Once Upon A Regency Christmas

He was rock-steady as they negotiated the yard, lit by starlight reflecting off the snow. ‘My goodness, I am chilly.’ An exaggerated shudder would hide her shaking, surely?

Once inside she went directly to the stairs—walking, not breaking into a run, not fleeing to her room to bury her head under a pillow. ‘Would you check the doors and windows are secure and the fire safely banked? I do not yet know how much reliance to place on Smithers.’

‘Of course. Goodnight, Lady Julia.’

‘Goodnight, Captain. Sleep well.’ He would make sure all was safe, she was certain of that. Giles Markham made her feel protected, sheltered. Rejected.

Sleep well. Lady Julia, Julia, had a sense of humour hidden under that baffling exterior because she surely couldn’t have been serious with that blessing. Giles hauled the blankets up over his ears and wondered why the arousal was not keeping him warm. Or why the cold was not killing the arousal, come to that. This was the worst of both. He was stone cold and hard as a hot icicle.

You shouldn’t have kissed her, common sense pointed out. She kissed me first, came the answer from considerably south of his brain. Yes, but you were going to kiss her, weren’t you? Telling yourself she needed comforting, pretending that all you wanted was to offer a shoulder to cry on. Haven’t you learned your lesson? You start out in a fit of gallantry, or of lust, then you get yourself tangled deep in whatever webs they are spinning and you end up as damaged as you would after a bayonet in the chest.

He was a soldier—that was what he was, what he did. What he had been, he reminded himself, giving the pillow a thump. No more.

Yes, but… That was what was keeping him awake, almost more than his frozen feet and the throb of desire. She kissed me and she had no idea what she was doing.

Not that it had been any less delightful for that. Julia had tasted delicious, her lips under his had been sweet and generous, her body curving into his had promised an abundance of the femininity that her practical manner struggled to deny. Yet she was a widow and, from what had been said, had been married and in India for several years. So what was the truth? A marriage in name—or was the husband a complete fiction? In which case, was she even Lady Julia Chalcott and the daughter of an earl?

A blast of wind hit the window panes, sending a draught swirling around the room. Giles swore and got out of bed, still fully dressed save for his neckcloth and boots. He had slept like a log in far worse conditions than this, but not if there was an alternative. He bundled up the bedding and let himself out of the room, then went down to the drawing room, where at least there was a fire.

He made himself a nest in front of the hearth on top of the sofa cushions and set to work on the sullen coals. By the time he had a cheerful blaze going he felt warmer and his brain was beginning to focus. He climbed the stairs again, dug in his bag for the thick red book he had bought to study, that had cost too much to throw away as he’d ploughed through the snow.

Giles settled back into his makeshift bed before he began to investigate the Peerage and Baronetage.

Sir Humphrey Chalcott, second baronet, born London 12th May 1752.

He would be sixty now, if he had lived.

Only son…

Married 1804, in Calcutta to Julia Clarissa Anne, daughter of Frederick Falmore, Fourth Earl of Gresham.

No first wife, so Miss Chalcott must be the daughter of a mistress.

Giles looked for the Falmores. Julia had been born in 1787, the only child of the Fourth Earl, who had died in early 1803, five years after his wife. The title passed to the son of his youngest uncle. Giles did the calculation. She had married a man thirty-five years her senior when she had been barely seventeen years old.

Who would put a grieving, orphaned girl of sixteen on a ship to India? The ‘fishing fleet’ was for the desperate and the poor, the plain or the otherwise ineligible women seeking a husband eager to take any British wife of gentility as they struggled to make their way in India.

If Julia really was who she said she was, then perhaps her husband had been unable through illness or infirmity to consummate the marriage to his young bride. He had obviously once been virile, Miss Chalcott was proof of that.

Giles threw another log on the fire, blew out the candle and settled down to sleep, his curiosity now thoroughly aroused. Which was, he concluded as he finally began to drift off, rather more comfortable than what he had been suffering from earlier.

