Christmas Carol (16 page)

Nicholas
. Pain flowed over her, grief
and a terrible loneliness filling her heart. In the midst of
lingering confusion she was sure of only one thing. The emotion she
felt for Nicholas was real.

“Nicholas,” she whispered. “Oh, my love. My
dear, lost love.” Tears poured down her cheeks. She did not bother
to wipe them away. She cowered in the wing chair, seeking comfort
in its familiar shape. She did not stop crying until Nell, the
chambermaid, knocked at her door and entered, bearing a tray with
Carol’s breakfast on it. Then Carol hastily wiped her face on the
sleeve of her bathrobe and sat up a little straighter, trying to
appear more composed than she actually felt.

“Are you up already?” asked Nell in surprise.
After a closer look, she said, “No, you’re up
still
. You
haven’t been to bed, have you? You’ve been sittin’ in that old
chair all night long. Oh, miss, you’ll catch pneumonia or something
worse if you don’t keep warm.”

“I am not sick. I am just a little chilled.”
It was all Carol could do to make herself respond, but she did not
want to worry the maid. Nell had done everything she could to make
Carol’s existence at Marlowe House a pleasant one, and Carol knew
she hadn’t been very nice in return. For the first time, she felt
guilty about that.

“You just drink your tea now, and eat
something, and you’ll brighten right up,” Nell advised. “A nice,
hot bath will help, too,” she added, pouring out a cup of tea and
handing it to Carol.

As she looked at the maid through the rising
wisps of steam from her tea, it seemed to Carol that Nell was
remarkably like Ella, the maidservant who had been taking care of
her for the last few days.

“Nell,” Carol asked, “what day is today?”

“It’s Wednesday,” Nell responded, “the
twenty-second of December. Just three more days till Christmas. I
shouldn’t wonder if you’ve forgotten what day it is, with
everything you’ve been doing lately, seeing to Lady Augusta’s care
and then arranging for the funeral and all that.”

“The funeral,” Carol repeated. “Nell, did you
or anyone else in the house see or hear anything strange last
night?”

“What do you mean, strange?” asked Nell.

“Just unusual sounds, or perhaps someone who
shouldn’t be here,” Carol said.

“Like an intruder? No, Crampton saw to all
the locks as soon as the funeral guests left, and he turned on the
alarm system. You know how Lady Augusta was about using that
system. She thought she was going to be robbed and then murdered in
her bed if it wasn’t turned on every night, and Crampton isn’t
likely to change old habits now.” Nell paused, and Carol thought
she went a little pale. “Why do you ask, miss? Did you see
something? My old grammie used .to say that sometimes the ghosts of
people recently dead come back to their houses just after their
funerals. They aren’t quite ready to go to heaven yet, you see, or
to the other place, either. Can’t blame them for that, I say.
Heaven’s bound to be strange for most people after livin’ on earth
for years, and as for the fires below—well, who would want to go
there at all?”

“I’m not sure exactly what it was I thought I
saw and heard,” Carol said. “Perhaps it was just the wind.”

“There wasn’t any wind last night,” said
Nell, “only the clear sky and one or two stars. But after all, you
can’t expect to see many stars with all the city lights shinin’ so
bright, can you?”

“I must have been dreaming, then,” Carol
said, unwilling to continue the conversation. Nell claimed the
previous night had been clear, but Carol distinctly recalled a
thick fog. And she
had
heard the wind. “I was so tired that
I fell asleep in the chair and, as you guessed, I never did get
into bed.”

“That uncomfortable old chair would give
anyone bad dreams,” Nell agreed. “You take my advice, miss, and
have a nice soak in a tub of hot water.”

“Ill do that,” Carol promised. “I am planning
to be out for most of the day, so would you tell Mrs. Marks I won’t
be here for lunch?”

“I’ll tell her.” Picking up the dinner tray,
Nell left Carol to her usual breakfast of tea and a plain roll.

After eating, and after indulging herself
with a long, hot bath, she did feel better. Upon entering her
bedroom from the bathroom down the hall, Carol took a good look at
the place where she had been living for years. Until this morning
the decor of her room had suited her mental state, but now she saw
that it was filled with depressingly worn and faded
furnishings.

