Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow

“This poor fellow here might as well be perched at the top of a sliding board, sitting on the elephant’s neck like that,” he continued, frowning a bit to prove the seriousness of his commentary. “He’d be tossed off, head over heels, and bouncing down the mountainside before he knew it.”

“He would?” asked Clarissa, her eyes round with horrified fascination. “All the way down to the bottom?”

“All the way,” said Revell solemnly. “In less time than it takes to tell. And oh, how that old elephant would laugh!”

“Artists often make such errors, my lord,” said Sara hurriedly. Heaven only knew what Revell would say next if she left him unchecked, and he wouldn’t be the one who’d have to deal with nightmares tonight. “Artists often must instead rely upon the reports of others because they cannot see everything they must portray. They can’t really be faulted if the results are sometimes questionable.”

“Questionable?” repeated Revell, his brows raised with exaggerated wonder. “I’d say the results were deuced peculiar, and so would you, Miss Blake, if you dared be honest. You know perfectly well what a proper elephant should look like.”

“I also know what a proper one smells like,” countered Sara warmly, “not that that is particularly relevant to this discussion.”

“Why not, Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa, leaning her cheek on her elbow. “If elephants don’t smell nice, then why would Hannibal wish to take them all the way to Rome?”

“Because they are very large and strong and have great endurance,” said Sara, eager to move on from the question of elephantine aroma. “They would be exceptionally useful to any army.”

“Your Miss Blake is quite the expert on elephants,” said Revell, beaming dangerously at Sara. “I doubt there’s another governess in Sussex—no, all of England!—that has so much experience with the creatures.”

“Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa, simultaneously enormously impressed yet uncertain as to whether she should believe Revell or not. “However would she have any experience with elephants?”

“Because I learn through reading,” said Sara quickly, before Revell could offer any additional helpful insight. Blast him for teasing her this way! Didn’t he realize the kind of trouble he was making for her? “One can learn everything about anything through books.”

But Clarissa was paying much closer attention to the elephants than to the wisdom to be gained through reading.

“We should put elephants in Mama’s greenery,” she said, grinning up at Revell. “Miss Blake and I have been charged with making the greenery in the ballroom more festive for Mama. It’s our special task. We were going to make camels for the three kings, but now I think they should have elephants instead.”

“Oh, Clarissa, I do not believe that is the wisest idea,” said Sara doubtfully. Lady Fordyce’s tastes were exceptionally traditional, and likely she would not be pleased to find elephants—even elephants cut from white pasteboard and daubed with colored inks—parading over her mantels and sideboards between the silver candlesticks, through boughs of holly and boxwood.

“Why not, Miss Blake?” asked Revell blithely. “There are plenty of elephants in the Bible, aren’t there? Begin with them, then some tigers.”

“Tigers!” exclaimed Clarissa with a small roar of relish. “Tigers for Christmas!”

Revell nodded, his eyes glinting with wicked mischief that would have shocked Albert and the others. “What better time of the year, eh? And what of a mongoose or two? Miss Blake knows of them, too, you know.”

“You must come help us, Lord Revell,” ordered Clarissa. “This afternoon, in the schoolroom. You can help Miss Blake and me cut out the animals and paint them, and then tomorrow we can arrange them in the ballroom.”

“I’m sure Lord Revell has other plans, Clarissa,” said Sara, silently praying that he did. “Doubtless he’d rather spend his afternoon in the company of the other gentlemen like your brother, not in the schoolroom with us.”

“Not at all,” said Revell, holding his hand over his heart so gallantly that Clarissa giggled. “I cannot think of a greater pleasure than spending the afternoon in the company of two such delightful ladies.”

“Please, my lord,” said Sara, almost pleading. “It is not necessary.”

“And I say it is my decision if I choose to splatter myself with glue and paint for the sake of the elephants and tigers and mongooses, too.” His grin softened as their gazes met over Clarissa’s head. “Besides, isn’t Christmas the time for miracles and magic of every sort?”

Chapter Four

Revell stood before his bedchamber window, watching the two figures make their way in a zigzagging path across the snowy field toward the house. Against the stark black and white of the wintry landscape, the pair stood out in sharp contrast: the little girl in her bright red cardinal and blue mittens, the woman in a cloak of darkest green. But then, for Revell, the two would be the first he’d spot even in the most crowded street in London.

