance.

      He didn’t look at Miri that way. He treated her with perfect respect, as though she were no more than the average unmarried girl and, after the first shock, appeared utterly unmoved by her beauty.

      ‘More potatoes, Lady Julia?’ Not that he didn’t treat her with respect also. His manner was perfectly correct, so correct that she kept telling herself that she was imagining the warmth in his regard, the occasional double meaning in what he said. It must be her imagination. She had felt an immediate attraction to him in the carriage so perhaps now she was reading an answering interest where there was none at all. How lowering.

      ‘Thank you.’ The food was adequate. Plain but hot, dull but filling. Miri ate with a delicacy that concealed any distaste for what was unfamiliar for both of them.

      ‘After shipboard fare for months this has to be an improvement.’ She reached for the pepper. ‘But if we stay I must order some spices. I cannot endure such bland seasoning much longer.’

      ‘You are in two minds about remaining?’ Captain Markham twirled the stem of his wine glass slowly between fingers and thumb. The cellar had revealed a number of dusty bottles of dubious vintage and they were cautiously sampling one.

      ‘This house is a disappointment,’ Julia admitted. More than the house, if she was honest. After six years of brutal realism and clear thinking she had allowed freedom to go to her head. She had let herself dream and had followed that dream. She looked at Miri and acknowledged that she had been selfish as well. All for the very best of motives. ‘I will sell it.’

      ‘You will achieve a better price if you wait until the spring,’ Markham suggested. ‘Once it has been cleaned and had a lick of paint and the sun shines on it, it might be transformed.’

      ‘And a maharaja on a white elephant might come down the driveway and offer me chests of gold for it,’ she retorted and was rewarded with a laugh from Miri.

      They ate the apple pie, the desire for cream politely unspoken. ‘There was no port in the cellar, I gather,’ Julia said as she and Miri stood up. ‘We will leave you to your wine. If you will excuse us, we will retire now.’

      ‘Of СКАЧАТЬ