A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau (20 page)

She was that woman unmasked again—the one who forgot to be the dignified, cynical Lady Stapleton, the one who had forgotten her surroundings, the one who clearly loved children with a patient, compassionate warmth.

Edgar stood with his shoulder against a tree, watching, fascinated.

And then the child jumped with a bold lunge and bowled her right off her feet in his descent so that they both went down on the ground, the child squealing first with fright and then with delight when he realized he was not hurt, Helena laughing with sheer amusement.

She turned her head and caught herself being watched.

She lifted the child to his feet, dusted him off with one hand, directed him to his father, and sent him scampering away. She dusted herself off, her face like marble, and turned to walk away into the trees, in a direction no one else had taken. She did not look at Edgar or anyone else.

He sighed and stood where he was for a moment. Should he go after her? Or should he leave her alone to sulk? But sulk about what? That he had watched her? There was nothing secret in what she had been doing. She had been amongst the crowd, playing with one of the children. But her awareness that he was watching her had made her self-conscious or angry for some reason. It was impossible to know what was wrong.

He knew his wife as little today, Edgar thought, as he had known her that first evening, when he had looked up from his conversation with the Graingers and had seen her standing in the doorway, dressed in scarlet. She was a mystery to him—a prickly mystery. Sometimes he wondered if the mystery was worth probing.

But she was his wife.

And he was in love with her, even if he did not love or even particularly like her.

He pushed his shoulder away from the tree and went after her.

S
HE HAD NOT WANDERED FAR
. B
UT SHE WAS HALF
hidden behind the tree trunk against which she leaned. She was staring straight ahead and did not shift her gaze when Edgar came in sight. But he cut into it when he went to stand before her. He set one hand against the trunk beside her head and waited for her eyes to focus on his.

“Tired?” he asked.

“No.”

“It has been a long walk for you,” he said, “with the added strain of having to converse with a new father-in-law.”

“Would you make a wilting violet of me, Edgar?” she asked, one corner of her mouth tilting upward. “It cannot be done. You should have married one of the young virgins.”

“You are good with children,” he said.

“Nonsense!” Her answer was surprisingly sharp. “I dislike them intensely.”

“Greenwald’s little boy had been abandoned by the older tree climbers,” he said. “He would have been left in his loneliness if you had not noticed. You made him happy.”

“Oh, how easy it is to make a child happy,” she said impatiently, “and how tedious for the adult.”

“You looked happy,” he said.

“Edgar.” She looked fully into his eyes. “You would possess me body and soul, would you not? It is in your nature to want total control over what is in your power. You possess my body and I suppose I will continue to allow you to do so, though I did resolve this morning to remind you of your promise and to force you on your honor to keep it. But there is that damnable detail of a shared bed, and I never could resist an available man. You will
not
possess my soul. You may prod and probe as much as you will, but you will not succeed. Be thankful that I will not allow you to do so.”

He was hurt. Partly by her careless dismissal of him as merely an available man—but then such carelessness was characteristic of her. Mainly he was hurt to know that she was quite determined to keep him out of her life. He might possess her body but nothing else. More than ever she seemed like a stranger to him—a stranger who was not easy to like, but one he craved to know and longed to love.

“Is the reality of your soul so ugly, then?” he asked.

She smiled at him and lifted her gloved hands to rest on his chest. “You have no idea how appealing you look in this greatcoat with all its capes,” she said, “and with that frown on your face. You look as if you could hold the world on your shoulders, Edgar, and solve all its problems while you did so.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “I could help solve your problems if you would share them with me, Helena.”

She laughed. “Very well, then,” she said. “Help me solve this one. How do I persuade a massive, masterly, frowning man to kiss me?”

He searched her eyes, frustrated and irritated.

She pulled a face and then favored him with her most mocking smile. “You like only more difficult problems,
Edgar?” she asked him. “Or is it that you have no wish to kiss me? How dreadfully lowering.”