There were doubtless more embarrassing social situations than meeting over the breakfast cups the man you had inexpertly kissed the night before and who had then firmly but kindly rebuffed you. Just at the moment Julia couldn’t think of any and she was applying her mind to it when Giles opened the dining room door.

Having all one’s clothing drop off in the middle of a dinner party? Walking in on the Governor General in his Calcutta mansion while he was pleasuring his mistress on the billiards table?

‘Good morning.’

She dropped the sugar bowl, sending lumps of sugar scattering across the table.

‘Julia!’ Miri was laughing at her. ‘Whatever are you thinking about? Good morning, Captain Markham.’

‘Billiards,’ she managed.

‘And what is there about billiards to make you blush?’ Miri was intent on teasing.

‘If you must know, I was thinking about the Marquess of Hastings. His billiard table. Government House.’ She cast a harassed glance at Giles, who had seated himself at the end of the table. ‘Good morning, Captain. There is bacon, eggs, bread and butter. You could ring for cheese. There are also some preserves. Damson, I think. Tea? There is no coffee or chocolate.’

And if I keep on talking long enough the floor may simply open up and swallow me.

‘Thank you.’ Giles accepted the tea cup. ‘What is there about the Marquess of Hastings and billiards to bring the colour to your cheeks? Is he such a bad player?’

‘No, I am.’ The floor remained disappointingly intact and Giles’s—Captain Markham’s—faint smile remained provoking. ‘It has stopped snowing. Perhaps the roads will be open soon.’ And you can leave. Please. Before I make more of a fool of myself than I have already.

‘I’ll go out and see, although I doubt it. The temperature is as low as ever, so nothing will have thawed.’ He buttered a slice of bread and addressed himself to his food while Julia sought for innocuous topics of conversation.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Miri announced. ‘Mrs Smithers has some stout boots that she said she would lend me.’

‘Have you ever seen snow before?’ Giles asked.

‘No, not before yesterday. It is very beautiful, but rather frightening.’

‘There is no danger if we stay near the house, which I suspect is all we will be able to do. It is best not to take liberties with snow, although I’ve moved troops in worse in an emergency. But it is a sneaky killer and it is best not to provoke it.’

He sounded utterly matter-of-fact and professional about what must have been a nightmare. Julia cast a covert glance at the firm jaw and the broad shoulders and found she could easily picture Giles leading men through any kind of danger and doing it well. He was still talking to Miri when she pulled herself out of her imagination.

‘We can build a snowman if you like. Won’t you join us, Lady Julia?’

‘Thank you, no. Please do not let Miss Chalcott get cold. She is not used to low temperatures, let alone these conditions.’

Those unusual grey eyes were quizzical. ‘Neither of you are, which is why it would be unwise to wander about outside alone at any time.’

‘That all depends what one encounters, doesn’t it?’

Giles’s eyes narrowed and, to her confusion, he smiled, not at all embarrassed. Miri, apparently blissfully unaware of any cross-currents, beamed at her. ‘Please come, too, Julia. It will be fun. There are sure to be more boots.’

Of course it will be fun. Miri would love the novelty of the snow and she was a miserable friend to grudge joining in, just because she had made a fool of herself last night. ‘Very well. Let us have fun.’

* * *

The sun was shining when they emerged, swaddled in layers of coats and scarves. Giles followed the partly-filled wheel ruts to the gates. ‘Not as bad as I feared,’ he reported back.

‘Thank heavens for that.’ Julia stamped her feet in their layers of woollen stockings inside the clumsy boots. ‘Is the road clear?’

‘The hedges have stopped the snow drifting off the fields for as far as I can see, although it may be bad further on. It is still too thick for the carriage and too soon to try on horseback. We may get out by Christmas if this weather holds. Now, snowmen.’

He showed Miri how roll a snowball across the lawn so that it grew. ‘We need a big one for the body and a smaller one for the head.’

‘Let me.’ She pounced on the ball and began to push it, laughing with delight, her breath making white puffs in the air.

Giles left her to stand beside Julia. ‘Shall we walk along the edge of the shrubbery, see if there are any evergreens for your Christmas garlands?’