During her brief stay in the nineteenth
century she had been learning all over again to appreciate comforts
she had once taken for granted. After her father’s bankruptcy, and
especially after his suicide, she had given up elegant furniture,
good clothing in pretty colors, fresh flowers, music, the theater,
and all other material pleasures as if she were a medieval monk
putting on a penitential hair shirt. She had reacted to her
father’s misfortunes and to his death as if she were the one to
blame for them.

Now, sensibilities newly awakened to the
pleasures of Lady Caroline Hyde’s daily existence made Carol chafe
at the lack of beauty in her own life. Recalling Lady Caroline’s
blue and white bedchamber, her finely made gowns, her rose perfume,
and most of all, the frequent sight of Nicholas’s broad-shouldered
form attired in perfectly tailored clothing, Carol heaved a deep
sigh.

“Nicholas, your presence in that borrowed
life was the greatest pleasure of all. If I had known that living
without hope of ever seeing you again would hurt so much, I’m not
sure I could have given you up. No, not even for your own
good.”

The slightly musty smell of her room, to
which she was so accustomed that usually she did not even notice
it, suddenly irritated her beyond enduring. Carol flung open the
windows, letting in cool air and watery December sunshine.

“How could I have lived like that?” she
muttered to herself. “After I started working for Lady Augusta, I
wasn’t completely without money. I could have bought a few pillows
or a new comforter to brighten up my room, or treated myself to a
restaurant dinner once in a while.”

Standing by the window, she gradually became
aware of the spring-like warmth of the weather. The sun and the
pleasant temperature drew her like a magnet. She took her
unattractive but serviceable old brown coat out of the closet and,
after a last glance around her room, headed for the outdoors.

On her way out of the house Carol hurried
past Lady Augusta’s suite on the next floor below her own room.
Nell was busy cleaning and had the door and all the windows thrown
wide. There was just the faintest trace of lavender perfume borne
on the fresh breeze blowing through the door and into the hall.

“I’ll have this suite spit-and-polish clean
by the end of the day,” Nell called, catching sight of Carol.
“Then, when Lady Augusta’s missing nephew finally gets here, he’ll
have a nice place to sleep. These are the best rooms in the house.
Lady Augusta was stingy elsewhere, but she kept her own rooms in
good shape, at least till she got so sick at the end.

“Go on now, miss,” Nell urged when Carol
hesitated as if she would enter the rooms. “You’ve been indoors too
much lately, takin’ care of Lady Augusta for all these weeks. Get
some fresh air and sunshine and go for a nice long walk like you
used to do and you’ll sleep better tonight than you did last
night.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

As she started down the great staircase
toward the entrance hall Carol paused, overcome by memories and
seeing Marlowe House with eyes in which the past and present flowed
together in a thoroughly disorienting way. The black and white
checkerboard floor in the hall remained the same, but the hall
itself now looked pathetically small to her. Just the day before,
she and Penelope had come down these same steps together, laughing
and planning a day of shopping, each of them secretly hoping to
encounter a beloved man during their excursion to Bond Street.

Carol had to fight back the urge to pound
against the wall that cut the hall in half. She had the oddest
feeling that if she could only break down that wall, or in some way
pass through it, she would find on the other side of it the people
she loved and the life she had been living for the last few
days.

“Not days,” Carol reminded herself. “One
night. That’s all the
real
time it took for me to fall in
love.”

Even as she stood at the foot of the
staircase, glaring at the wall with one fist raised as if to strike
it, her common sense reasserted itself. In the other half of
Marlowe House there currently lived a businessman with his wife and
two small children. Nothing waited for Carol there.
Nothing
.

With Crampton not in sight, Carol opened the
heavy front door herself and stepped outside. Pausing on the top
step to catch her breath and steady her nerves, she recalled
Nicholas bringing her home and acting so terribly proper in front
of Lady Augusta’s butler, though he had just been doing the most
wonderful, outrageous things to her in the privacy of his
carriage.