“That be Miss Fordyce and her governess, my lord,” said the maidservant, following his gaze as she set the tray on the table beside him. The woman was past middle age, a servant who’d likely been with the Fordyces for so long that she felt entitled to certain conversational freedoms like this. “No matter what the weather, them two always go walking at this time of the day, regular as clockwork after first lessons.”

Revell, of course, had discovered this for himself, having already visited the schoolroom as promised to help with the tigers and elephants. The schoolroom had been empty except for a mystified parlor maid who’d informed him of Miss Clarissa’s customary walk. He’d have to control his impatience for another half hour or so until they returned, and without much interest he glanced at the plates of sliced cold meat, breads, and cheese on the tray that the cook had sent up to him out of a certain pity.

He knew he was already being regarded as something of an oddity. The other houseguests had scattered for the day, the gentlemen out riding and visiting the local tavern with Albert and Sir David as their leaders, and the ladies, under Lady Fordyce’s guidance, putting the final touches on their masquerade costumes at the local milliners and mantua-makers. His polite refusal to join either party had raised eyebrows, and he could only imagine what manner of wicked pastimes the others had imagined for him instead. How wonderfully shocked they’d be when they, inevitably, learned the truth!

“Aye, my lord, that Miss Blake has worked magic with the little miss,” continued the maidservant with approval, taking Revell’s silence as encouragement. “Like a little wild creature, she was, before Miss Blake came. ’Course ’tis to be expected, being so petted and all, but Miss Blake was the only one to give her manners to match her breeding.”

“How long has Miss Blake been with the family?” asked Revell, striving to sound only idly interested. He knew it wasn’t wise to encourage such confidential discussions with servants, but he’d learned next to nothing from Albert, and God help him, he’d so blasted much at stake.

“Five years this spring, my lord,” answered the maid-servant promptly, her hands folded over the front of her apron. “Before that she was with Lady Gordon, whose husband made such a fortune in India. A regular nabob, he was. Oh, begging your pardon, my lord, meaning no disrespect to yourself.”

“None taken,” said Revell, his thoughts racing. He remembered Lady Gordon—Lady Gorgon, they’d called her, on account of her imperious manner—from Calcutta’s small English social world before her husband had retired from the Company and returned home. But how would Sara have become a servant in Lady Gordon’s household, and why in blazes would she have left India—and him—so suddenly to do so? “Though I suppose they must have become acquainted in India together.”

“Miss Blake in India, my lord?” asked the servant, scandalized. “She’s a proper English lass, is our Miss Blake, not one of those wild, brown-skinned hussies from the colonies! Begging pardon again, my lord, but ’tis different for gentlemen. You know how it be, my lord. Lady Fordyce would never have taken Miss Blake if she’d lived wild among the pagan savages like that.”

“I understand,” said Revell, and he did, far more than the servant could realize. He’d forgotten the prejudice against women who’d gone out to India, let alone the ones like Sara who’d been born there. She hadn’t even had the advantage of being sent home to England for education as a girl, the way most British children were, simply because her widowed father hadn’t been able to bear parting with her. When he’d teased Sara about tigers and elephants before Clarissa, he’d only meant to remind her of the past they’d shared. Instead, great bumbling ass that he was, he’d put her entire livelihood and reputation at risk.

“If that will be all, my lord,” the maidservant was saying as she dropped a quick curtsy, the edges of her apron clutched in her hands.

“Yes, yes, and thank you,” said Revell, then shook his head as he thought of the final question. “About Miss Blake. She’s never been wed, has she?”

The servant grinned widely. “Nay, my lord, nor could she have taken a husband and still be Miss Blake, could she? Neither husband, nor followers, not since she’s been with the Fordyces. I tell you, my lord, she’s a good, quiet lass, and a credit to this house.”

“That is all, then,” he said softly, and turned back to the window. Sara and Clarissa must be inside now, for the haphazard trail of their footprints through the snow led to the kitchen door in the yard below. Soon he could venture back to the schoolroom, and be sure to find them there.