‘Is it worthwhile, decorating this place?’ A nice safe topic.

‘Walk, before your toes freeze.’ He possessed himself of her hand and tucked it under his elbow before she could object, studying her from his superior height. She was not used to having to tip her head back to meet a man’s eyes. ‘You are determined to be miserable, aren’t you?’ he enquired.

‘No!’ She glared up at him, indignant. ‘I am determined to get out of here, that is all. Poor Miri, dragged all this way from home. I was mad to even contemplate it.’

‘Poor Miri?’ He tipped his head towards the lawn where her stepdaughter was already working on a second snowman’s body, every line of her bundled-up body radiating enjoyment.

‘Snow is a novelty. So is being cold, being snubbed, feeling homesick. I wanted to do the right thing for her, I told myself. Now I wonder if I wasn’t being selfish in demanding her company.’

‘What was it like for you, arriving in India, being hot, being homesick? Not snubbed, I imagine. Not an earl’s daughter.’

He was curious, but she was not surprised. She would have found it strange if he was not. ‘No, not snubbed.’ The temptation to pour it all out into a sympathetic ear was almost overwhelming. Instead she said what she had been avoiding all morning. ‘I must apologise for last night.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘If you had pounced on me in the stables, forced a kiss on me, you would be apologising.’ She risked a sideways glance when he remained silent.

‘You are very refreshing, Julia.’ When she frowned up at him the corner of his mouth kicked up, emphasising the scar on his cheek. ‘If I had done that then, yes, an apology would be in order unless it was obvious that a kiss was welcome. But I could have stepped away at any point, which might give you a clue that I enjoyed it. I assure you, I would have fled screaming if I had been unwilling—the door was right behind me.’

‘How very gallant you are, Captain. You kiss the poor, needy widow, you refrain from taking advantage of her and then you protest that you enjoyed the experience.’ She must stop talking now before she made any more of a pathetic spectacle of herself.

‘If you are suffering from a lack of male attention, Julia, then I can only assume that the passengers on the ship and every man in London between the ages of sixteen and sixty had something seriously wrong with them.’ There it was again, that narrow-eyed, very masculine assessment that had her pulse pounding.

Oh, yes, the men on the ship had looked. They had seen either a rich widow ripe for the plucking or her beautiful stepdaughter to be seduced. Or, in one or two cases, both. What none of them saw was a woman yearning for experience, for passion and for a virile man in his prime to deliver them.

Well, she had a virile, attractive man by her side at this moment. One who appeared to be discreet and considerate. She could be a coward or she could risk a monumental snub and tell him what she wanted. Julia took a steadying breath, but Giles was before her.

‘Tell me how you came to be in India, married so young to a man who must have been much older than yourself.’

Why not? None of it was a secret and she had already abandoned any pretext of pride with this man. ‘I was poor and unlucky in my relatives,’ Julia began. ‘My father died five years after my mother, when I was sixteen. He had married below him, his family said, and it was good that he had no son by such an unsuitable woman, a merchant’s daughter. The title went to his cousin, who was horrified to discover the state of the family coffers. Papa was not the most provident of men and there was no money, not enough to maintain the estate as it should be.’

‘One can understand the heir’s feelings,’ Giles observed.

‘Cousin Richard said I was a further drain on his pocket and that he had no intention of funding a Season for me the following year. An acquaintance was going out to India, so I could make myself useful by accompanying her as a companion and then I was sure to pick up a husband for myself. The problem was solved.’

She glanced up at his face when he said something sharp under his breath. He looked appalled. ‘You were sixteen, bereaved.’

‘I was also exceedingly pretty and his daughters are rather plain. I can say it now because my looks did not survive long. I was blonde and curvaceous and I had a beautiful roses-and-cream English complexion. Enchanting, though I say it myself. I arrived in Calcutta just as the cholera did. It killed thousands, amongst them many of the eligible young men who had come down to meet the Fishing Fleet. I caught it, too. They shaved my head because of the fever and when I recovered I was as thin as a rake, the roses had fled and my hair grew back straight and much darker. My travelling companion was dead, my looks gone, my pockets empty. I was desperate.