With as much strength of will as she could
muster, she told herself that all of it had happened one hundred
and seventy-five years in the past. If it had happened. If what she
thought she remembered was not a dream.

“No,” she said aloud, her voice breaking a
little. “I know it was real. I would never feel this loss and this
aching sensation in my heart if it were only a dream. The emotions
I experience when I have been dreaming last for a few minutes, or
for an hour at most, after I wake up, and then they disappear.
These memories are growing stronger the more I think about them. It
really did happen. I love Nicholas and I will never see him again.
I have to accept that. I have to learn to live without him. The
trouble is, I’m not sure I can.”

Consumed by memories of Nicholas, Carol spent
the day walking around London while she looked for sights familiar
to her in that previous time. The glittering, present-day Christmas
decorations she saw everywhere mocked the sorrow she felt and made
her yearn for the simpler evidence of the holiday season in the
lost world of Regency London to which she longed to return.

She saved the most important spot for last,
walking to it from Bond Street as she had walked to it on an
afternoon so far in the past, yet in her mind and memories only
twenty-four hours earlier. Getting there was easier today. She was
wearing her sensible walking shoes and there was no ice or snow to
impede her. She found the right street at once, but Nicholas’s
house was no longer there. Pretending she was a college professor
doing research on the Regency period, she stopped an elderly,
well-dressed man and asked him if he knew what had happened to
Montfort Place.

“I know the house you mean,” the man told
her. “I remember this area from my childhood. It was a very
different neighborhood in those days. The original buildings on
this block were bombed into rubble during World War II. You do know
about the Blitz?”

“I do.” The lump in her throat prevented
further speech.

“You must be terribly disappointed not to
find the particular historic house you wanted to see,” said the old
man. “But there are other interesting spots in London still
surviving from the Regency period.”

When Carol nodded and thanked him, he passed
on down the street, leaving her to stare at the uninteresting
modern building that now took the place of the lovely white house
in which she and Nicholas had once made love.

“So long ago,” Carol sighed, “and yet only
yesterday for me. Oh, Nicholas, why can’t I
feel
your
presence here? Where have you gone? Into the afterlife with Lady
Caroline, I suppose,” she said, answering her own question sadly.
“You are dead now—grown old and feeble, dead and buried more than a
hundred years ago.” Unable to bear that thought, she hurried away
to walk unseeing through the busy streets until the early December
twilight brought her ramblings to an end.

Her way back to Marlowe House in late
afternoon took her past a small florist’s shop. Just as she reached
it the shop door opened to discharge a customer. The scent of
holiday greenery mingled with the fragrance of roses wafted outward
to Carol’s nose, stopping her when she would have hurried by. Once
again, memory assailed her. The drawing room of Marlowe House had
smelled like that long ago, on a day shortly before Christmas.

“Perhaps spending money on flowers isn’t a
waste after all,” Carol said to herself. “How much I enjoyed
receiving the bouquets that Nicholas sent to me.”

Irresistibly drawn by the sight of numerous
containers within, all filled with bright flowers, and by the
sparkling white and green display of miniature Christmas trees in
the window, she entered the shop. There she purchased a few red
roses and some evergreens. Then, acting on an impulse, she also
bought a red glass bowl of paperwhite narcissus bulbs set in white
pebbles. The buds at the top of each stem looked ready to burst
into bloom.

When she reached Marlowe House it was almost
dinnertime. Carol did not use the front door. Instead, she pushed
open the gate in the iron railing at the front of the house and
went down the outside stairs into the sunken area where the
servants’ entrance was. Opening the old-fashioned, glass-paned
door, she stepped through the tiny vestibule and thence into the
kitchen. The cook looked up in surprise at her unexpected
appearance.

“Good evening, Mrs. Marks,” Carol said.
“Would you have a small vase I could use for these flowers?” Carol
looked around at what were obviously preparations for the holiday.
Certain spicy aromas suggested that gingerbread was in the oven,
and two fine, high loaves of white bread were cooling on a rack. A
second rack held a batch of cookies onto which Mrs. Marks was just
sprinkling red and green sugar. Hettie, the scullery maid, was busy
chopping celery and onions.