And then what? He’d learned more of Sara’s past from the maidservant, true, but he’d also realized he didn’t want to ask any more such questions. It had been one thing to make inquiries when he’d no notion of where she was, but quite another when fate had so conveniently placed her once again beneath the same roof. Now he should be asking her himself, directly and without guile; anything else seemed distastefully like spying, and Sara—Sara deserved better than that from him, no matter what happened next.

Still gazing out at the flurried footprints in the snow, he lightly touched the waistcoat pocket that held the sapphire ring. She could talk all she wished about Christmas miracles, but surely finding her again like this, across six years and three continents, was as truly miraculous as anything he could ever have dreamed.

Perhaps this is why he’d been drawn so inexplicably to Ladysmith. Perhaps some subtle tug of fate had made him trade London and a liquor-sodden bachelor Christmas with Brant for another chance with Sara. Living in India had loosened his distinctly English faith in a world based on logic and reason, and made him trust more to the mysteries of fate.

But not even that could explain why Sara had abandoned him the first time, or why he seemed so damned eager to let her do it again. He thought he’d sensed the old magic between them again, but for her part, she hadn’t exactly been overjoyed to see him. Pleased, yes, but not overjoyed, and not at all eager to trade her life as a governess for one with him—a sobering, if not downright depressing, thought. Yet he couldn’t deny that when he was with her, he felt happier, younger, more content and yet more excited, too, more at peace with himself and the world.

He might even still feel in love.

He gave the box with the ring one last rueful pat. All he could do was ask Sara for the truth, and let the rest fall where it would.

And believe with all his heart in miracles.

Never had Sara doubted that Revell Claremont was an extraordinarily accomplished gentleman. He rode well—both horses and elephants—shot well, and was as skilled with the short, curved blade of a Gurkha’s kookree as he was with an English cutlass. Unlike most sons of dukes, he had survived on his own since he was fourteen, and made his first fortune before he’d turned twenty-one. He was as well read as any university man, spoke five languages with ease and grace and swore in several more, and while he could demonstrate all the politesse of a career diplomat, he could also be a ruthless negotiator and trader, as able to conduct business in a rough tent with Bengali brigands as he was with the equally cut-throat factors of the East India Company.

But as Sara soon saw, he was hopeless—absolutely, abjectly hopeless—with a pair of scissors, a pot of paste, and a pile of colored paper squares.

“Not like that, my lord,” said Clarissa, scowling down at the tiger’s head, newly attached at a peculiar angle to his body and oozing a fatal blob of paste from his throat, or what should have been his throat if his head had been placed more accurately. “You’ve put it on all wrong.”

“I have?” Revell stared balefully at the tiger, heedless of another paste blob smeared across the sleeve of his superfine coat. He had insisted on sitting beside Clarissa at the child’s table, his oversize frame hunched forward and his legs bent awkwardly to fit the short chair. “I thought he had rather a rakish air about him.”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Clarissa crossly. “It’s just wrong.”

Considering the discussion complete, she reached across Revell and pushed the offending head into a more anatomically pleasing position, using her small thumb to wipe away the extra paste.

“There,” she said, propping the tiger to stand upright. “Now he’ll do. Mama is most particular, my lord. She doesn’t want her ballroom cluttered up with any old rubbish, and she’ll tell you so, too.”

“I doubt she would tell Lord Revell quite as rudely as you have, Clarissa,” said Sara. She didn’t dare look at Revell, sitting there with his knees beneath his chin and the most wounded look imaginable on his face, or risk giggling out loud. “He has been most kind to offer his help, you know.”

“Well, he hasn’t helped at all,” declared Clarissa, hands on her hips and without a morsel of gratitude. “First he cut the ear off that lovely elephant you’d drawn, then he didn’t wash the red paint from the brush before he put it into the blue and made it all nasty and purple, and then he tried to ruin this tiger, too, by putting the head on so crooked.”

“Clarissa,” warned Sara. “I believe Lord Revell deserves an apology from you for that.”

Revell sighed. “No, I don’t,” he said humbly. “I did muddy the paints, exactly as Clarissa said.”

“That’s not the point, my lord.” As sternly as she could, Sara frowned at Clarissa. “Clarissa, an apology.”

“Very well.” Now Clarissa was the one to sigh, flopping her hands at her sides to duck the slightest possible curtsy. “Forgive me for speaking so rudely to you, my lord. You didn’t mean to be clumsy and bumbling. You just were.”

