Once Upon a Christmas Read online

  Celia tried to smile, but failed. “I would not have found myself thrown on the parish, after all. I do have four hundred pounds safely invested in the Funds, which will bring me the princely sum of—what is it?—about twelve pounds per annum, I think. And I might double that income, if I hire myself out as a scullerymaid.”

  Mrs. Floyd shuddered. “Do not even jest about such a thing. I have been so anxious! And when we received that message from the duchess informing you that she intended to pay you a visit, I was thrown into such a fever of hope it was almost worse than the fear! And then she asked you so many questions, just as if you were being interviewed for a position of some sort, which struck me as so very—but now everything is settled, and quite comfortably. Celia, I congratulate you.”

  Celia frowned. “Settled? Surely you do not think that dragon of a female means to offer me permanent residence at Delacourt?”

  Mrs. Floyd nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes! Yes, indeed! That is what I understood her to say. Did not you?”

  “Certainly not! My hat, what an idea! After all—why should she? Her Grace did not strike me as the benevolent sort. In fact, I thought her the coldest fish ever I met.”

  “Well, she is, perhaps, a little high in the instep—”

  “High in the instep! That woman has held her nose in the air for so many years, it’s my belief she can no longer bend at the waist.”

  Mrs. Floyd fluttered agitatedly. “Celia, really! You mustn’t be disrespectful. After all, she is a duchess. It would be wonderful if she did not acquire a great opinion of her own importance, the way everyone round her must bow and scrape. Such a handsome woman, too! I daresay she is accustomed to an extraordinary degree of deference.”

  Celia’s eyes sparkled dangerously, and Mrs. Floyd hurried to forestall whatever remark her former charge was about to make. “Do not forget she is your aunt! Or something like it. And she will be showing you a great kindness.”

  “Aunt.” Celia shivered dramatically. “I shall never be able to address her as ‘Aunt Gladys,’ try as I might.”

  “Oh, pooh. I daresay she is perfectly amiable, when one comes to know her. And they do say blood is thicker than water.”

  Celia chuckled. “Yes, they do say that, but she’s no more related to me than you are. She simply married my father’s cousin—whom he never met, by the by! The old duke booted my grandfather out of the house without a farthing, cut him out of his will, and never spoke to him again after he married my grandmother. We never encountered anyone from that branch of the family, and never cared to. And now I know why! If that stiff-rumped Tartar is the present duke’s choice for his life’s companion, only think what he must be like! After a se’nnight in their house, I daresay it will be a relief to hire myself out as a scullerymaid.”

  “I wish you would not talk in that flippant way, my dear, about matters that are quite, quite serious! And besides, Delacourt is not a house,” said Mrs. Floyd severely. “I would own myself astonished if you encountered the duchess above once a month in that great sprawl of a place. Apart from dinner, that is.”

  “Gracious. Will it be so very splendid, do you think?”

  “My dear Celia! Delacourt is famous!”

  “I suppose it is.” Celia rubbed her cheek tiredly. “In that case, I’ve nothing suitable to wear. It is a bit much, I think, to have to take something so trivial into consideration just now.”

  Mrs. Floyd reached out and patted her young friend’s knee consolingly. “Depend upon it, my dear, they will understand that you are in mourning.”

  “They will have to,” said Celia defiantly, “for even if I had the inclination to purchase a new wardrobe, I haven’t the funds.” Her eyes widened in alarm as another thought struck. “What about Christmas? I hope I am not expected to arrive bearing gifts for a houseful of persons I have never met. And I cannot afford anything remotely fine enough!”

  “Oh, they don’t keep Christmas in the great houses the way we humbler folk do. A pity, I always thought—as if Christmas could go out of fashion! But that’s what one hears.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know. The way my luck has been running, I shall arrive to find every room decked with holly and mistletoe, and discover that I must give expensive presents to all my unknown relatives—and their servants! Well, that’s that. The instant I step through the door I shall tell the duchess that I have other plans for the holidays.”

