A Christmas Dance (7 page)

It was awfully tempting. “No.”

“Pity.”

A half hour after their arrival, Patience decided it would have been a much greater pity if she had given in to temptation and returned home. True, there was a moment or two of terrible nerves upon her introduction to Mrs. Virginia Higgs, but the discomfort was blessedly short lived. It was difficult to be ill at ease in the company of such an affable woman.

As soon as Patience had arrived, Mrs. Higgs had ushered her to a settee where she, and a good number of her friends, proceeded to ask a long series of friendly questions. Though it put her in the awkward position of having to parry one or two inquiries into her past, Patience felt the amicable interview was preferable to being snubbed. Shame it had the unfortunate side effect of making it impossible for her to
ever
so casually cross the room to where William was speaking to an entirely different group of ladies. It was even more unfortunate that several of those ladies were young, attractive and unmarried.

“Is something the matter, dear?”

Patience snapped her gaze away from William. On the settee next to her, Mrs. Higgs fluttered her fan below a small, knowing smile. “You look rather. . .distant.”

“Oh, no. No, I. . .” Patience scrambled for a plausible excuse for her distraction, only to be handed one by the sight of Caroline motioning for her from across the room. “I believe Miss Meldrin needs me, that’s all. Please, do excuse me.”

She hurried away quickly on the slight chance Mrs. Higgs would be so bold as to point out Caroline was standing a significant distance from where Patience had been gazing.

Caroline gave her a rather distracted smile as she approached. “Patience, I seem to have torn my gown. Do you--”

“
Caroline
--”

“I have.” Caroline lifted her arm to display a loose seam at the cuff of her gown. She stared at it with a bemused expression. “I’ve actually torn it.”

“Oh.” Patience blinked at the loose material. “Well. . .how unexpected.”

“Yes, rather. . .” Caroline’s brow furrowed further. “I suppose it needs to be mended.”

“Yes. I suppose so. . .Did you bring needle and thread?”

Caroline looked up and dropped her arm. “No. Didn’t you?”

“No.” Amusement tickled the back of her throat. “I never thought we’d truly need them.”

Laughing softly, she took Caroline’s hand and led her out of the parlor to the ladies’ retiring room some distance down the front hall. She sighed when they discovered the room empty.

“I’d rather hoped to find assistance. No matter. Wait here, and I’ll fetch a needle and thread from a maid.” She remembered the last occasion in which either of them attempted to wield thread and needle. Mrs. Meldrin had insisted they practice their stitch work in the creation of a sampler. The results had been grisly. “Perhaps I’ll just fetch the maid.”

She left Caroline still scowling at her marred gown, and took no more than a dozen steps away from the door before coming knee to face with a small dark-haired boy with enormous brown eyes, drying tear tracks down pink cheeks and a thin line of blood dripping from his mouth.

Her heart turned over at the sight.

“Oh, you poor dear.” She crouched down in front of him. “Darling, are you hurt?”

To her astonishment, he answered by grinning broadly and pointing to a bleeding gap where his front tooth ought to have been. “I’ve a hole!”

She reared back a solid foot. “Good Heavens, that’s ghastly.”

Apparently well over the pain of his injury and delighted with her assessment of his wound, he giggled and prodded the space with his tongue.

“Oh, dear.” Her stomach did a slow, nauseating roll. “Don’t do that, I beg you.”

“Why?”

She stood up and grimaced. “It’s. . .unsightly.”

A familiar male voice sounded from behind her. “Unsightly? That’s no way to speak about one of my nephews.”

The rolling sensation was immediately replaced by a jittery one at the sight of William striding down the hall. He stopped in front of her to smile. “Gruesome is generally a better choice. I’ve been looking for you.”

Oh, the things that smile and those simple words did to her. She hadn’t a name for most of them, but thought perhaps bliss summed up the whole rather nicely. She stammered, swallowed, and felt herself blush. “I. . .I was just. . .” William’s lips twitched at her reaction but she thought it best to pretend she didn’t notice. She stepped aside to gesture at his nephew.

“He’s hurt,” she said, sounding rather lame even to her own ears.

“Ah. . .So, he is.”