‘And so Sir Humphrey Chalcott won himself the daughter of an earl.’

Chapter Four

Giles tried to imagine what it would have been like for a girl scarcely out of the schoolroom to find herself in an alien land, weak, abandoned. Where had she found the strength to carry on?

Julia’s voice was quite steady as she told her tale, almost as though she spoke of someone else entirely. ‘Sir Humphrey thought he was acquiring status and influence. What he did not realise until too late was that the new earl had no intention of giving him anything, let alone the allowance he was hoping for.’

‘He was much older than you were.’

Julia nodded. ‘I suppose I hoped for a substitute father. I soon learned that he couldn’t even be a decent parent to his own daughter, let alone comprehend the fears and needs of a young bride.’

They came to a gap in the planting. Julia waved at Miri, who now had a line of five snow bodies in descending order of size. ‘I think Miri is building a snow family. She was the one bright spark at first. Her mother died when she was fifteen so she was shut away in the women’s quarters. She is four years younger than me, the sister I never had.’

‘And your husband was not a successful man?’

‘He was self-indulgent, indolent and had made himself ill by surrendering to all the temptations of the east. The food, the drugs, the women. He did not have to lift a finger to live a comfortable life, so he did not. He never saw it was his fault that he did not achieve the wealth of other merchants, who did apply themselves.’

They reached the corner of the shrubbery and Giles ducked under a snow-laden branch and into the shelter of the plantings. With the evergreens arching overhead the winding path was almost clear of snow.

‘It was not as bad as it might sound.’ His silence had left a space that she seemed compelled to fill. Giles wondered whether she had bottled all this up for so long that she was confiding things that she never had to anyone else. ‘You can live much better in India on little money than you can over here. I rapidly learned to be a housekeeper.’

‘It must have been hard, even so. A strange and alien land, marriage to a man like that.’ He felt caught up in her story. Here, for the first time in a long time, was a woman who told the truth without artifice, just as she had asked for his kiss with total simplicity.

‘I learned to fill my time.’ Julia made a business of adjusting her shawl. ‘So that is my story. Now you must tell me yours, Captain Markham.’

‘Is it not to be Giles, this morning?’ He snapped off a sprig of holly, laden with berries, and tucked it in her bonnet.

‘No. You know why not. I made an error of judgement last night.’ She put up her free hand, touched the holly as though to pluck it out again, then left it where it was.

‘The timing, perhaps, with us both tired, was not ideal.’ She had kissed like a virgin and he had reacted instinctively to distance himself, he realised. Giles tried a little cautious fishing. ‘You miss some aspects of marriage, no doubt.’

That provoked a sudden burst of laughter. He had never heard her laugh before and he grinned back, enjoying the way those blue eyes sparkled, the curve of that lush mouth. All the severity in her face vanished, just for a second. Then the laughter was gone.

‘By the time he married me my husband’s amorous days were long past. His health would not allow him to make a great deal of effort, especially as I think he found the whole exercise humiliating. I had none of the training of the Indian courtesans he was used to. They can pretend passion, feign an amorous attraction that it was completely beyond me to attempt.’ She shrugged. ‘These past four years I might as well have been a widow.’

‘There were no children?’ He regretted asking the moment he saw the way her face tightened and her shoulders braced.

‘No.’ Julia released his arm, reached out to pluck an ivy tendril and began to fashion it into a circle. ‘I cannot think how I can speak so frankly to a man about this.’

‘I am a stranger. You’ll never see me again.’ And we are met by chance on this snow-covered island of ours, bound together for a few days. He felt his body stir and harden as the temptation began to form into intention. If she is willing…

Giles picked more ivy and held the strands out one by one for her to add to her wreath, enjoying the concentration on her face as she wove the whippy lengths, struggling with the thickness of her gloves. Her brows were drawn together, her teeth were closed on the fullness of her lower lip and she looked sensual, intelligent and flustered, a heady combination. ‘I imagine you found no shortage of gentlemen willing to offer you diversion.’