  Mrs. Floyd looked uneasy. “But you don’t, my dear. They will think it odd when Christmas approaches and no one sends a carriage for you.”

  “Perhaps they will offer me the use of one. They doubtless have a dozen.”

  “How will that mend matters? You will have to direct the coachman to take you somewhere. Where will you go?”

  Celia bit her lip. “I think I feel an attack of influenza coming on,” she said mendaciously, pressing a hand to her forehead and falling back on the sofa cushions. “What a pity! I fear I shall not be able to visit Delacourt until the second week of January. At the earliest.”

  Mrs. Floyd’s face fell. “Well, of course, you could plead illness,” she admitted. “And Dr. Hinshaw has promised us a goose,” she added valiantly, “so I’m sure we will have a very merry Christmas here at the vicarage, just the two of us.”

  Celia’s conscience immediately pricked her. She sat up. “No, no, I was only funning,” she said hastily, and forced a smile. “The duchess is expecting me next Thursday week, and Thursday week it shall be. I would not dare gainsay her.”

  Mrs. Floyd’s relief was palpable. She immediately brightened, and began chattering of her nieces and nephews, and how pleasant it would be to give them their little gifts in person rather than sending them through the post, and how there had never been a figgy pudding to equal the figgy pudding her sister-in-law made every year.

  Listening to her, Celia felt ashamed. Her grief had made her selfish. It hurt to see how much her friend was looking forward to leaving her. But it was only natural, after all. Anyone who had a home would want to be home for Christmas.

  Celia had not given Christmas a thought. Now she realized that she simply had not wanted to think about Christmas, any more than she had wanted to think about Mrs. Floyd leaving. Both thoughts gave her a painful, even panicky, sensation. But she would make an effort to hide that. She owed it to her friend, to let her leave for home with a happy heart, untroubled by the notion that Celia still needed her.

  But she did. Oh, she did indeed.

  Mrs. Floyd was the last person left alive whom Celia loved. The thought of Liz going back to Wiltshire and leaving her alone, completely and utterly alone, filled Celia with a blind and brainless terror.

  It was useless to tell herself how silly she was being. She knew there was no logical reason to fear that Liz, too, would die if she let her out of her sight. But logic had no power over the formless dread, monstrous and paralyzing, that seized her every time Mrs. Floyd left the room. Since the first week of September she had been all but glued to Liz’s side, following her about like a baby chick. How would she feel when Liz left the county? Could she smile and wave her handkerchief as the coach bore her only friend away? Or would she make a spectacle of herself, weeping and screaming like a child?

  This surely would be the worst Christmas of her life.

  Chapter 2

  The flat in Conduit Street rang, as it did most evenings, with boisterous male laughter. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour and the quantity of brandy which had been consumed in the course of the evening, a rather haphazard game of darts was in progress.

  The target was centered upon a wall dotted with small holes—evidence that this game was not the first to be played in this room, nor the first to be played in the wee hours of the morning by friends who were less than serious in their attempts to best one another. Winning was never the point of any game played in Jack’s flat. One was expected to instantly and enthusiastically join whatever game was underway at the moment, but actually winning was viewed as a rather u
nfortunate breach of etiquette.

  The contestants were an eclectic lot. It might be assumed, from the fashionable address of the flat, and the fact that it had been home to the Marquess of Lynden for the past several years, that the gentlemen who gathered there would be the scions of distinguished families. Lord Lynden, however, was easy-going to a fault. He made friends easily, and wherever he went. The only prerequisite for becoming one of Jack’s intimates was to be a thoroughly decent chap. A great gun. Sound as a roast. So long as there was something admirable about you, Jack Delacourt didn’t care who your antecedents were. He also didn’t care whether you were full of juice or poor as a church mouse. One could always drop by his flat unannounced and be sure of a welcome; there was generally a stream of idle, but good-natured, company ebbing and flowing at various times of the day and night. Since the company was almost exclusively male, and almost exclusively young, one was certain of finding an abundance of food and drink there as well.