Chapter 6

William eyed the little boy before him with something akin to alarm tickling along his skin.

He loved his nephews, each and every one of them, and he would freely admit as much to anyone who might care to listen. He would also admit that, if it was at all possible, he would prefer to express his devotion from a healthy distance. The younger the nephew, the healthier the distance.

Small children were such unpredictable little blighters--giggling cherubs one moment with happy smiles and big eyes, and then the next thing a man knew, they were screaming at the top of their lungs, producing vast rivers of tears, and demanding you fetch them something called “bwon won,” or “gwaba,” or another equally incomprehensible object.

This particular nephew had recently outgrown the tendency to babble incoherently, but he remained still a very small child and, as a rule, very small children were loud, clingy, sticky, needy, wet, and--perhaps worst of all--terrifyingly breakable.

He glanced down the hall and wondered if there was any way he could shout for his sister without completely unmanning himself in front of Patience.

He rather doubted it.

Resigned to handling the situation, he crouched down, hesitated, then reached up to gently ruffle the boy’s hair. “Lose a tooth, did you?”

Patience frowned as the boy nodded. “Isn’t he a trifle young to be losing his teeth?”

“I imagine he had assistance.” William pointed at the boy’s chin. “Did you hit your mouth on something, Will?”

“Felix.”

“Felix struck you?”

Will shook his head and patted his elbow.

“Ah. You caught his elbow with your mouth,” William translated. “An accident?”

Will nodded, and once again prodded the space with his tongue.

Patience averted her eyes. “Oh, dear.”

“Not in front of the lady, if you please,” William admonished. He withdrew a handkerchief and used it to stop the small amount of blood that was still oozing from the wound. “Let’s find your nanny and get you cleaned up a bit.”

“Or a lot,” Patience suggested.

William chuckled and stood, then very carefully reached out to pick the boy up, only to have Will back away and point at Patience.

“You want Miss Byerly to accompany you?”

Will nodded.

Excellent plan, young man
.

“Me?” Patience took a sudden step back. “Oh, I can’t, I’m afraid. Caroline has torn her gown, and—“

William cut her off with a chiding tone. “
Patience
.”

“She has,” she informed him. “In earnest, for a change. I need to find a maid with thread and needle.”

William nodded. “Right. I’ll find the maid. You take Will to his nanny.”

“I. . .” She bit her bottom lip. “I. . Er. . .Won’t they be in the family portion of the house? I don’t wish to intrude.”

“They’re in the orangery at the end of the hall. You won’t be intruding,” he assured her.

Only she didn’t appear reassured in the least. Her fingers began to rub at a velvet ribbon on her gown. “But. . .Couldn’t you take him?”

William looked to Will. “Do you want me to take you?”

The boy shook his head.

“It appears I cannot.” He smiled at Patience. “He wants you.”

“Oh. . .Er. . .”

“Is something the matter?”

“No. Yes. I’m not certain. I. . .” She eyed Will a little nervously. “I am fond of children, but to be honest,” she leaned towards William and whispered, “I’ve very little experience with them. I’ve never been responsible for one.”

“I see.” Was he going to have to take Will himself, after all? He sincerely hoped not. “I imagine I’ve not much more experience than you.” He leaned towards her and whispered, “I avoid them whenever possible.”

“Will is
your
nephew.”

“Yes, but you’re a woman. Women are born with the instinct to. . .” he waved his hand about, searching for the right word. “. . .To nurture. . .Or what have you.”

She rolled her eyes, but knelt down and smiled at Will. “You are adorable …Even though you’re messy.”

Will grinned at her.

William grinned wider. “There you go.” He gave her a gentle but bolstering pat on the back. “Just scoop him up and bring him down the hall.”

Patience straightened and took a step forward. . .Then a step back. “What if I should drop him?”

William shook his head. “You’ll not drop him. A firm grip is part of the womanly instinct.”

She sent him a withering look. “And I suppose men are born with a natural urge to toss them about like sacks of flour?”

“We’re a stupid lot.”

She laughed and offered Will her hand. “We’ll walk, if it’s all the same to you, Will.”