He kissed her—hard and open-mouthed. Her hands came to his shoulders, her body came against his, and for a few moments hot passion flared between them. Then he set his hands at her waist, moved her back against the tree, and set some space between them. Irritation had turned to anger.

“I do not like to be played with like a toy, Helena,” he said, “to be used for your pleasure at your pleasure, to be seduced as a convenient way of changing the subject. I do not like to be mocked.”

“You are very foolish, Edgar,” she said. “You have just handed me a marvelous weapon. Do you not like to be
mocked
, my dear? I am an expert at mockery. I cannot be expected to resist the challenge you have just set to me.”

“Do you hate me so much then?” he asked her.

She smiled. “I lust after you, Edgar,” she said. “Even with your child in my womb, I still lust after you. Is it not enough?”

“What have I done to make you hate me?” he asked. “Must I take sole blame for your condition?”

“What have you done?” She raised her eyebrows. “You have married me, Edgar. You have made me respectable and safe and secure and rich. You
are
very wealthy, are you not? Wealthier than your father even before you inherit what is his? You have made me part of an eminently respectable family. You have brought me to this—to Mobley Abbey at Christmastime and surrounded me with respectable families and children.
Children
wherever I turn. It is to be what your father calls a good old-fashioned Christmas. I do not doubt it, if today is any indication—yet today Christmas has not even started. And if all this is not bad enough, you have
tried to take my soul into yourself. You have suffocated me. I cannot breathe. This is what you have done to me.”

“My God.” His hand was back on the tree trunk beside her head. He had moved closer to her though he did not touch her. “My God, Helena, who was he? What did he do to you? Who was it who hurt you so badly?”

“You are a fool, Edgar,” she said coldly. “No one has hurt me. No one ever has. It is I who have done all the hurting. It is in my nature. I am an evil creation. You do not want to know me. Be content with my body. It is yours. You do not want to know me.”

He did not believe her. Oh, yes, she hurt people. He did not doubt that he was not the first man she had used and scorned. But he did not believe it was in her very nature to behave thus. There would not be the bitterness in her smile and behind her eyes if she were simply amoral. Nor that something more than bitterness that he sometimes almost glimpsed, almost grasped. What was that other something? Despair? Something or someone had started it all. Probably someone. Some man. She had been very badly hurt at some time in her past. So badly that she had been unable to function as her real self ever since.

But how was he to find out, to help her when she had shut herself off so entirely from help?

There was a glimmering of hope, perhaps. The things that suffocated her must also frighten her—her marriage to him, his family, his father’s guests and their children, Christmas. Why would she fear such benevolent things? Because they threatened her bitterness, her masks? The masks had come off briefly already this morning—first with the Bridgwater baby and then with the Greenwald child. And perhaps even last night when she had allowed herself to be comforted.

“You were right about one thing,” she said. “I
am
tired. Take me home, Edgar. Fuss over your pregnant wife.”

He took her arm in his and led her back to the others so that he could signal to his father that he was taking Helena back to the house. His father smiled and nodded and then bent down to give his attention to Jonathan, the Thornhills’ youngest son. Greenwald’s little boy briefly danced up to Helena and told her that he was going skating as soon as the ice was thick enough.

“I am going to skate like the wind,” he told her.

“Oh, goodness,” she said, touching a hand lightly to his woolly cap. “That
is
fast. Perhaps all we will see is a streak of light and it will be Stephen skating by.”

He chuckled happily and danced away.

Her voice had been warm and tender. She might believe that she disliked children, but in reality she loved them altogether too well.

They walked in silence through the woods and up the slope to the wider path. She leaned on him rather heavily. He should not, he thought, have allowed her to make such a lengthy walk when only a week or so ago she had still been suffering from nausea and fatigue.

“Tell me about your first marriage,” he said.

She laughed. “You will find nothing there,” she said. “It lasted for seven years. He was older than your father. He treated me well. He adored me. That is not surprising, is it? I am reputed to have some beauty even now, but I was a pretty girl, Edgar. I turned heads wherever I went. I was his prize, his pet.”