  Tonight’s impromptu party was small, but fairly typical. Jack himself was present, his tall person flung sideways across an easy chair in a posture chosen for comfort rather than propriety. Dwight Thornburg, an earnest and rather threadbare young man whom Jack had met at school and whose intelligence and loyalty had earned him a permanent place in Jack’s world, sat across from him. They occasionally interrupted their conversation to toss a desultory dart or two, but the game was being pursued with more zeal by the other two gentlemen in attendance.

  John Emerson, who had a lamentable tendency to throw wide, had hurled a dart with so much vigor and so little skill, that it stuck, quivering, in the wall fully six inches from the target. His friend Dick Hart whooped with laughter.

  “What a clumsy fellow you are! No precision of eye, Emerson—none at all. And to think I let you drive me here from Worcester! I’d no idea I was taking my life in my hands.”

  “Well, don’t choke to death,” Emerson gloomily advised his friend, as Hart’s laughter sent him into a coughing fit. He strolled over to pry his dart from Jack’s wall. “I say, it’s dead center after all!”

  “Eh?”

  Emerson pointed with pride at the dart, neatly centered on a wallpaper rosebud. “I was aiming at the rose,” he announced.

  Hoots and catcalls greeted this pronouncement. Emerson waved them aside with great stateliness, and yanked briskly at the dart. It popped out of the wall with sufficient force to send Emerson staggering back a pace, and the unfortunate lad struck a ceramic jar atop Jack’s mantlepiece with his elbow. It promptly crashed to the floor. A brief silence fell, during which Emerson flushed scarlet.

  “Oh, Jack, I am sorry, dear chap—I’ll buy you another, of course—” stammered the luckless Emerson.

  Jack grinned. “On the contrary, old man, I am in your debt.” He indicated several papers lying amid the wreckage. “I wonder what urgent communications I have overlooked by stowing them in that pot?”

  Jack uncoiled himself from his contorted position in the chair and strolled over to take the papers, which Emerson had hurriedly retrieved from the shards of broken pottery. Then, lightly shrugging off Emerson’s attempts to apologize, he returned with the small collection of correspondence to his favorite chair and began leafing through it. The game resumed behind him. By the time it reached its former pitch of hilarity, Jack had gone through several letters, including two that made him smile and shake his head, one that made him wince and pitch it into the fire, and another that caused him to frown in puzzlement. He read this one a second time.

  “Here, Thornburg,” he said at last, tossing the elegant sheet of hot-pressed paper to the most sober of his friends. “You fancy yourself a knowing ‘un. What do you make of that?”

  Thornburg caught it deftly, arched his brows in amused inquiry, and perused the letter. “Very proper,” he said when he had finished. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s from my mother.”

  “Yes, thanks, so I see! Nothing mysterious about that, is there? Why shouldn’t it be from your mother?”

  Jack gazed meditatively at him. “Have you ever met my mother?”

  “I have,” asserted Hart, unexpectedly joining the debate. “Let me see it.”

  Thornburg obligingly handed the letter to him and he read it. Emerson, abandoning the darts, crowded up behind Hart and read it over his shoulder. Both Hart and Emerson were well-connected, if impecunious, young men and both were at least slightly acquainted with the Duchess of Arnsford. Dick Hart, in fact, was related to her on his mother’s side, and was therefore rather better acquainted with her than he cared to be. By the time he had finished the missive his eyes had narrowed in suspicion.

  “Smoky,” was his opinion. “Too smoky by half.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought,” agreed Jack.

  Thornburg gave a snort of laughter. “What the deuce is smoky about it? It’s a perfectly civil letter, inviting you to Delacourt for Christmas. Don’t you want to spend Christmas with your family?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” explained Jack, moodily crossing one leg over the other. “I always go home for Christmas. I’ve never spent Christmas anywhere else.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I don’t need to be invited to my own home for Christmas! It’s really most peculiar.”