It was all the same to William, as long as she took the child. “Nanny’s in the orangery,” he reminded her as he began to back away, intending to make good his escape. “End of the hall.”

* * *

The nanny, Patience soon discovered, was not to be found in the orangery. Oddly enough, neither was a single plant. Apparently, it had been some time since the orangery had been used for its intended purpose. The large stone and glass room was empty except for one rather harassed looking maid cleaning up what appeared to have been an exceedingly active game of Bob-Apple. She seemed more than happy to set aside the chore in favor of taking charge of little Will.

“Nanny sent the others to the nursery after the mishap,” she explained to Patience before smiling at Will. “She’s been looking for you. Perhaps we’ll find her first. Shall we make a game of it?”

In an instant Will let go of Patience’s hand and dashed to the maid.

Patience sighed and smiled as the maid led him from the room. She’d worried herself over nothing. The little darling had been no trouble at all. He’d kept his hand in hers, and William’s handkerchief in his mouth for the duration of their walk. And aside from a few garbled comments that hadn’t seemed to require any response from her, he’d been quiet as a mouse.

Feeling decidedly smug with her competent handling of Will—
she
’d managed to spend a bit of time with the child without acquiring any bite marks—Patience sighed once more then glanced about at the remnants of the Bob-Apple game. She noted that one of the barrels had a sizable puddle of water around the base and a number of scraped, nicked, and otherwise mauled looking apples inside. But the second barrel looked to have gone unused.

The sides were dry, and the handful of floating apples looked free of blemishes. Apparently, the children had wanted to all try their skill on the same apples.

Curious, she reached out to poke at one of the unmarred apples, and watched as it dipped below the water before softly
popping back to the surface. The game couldn’t be too difficult, she mused. It was not as if the slightest touch would send the apples sloshing about willy-nilly. . .She poked again just to make sure.

She eyed a stack of drying cloths neatly folded on a nearby chair.

She shouldn’t. She
really
shouldn’t.

Then again, when was she likely to have the chance ever again? She couldn’t very well go home and ask the staff to put apples in a barrel for her. They’d think her as batty as her father.

With a giggle tickling her throat, she took up position in front of the barrel and began to lean forward. She felt wonderfully absurd, and a bubble of laughter escaped before she could help it, then another as she bent further down. By the time she was in position to actually begin the game, she was laughing hard enough to lose her balance. To steady herself, she reached out to catch at the sides of the barrel.

“You’re supposed to keep your hands behind your back.”

If she
had
been keeping her hands behind her back, she likely would have toppled in at the surprise of William’s voice coming from the door.

Still laughing, she straightened and looked up. From his amused tone, she rather thought to find him leaning a shoulder
against the doorframe, a knowing sort of smirk on his face. Silly of her, really--the military officer in him would never allow for leaning, or smirking for that matter. He stood straight-backed with his hands gripped behind him, a bright twinkle in his dark eyes.

She smiled back at him and wondered a little that she didn’t feel foolish at having been caught. Then again, he knew she wanted to try the game. And he
had
witnessed her stuffing an entire slice of cake in her mouth. In comparison to that unfortunate spectacle, a game of Bob-Apple seemed fairly decorous.

She planted her hands on her hips and nodded toward the barrel. “If I don’t hold on, I’ll fall in.”

“Ah.” He walked into the room and peered into the barrel. “We can’t have that. Go on, then. I’ll not tell anyone you cheated.”

“
Cheated
?” She schooled her face into a haughty look—a difficult endeavor when one found it nearly impossible to stop smiling—and pointedly caught her hands behind her back.

“Much better,” William informed her. “If you’re going to do the thing, you may as well do it properly.”

She couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Any other rules or suggestions you care to impart?”

“No, I believe that’s all of it.” He motioned at the barrel. “Have at it.”

Feeling both silly and delighted, she stepped forward, picked out a nice apple at the edge and began to lean forward. She straightened again and sent a narrowed eyed glance at William. “You’re not going to play the part of sibling and assist, are you?”

“Assist…? Ah, the head dunking.” His lips twitched. “Wouldn’t you like the full Bob-Apple experience?”

“I’d like to experience it as an only child.”