“I know,” admitted Revell as he tried to scrape the paste from his sleeve. “It’s quite a problem with me, isn’t it? But perhaps Miss Blake can help me. Surely there must be some task you’ll trust me with, Miss Blake? Something that not even I could ruin?”

Though Revell’s expression remained serious and properly penitent for Clarissa’s sake, his eyes sparkled with such amusement that Sara realized he, too, was dangerously close to laughing. The blobs of paste and ruined paint were like another secret they shared, another connection—albeit an untidy one—and she felt such a warmth of fresh affection swirling between them that she couldn’t keep from smiling.

If they had wed as they’d planned, they could be husband and wife in a house of their own, instead of guest and governess in this one. They could be laughing with their children, making plans for their Christmas together, sharing the paint and paste and mangled elephants, trust and love and happiness.

Oh, Sara, Sara, take care! A smile is not a promise for the future, nor an explanation for the past, and not once since he found you has he mentioned love….

“He could make the paper chains to hang over the looking glasses, Miss Blake, couldn’t he?” suggested Clarissa. “Even babies can make those. Here, my lord, it’s quite simple. You cut the strips of paper and loop them together like this.”

She demonstrated importantly, showing Revell exactly how to make the chain’s paper links tie into one another, as if she were a conjurer revealing a complex trick. “You do have to use the paste again, my lord, but it goes inside, where no one will see if you use too much.”

“As you wish, memsahib,” said Revell, dutifully bending over the strips of colored paper with more success than he’d shown with the animals; as Clarissa had noted, even a baby could make paper chains.

But Clarissa’s attention had already bounded forward. “What did you call me?” she asked. “Mem what?”

“Memsahib,” he said, concentrating on making the paste stick. “That’s what fine ladies are called in India, as a form of respect. Your mother would be memsahib, while your father would simply be sahib.”

“Memsahib,” repeated Clarissa, relishing the sound and feel of the foreign word. “Do you know other Indian words?”

“Oh, an entire wagon full,” said Revell expansively. “Instead of a gown, you would wear a sari. Your mother’s grand ball would be called a burra khana, and Miss Blake here would be your ayah.”

Sara laughed, wrinkling her nose. “I do not know if I wish to be anyone’s ayah. All the ayahs I ever had were cross-tempered old women who’d pinch my arm to make me obey.”

“Did you truly know ayahs, Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa curiously. “Or is it like the elephants, and you only mean from books?”

“From books, I am sure,” said Revell quickly, rescuing Sara from her misstep. “I’m the one who’s more at home in Calcutta than London.”

“Which is how you’ve come to know so many peculiar foreign words, I expect,” said Clarissa, leaning closer to admire his handiwork. “Why, my lord, that is almost a proper chain after all. Here, let me put it with the others.”

Gingerly she gathered up Revell’s chain and carried it across the room to add it to the other decorations they’d made, pausing to admire the animals once again.

“We need to talk, Sara,” said Revell, his voice low and urgent as he touched her arm. “When can we meet alone?”

Startled, she blushed, and pulled her arm away. “We shouldn’t, Revell,” she whispered. “That night on the terrace—wasn’t that enough?”

“Not by half, it wasn’t,” he said. “Tonight, after Clarissa is in bed. Ten o’clock, say, by the same door to the terrace.”

“Please, Rev, I do not—”

“I’ll not take no, Sara,” he said firmly. “Tonight, on the same terrace. Don’t fail me, lass.”

But before she could answer the door to the schoolroom opened and in swept Lady Fordyce.

“Look, Clary, look what I’ve brought you from town!” she called gaily, holding up an elaborate mask decorated with gold beads and red plumes. “It shall be the perfect accompaniment to your costume for—oh, my, Lord Revell! You surprise me, my lord!”

She might have been surprised, but Sara was beyond that, to out-and-out speechless horror. To have Lady Fordyce discover her like this, in Clarissa’s schoolroom, with Revell standing so guiltily close to her that there could be no respectable explanation possible.

Not that Revell wouldn’t venture one. “I didn’t intend to surprise you, Lady Fordyce,” he said, remaining beside Sara as if there were nothing at all remarkable about such proximity. “I was simply helping your daughter with the elephants.”