He surprised a short, bitter laugh from her. ‘I had married the man and, whatever his faults, he gave me shelter when I was desperate. Besides, I made myself too busy to be tempted. There was a business to run.’

‘You managed your husband’s affairs?’ That he could well imagine.

‘Hardly. Humphrey would never have allowed a woman to make decisions. But I acted as his representative, travelled on his behalf, carried out his instructions. That gave me freedom, the chance to see more of India.’

Her face was vivid with remembered pleasure, the colour up in her cheeks. He had no idea how she could denigrate her appearance, mourn her lost beauty. Didn’t the woman have a looking glass? ‘You could travel safely?’

‘I had two huge wrestlers as bodyguards. No one would have dared rob or attack me when they were there, I assure you!’

Julia held up the wreath, head on one side as she studied it. ‘Not bad. It will make a base for some holly and fir cones and I will hang it on the door to greet our numerous callers.’ She looped it over her wrist, then took his arm again. ‘Now you tell me your story, Captain Giles Markham.’

What to tell her? The truth, he supposed. To a point. ‘Only son of a country clergyman, destined for the church and determined on the army. I don’t know where that came from, but I rode almost as soon as I could walk. I learned to shoot, enjoyed swordplay. Led my friends into trouble and, I suppose more helpfully, out of it. I knew I hadn’t the faith to be a clergyman, but the army seemed to offer excitement with honour.

‘My godfather bought me my first commission, saying I might as well have his legacy to me while he was alive and I needed it. Then last year I received a field commission to captain. Two months ago it became clear I needed to come home for family reasons.’ Home to an inheritance of debts. He had more than a little in common with her cousin.

‘You must have done something outstanding to merit a field commission, I know that. A Forlorn Hope? Is that what they call those appallingly dangerous attacks where everyone is a volunteer and if it succeeds against all the odds the survivors are almost guaranteed promotion?’

Giles shrugged. He was never comfortable talking about fighting. The battle was against fear and against bad luck and it sounded like cant to prate about courage and honour. Those were private things. ‘I wasn’t going to get promotion any other way, there was no more money to buy one and I had no intention of spending my career as the oldest lieutenant in the British army.’

That day he had felt that nothing else mattered beyond winning promotion because nothing else in his life was true. The softer things—a woman, love, a family—they were not for him because he could not trust his own heart, his own judgement. From then on, if he survived, the army would be his life. For life.

He had fought until he arrived filthy, tattered and bloody, on top of the breach, the standard in one hand, his sabre in the other, his feet on rubble and dead bodies and a French officer surrendering to him. Afterwards they had praised his courage, his leadership, his gallantry. He told himself that was all that mattered.

He had been silent too long, lost in his thoughts. ‘An appalling experience, I imagine,’ Julia murmured.

His face must have been betraying him as much as his still tongue. ‘After a few days I realised I had lost whatever naïve ideas I still had about war. I’d been down into hell and survived. It made me a better officer.’

‘And yet when we first met you said you were late of the dragoons. After going through hell to gain your promotion, you left it.’

The unasked questions struck at his pride. Did she think he had lost his nerve, couldn’t face fighting any more? He had led a forlorn hope to secure his career as an officer and within months another kind of duty had made all that meaningless.

‘My family needs me,’ he said. ‘Things have changed. People depend on me.’ He did not understand that duty yet. It had never been intended that he should. But now it was on his shoulders and he would have to learn to carry it.

‘That is good to hear.’ The hand tucked under his arm tightened for a moment. ‘A man who will make a sacrifice for his family, put his own ambition aside for them. You must love them very much.’

I don’t know them, he wanted to say. They are strangers who will resent me. He could tell her what he had inherited, tell her anything, he sensed. But then he would not be Captain Giles Markham any longer, he would be the stranger he must become, and he wanted to hold on to the man he was now, just for a few more days. That isn’t too much to ask, is it?

They had reached the glade at the centre of the shrubbery. Giles turned and positioned Julia in front of him, toe to toe. He could forget the army, forget what lay ahead, in a brief affaire with this woman, if that was what she wanted, too.