  Hart nodded wisely. “Something’s afoot.”

  Emerson’s eyes grew round with conjecture. “I say, perhaps the duke has received notice to quit.”

  “That did occur to me,” admitted Jack. “But I think it unlikely.”

  “Pho! Arnsford will outlive us all,” scoffed Hart. “Besides, if your father were on his deathbed, Her Grace would have summoned you home immediately and permanently. Not just for Christmas.”

  “Let me see it again,” said Thornburg. He read the letter more methodically this time, and finally looked up with a more thoughtful expression. “I see what you mean. On the surface it’s a perfectly ordinary, cordial letter, but—”

  “But there’s no precedent for it,” interrupted Jack, shaking his head. “No need for it, no precedent for it, and what’s more, although it doesn’t sound like her in the least, it’s in her own handwriting. What the devil is happening out there in Oxfordshire? It can’t be me she wants, for I would have come anyway. I read it twice through, looking for the name of the friend she wants me to bring. But she doesn’t mention anyone.”

  “Perhaps she meant to, but she accidentally left that part out,” suggested Emerson.

  Hart snorted at this, and Jack looked skeptical. Thornburg knit his brows. “Would it really explain matters, had she mentioned your bringing a friend? I don’t see why she should particularly want you to do so.”

  The other three men yelped with laughter. Thornburg gazed at them in mild surprise.

  “Sorry!” gasped Jack. “I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew. My mother has been trying to marry my eldest sister off for years. Very nearly brought the thing off, last Season, but it all came to naught. Caused the devil of an uproar at the time.”

  Light dawned, and Thornburg’s cheeks reddened. “Of course! Lady Elizabeth. You’re right; the tale had reached even my ears. Sorry. I’ve always been a little dense on such matters.”

  “I’ve got it!” exclaimed Emerson, and began excitedly ticking the points off on his fingers. “Jack is right that the duchess assumes he will bring a friend. And why not? He’s got more friends than any man in London. So she writes him a letter, even though she knows he will come home for Christmas, because she wishes to remind him of it, supposing that he will need to extend the invitation before everyone’s plans are made.” Emerson beamed at the group, evidently awaiting their approbation.

  “Yes? Go on,” urged Jack. “Why doesn’t she tell me whom to bring?”

  “Oh, she does not care which of us you bring. She trusts you to bring whomever you choose.”

  Hart groaned and punched Emerson in the shoulder. Jack dropped his head in his hands, choking back laughter. “My mother and
Elizabeth may be desperate, but they will never be that desperate! Not care who I bring home? You silly young chuff, I am the despair of my family! They live in daily terror that I will arrive on their doorstep with an opera dancer on my arm.”

  “Well, I don’t see the danger in that, old man,” said Emerson, aggrievedly rubbing his shoulder. “Lady Elizabeth can’t marry an opera dancer.”

  “No, but—” Jack suddenly broke off, an arrested expression in his eyes. “That’s it!” he exclaimed, snapping his fingers. His friends looked at him expectantly. He snatched the letter out of Thornburg’s hand and stared intently at it. “That must be it.”

  “What?” chorused Emerson and Hart.

  Jack took a deep breath. “She’s found a girl.”

  “A girl? For you, you mean?” asked Hart.

  “No, for you!” said Jack rudely. “Of course for me, chucklehead! She’s found a girl, and means to supervise our meeting.”

  Thornburg did not join in the general shout of laughter and spurious congratulations. He merely grinned, and shook his head. “Forgive me, old chap, but I don’t think you have quite reached the age where a man’s parents push him toward the altar willy-nilly.”

  Jack cocked a knowing eye at him. “Ah, Thornburg, you don’t know my family! I’m three-and-twenty now, you know. A very dangerous age.”

  “Oh, do the Delacourts fall in love at three-and-twenty?”