Lady Fordyce’s face went cautiously blank. “Elephants?”

“Yes, Mama, look!” Gleefully Clarissa held a paper elephant in one hand and a tiger in the other. “For the ballroom! Miss Blake and I made the animals, while Lord Revell made chains!”

“Even babies can make chains,” explained Revell modestly, stepping to the table to drape one of his chains from one hand across to the other. “And so, therefore, can I.”

“But elephants and tigers, Miss Blake?” asked Lady Fordyce, disapproval frosting her voice. “For my masquerade ball?”

Sara nodded, resolutely determined to put the best face on what now seemed a disastrous decision. “Yes, my lady. The elephants were inspired by our lessons on ancient Rome.”

“But your lessons are one thing,” said Lady Fordyce, her expression growing darker still, “and my Christmas masquerade is quite, quite another.”

“Ah, but there will be no more appropriate creatures imaginable,” assured Revell as he idly swung the chain back and forth. “You’ve only to see how the Prince of Wales himself is covering his walls with peacocks and tigers everywhere, and my own brother is having the dining room of Claremont House painted all over with frolicking monkeys.”

“Your brother the duke?” asked Lady Fordyce, reconsidering the elephant in her daughter’s hand. “His Grace would approve? And the Prince, too?”

“I should not be surprised if you set a new fashion, and all on account of your daughter’s lessons,” said Revell, his smile shifting toward Sara, as if to thank Clarissa’s governess for such a splendid notion.

But at the same time his gaze seemed to warm as he found Sara’s, giving his words another meaning that only she would understand, and that would remind her once again of the meeting he sought with her later.

“You know, Lady Fordyce,” he continued, determinedly not looking away and not letting Sara do so, either, “that in England today there is nothing more choice, more desired, than that which comes from India, and never more so than this Christmas.”

Chapter Five

By the single candlestick in her chamber upstairs from the nursery, Sara took one final look at her reflection in the small looking glass over the washstand. Did her eyes truly seem brighter, happier, her mouth more ready to curve into a smile? Or was it no more than the most wishful hopes and the wavering candlelight that had made the difference, and not Revell?

Lightly she touched the crooked head of the paper tiger that she’d hidden in her pocket, now tucked into the frame of her looking glass, and as she ran her finger along the hardened paste on the tiger’s neck, she smiled, thinking of how gamely Revell had struggled at the low schoolroom table. Tomorrow, when they began decorating the ballroom in earnest, she’d sworn to herself that she’d return the tiger to the other ornaments. Deciding what to do next about Revell wouldn’t be nearly as easy.

From the hall below she heard the ten echoes of the case clock chiming the hour, and swiftly patted her hair one last time. She’d dallied long enough; now that she’d made up her mind to meet Revell—though only for the briefest few minutes imaginable!—she didn’t want to keep him waiting.

She hurried down the back stairs, keeping her footsteps as soft as possible so that no one else would know she wasn’t asleep. Not that anyone was likely to notice. With the house so full of guests, most servants were still busy helping in the kitchen or with serving, and from the voices and merry laughter in the drawing room, the Fordyces and their friends weren’t likely to retire to their bedchambers until midnight at the earliest. She paused to press herself against the wall to allow two footmen to bustle past with covered trays.

Around this corner, she thought as she fastened the front of her cloak, then down the last hall to the terrace doors, and to Revell. As hard as it would be, she meant to tell him the truth, as quickly and with as few words as possible, and then she would—

“Miss Blake!” called Lady Fordyce breathlessly behind her. “Oh, Miss Blake! How vastly fortuitous that you are still awake!”

Reluctantly, Sara stopped, her anticipation crumbling. As much as she wished to run ahead, to pretend she hadn’t heard her mistress, her conscience wouldn’t let her.

“I couldn’t sleep, my lady,” she said, her explanation mechanical with disappointment as Lady Fordyce joined her. “I was only going outside for a brief walk.”

“Then how glad I am to have found you first,” declared the older woman, her round face flushed and glistening with a hostess’s duress as well as the wine from dinner. She took Sara firmly by the arm to steer her back toward the drawing room, clearly unwilling to let Sara even consider escape.