“You were never—with child?” he asked.

“No.” She laughed again. “Never once, though not for lack of trying on his part. You can imagine my astonishment when you impregnated me, Edgar. Seven years of marriage and a million lovers since then had convinced me that I was safely barren.”

Did she realize, he wondered, how her open and careless mention of those lovers cut into him? But he had no cause for complaint. He had never been deceived about
her promiscuous past, of which he had been a part. She had never even tried to keep it a secret.

“His poor first wife suffered annual stillbirths and miscarriages for years and years,” she said. “Was not I fortunate to be barren?”

“There was only one survivor?” he asked.

“Only Gerald, yes,” she said. “Though why he survived when none of the others did was a mystery—or so Christian always said. He was neither tall nor robust nor handsome; he was shy and timid; he was not overly intelligent. He excelled at nothing he was supposed to excel at. He had only one talent—a girlish talent, according to his father. He played the pianoforte. I believe Christian would have been just as happy if none of his offspring had survived.”

Her first husband did not sound to have been a pleasant man. Edgar could not imagine his own father being impatient with either him or Cora if they had been less than he had dreamed of their being. His father, for all his firm character and formidable abilities in his career, gave unconditional love to those nearest and dearest to him—and to their spouses, too. Had Sir Christian Stapleton treated Helena, as he appeared to have treated his only son, with such contempt that she had forever after treated herself that way? Could that account for her bitterness? Her despair?

“Your child will have his father’s love,” he told her. “Or hers. I do not care what its gender is or its looks or abilities or nature or talents or lack thereof. I do not care even if there are real handicaps. The child will be mine and will be deeply loved.”

If he had thought to soften her, he was much mistaken.

“You think that now, Edgar,” she said contemptuously. “But if it is a son and he has not your splendid physique or can look at two numbers and find himself unable to add them together or sneaks away to play the
pianoforte when you are trying to train him to take over your business, then you will compare him to yourself and to his grandfather and you will find him wanting. And he will know himself despised and become a weak, fragile creature. But he may not come to me for comfort. I shall not give it. I shall turn my back on him. I will not have this pregnancy romanticized. I will not think in hazy terms of a cuddly baby and doting motherhood and strong, protective fatherhood. The stable at Bethlehem must have been drafty and uncomfortable and smelly and downright humiliating. How dare we make beatific images of it! It was nasty. That was the whole point. It was meant to be nasty just as the other end of that baby’s life was.
This
is what I am prepared to do for you, that stable was meant to tell us. But instead of accepting reality and coping with it, we soften and sentimentalize everything. What did you
do
to inspire this impassioned and ridiculous monologue?”

“I dared to think of my child with love,” he said, “though she or he is still in your womb.”

“Oh, Edgar,” she said wearily, “I did not realize you were such a decent man. One’s first impression of you is of a large, masterful, ruthless man. Our first encounter merely confirmed me in that belief. I wish you were not so decent. I am terrified of decency.”

“And I, ma’am,” he admitted, “am totally baffled by you. You would have me believe that you are anything but decent. And yet you will help a lonely child climb a tree and touch his head with tenderness. And you will passionately defend a woman and child whose courage and suffering have been softened to nothing by the sweet sentiments that surround the Christmas story. And you keep me at arm’s length so that I will not be drawn into your own unhappiness. That
is
the reason, is it not?”

She set the side of her head against his shoulder and sighed. “The walk out did not seem nearly this long,”
she said. “I am very weary, Edgar. Weary of being prodded and poked and invaded by your questions. Have done now. Come upstairs with me when we reach the house. Lie down with me. Hold me as you did last night. You did, did you not? All night? Your arm must have gone to sleep. Hold me again, then. And draw me farther into this terror of a marriage. Perhaps I will sleep and when I awake will have more energy with which to fight you. I will fight, you know. I hate you, you see.”