Marian's Christmas Wish (23 page)

Marian hurried to open the door. “Oh. good morning.
Lady Ingraham. Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

Lady Ingraham grabbed Marian and kissed her. “Yes! Yes!
And see here, my dear, we have a letter from Gilbert. And you can’t even guess
his news. Oh, I shall ring a peal over his head when he returns. Sly, sly boy!”

She waved a letter about as Marian laughed. “Lady
Ingraham, what is the news?”

The woman sat down on Marian’s bed and held the letter
next to her heart. “He’s done it! Oh, and we thought he rushed off to London on business. Marian, you cannot imagine how this pleases me. Gilbert’s got himself
engaged. He’s getting married!”

“What?” Marian shrieked. She felt the color draining
from her face and turned her head away.

Lady Ingraham was oblivious to Marian’s distress. “My
dear, how grateful I am you are here. Gilbert has asked me to plan a little New
Year’s Eve dinner for close friends and a reception to follow. He mentions
dancing, if I can produce an orchestra on short notice. There is so much to do.
Oh, Marian, say you will help me.”

“I will help you,” Marian said automatically. Tears
began to marshal themselves behind her eyelids, and she felt as though she were
suffocating. She wanted to fling open the window and take deep drafts of the
cold winter air, but she remained where she was, frozen to the spot.

If Lady Ingraham noted anything unusual, she did not
indicate it. She was on her feet again, pacing the length of the room and
waving the letter about. “Gilbert says he will be at Collinwood on the
thirtieth, where his fiancée, Lady Amanda Calne, will meet him, and they will
go over some plans for refurbishing the estate. They will be here on the
afternoon of the thirty-first. Sly boy! Have you ever heard of such a man?”

“No, never,” said Marian. Tears began to slide down her
cheeks, so she bent over to straighten her stockings.

Lady Ingraham finally took notice of her. “Oh, and I
have intruded on your morning toilette. When you come downstairs,

I’ll be in the bookroom with the cook. Come join us, my
dear, and we’ll begin planning.”

She hurried out of the room, clicking the door shut as
Marian began to sob. Marian was on her feet in a moment, pacing the room, as
the tears streamed down her face. As she crossed by the window seat, Marian
grabbed up
The
Poetics
and
pulled back her arm to hurl the book across the room.

She stopped herself in midswing, wiped her eyes on her
sleeve, and took a good look at the book. What a foolish thing that would be,
she thought even as she sobbed. I would ruin a perfectly good book. Marian set
the book down carefully on the dressing table and ran her finger across the
binding. Better to keep it as an excellent reminder that men are not to be
trusted.

If Gilbert had taken a knife and thrust it up under her
rib cage, nothing could have hurt more than the realization that she had been
made a fool of. Marian moved about the room. Another turn convinced her that
even more painful was the certainty that she still loved him.

Her legs began to shake, so she sat down in the window
seat. She drew her knees up close to her face and leaned her forehead against
them. And Lady Ingraham says that he will be back here in a few days, and I
must help. Oh, God, I cannot. She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief
and pulled out the note that Gil had slipped under her door two days ago. “‘Trust
me,’” she repeated. “‘Trust me,’” she said again. Marian crumbled the note into
a ball and threw it toward the wastebasket. “I wouldn’t trust you if you were
the last man on earth, Gilbert Ingraham.”

Her shock gradually gave way to enormous anger, the
intensity of it taking away her breath and leaving her white-faced and silent
in the window seat. How could you kiss me like that and then hurry to London and make love to some other woman? she thought. And then you say, “Trust me.”

She was on her feet again, wild to go home to Picton
and sob out her misery in Ariadne’s lap. She looked out the window. We could be
on a mail coach by nightfall, she thought, and then remembered that they had no
money. “And I have promised

Lady Ingraham that I will remain here,” she whispered. “Oh,
the devil take Gilbert Ingraham!”

Tense, Marian Wynswich presented herself in the
bookroom an hour later, where Lady Ingraham and the chef were scrutinizing a
much-rewritten menu. Lady Ingraham looked at her, and the tiny wrinkles between
her eyes deepened.

“Marian, you’re much too young to lose your bloom.” She
laughed. “It must be the frantic pace that we set here in Bath. Pull up a
chair, my dear, there’s work to be done. Thank you, Francois. Go do your best.”

Marian sat down. “I am a trifle indisposed,” she said.

“Gilbert would say you were a bit grim about the lips,”
said Lady Ingraham.

“Indeed he would,” Marian replied. “I am sure that what
I am feeling will pass away very soon. Now, what can I do for you, Lady
Ingraham?”

When they did not show up in the dining room. Washburn
brought lunch to them on a tray. Lady Ingraham ate quickly and returned to her
lists. Marian shoved the food around until she was tired of looking at it and
set the trays outside the door.

By the time the shadows were long across the Royal Crescent, Lady Ingraham had located a string quartet and enough ivy and other winter
greenery to shame a forest, and produced a guest list complete with addresses.
She examined the guest list one last time and handed it to Marian.

“My dear, my handwriting is so old and shaky that I
would be embarrassed to write the invitations. May I leave this to you?”

Marian nodded, her eyes scanning the paper. There were
several names on it that Percy had mentioned before in hushed tones, but none
was familiar to her.

“The starred ones will be invited first to dinner, and
the others to the reception and dance following.” Lady Ingraham took another
look. “Gilbert specifically requested . . . Oh, there he is. Reginald Calne.”
She tapped her fingernail on the paper. “I own I do not wish to have his feet
under my table, but he is her brother.”

Marian looked up, a question in her eyes.

“A regular scoundrel,” said Lady Ingraham, “but he
lives in Bath, and we must content ourselves. No one has perfect relatives.”
She smiled at Marian. “Possibly you know what I mean.”

Marian managed her first genuine smile of the
afternoon. “I do. Mine are singular.”

Lady Ingraham tapped her nail on Sir Reginald’s name
one more time. “Would that he were only singular!” She leaned forward in a
conspiratorial fashion. “He games and games, and loses fortunes on the turn of
a card, and when we are sure he is in the basket, he comes up with more money.
There are some who would like to know whether it ‘droppeth from heaven as the
gentle rain.’”

Marian nodded, and understood where Gilbert inherited
his penchant for sprinkling literature through his speech.
“Merchant of Venice,
madam,” she said as Lady
Ingraham laughed and touched her cheek.

Gilbert’s mother rose to her feet with some stiffness. “And
now, my dear, may I leave you to these invitations? Washburn has been going ‘ahem
and aha’ on the other side of that door, and I know he wants me to look over
the ballroom.” She patted her hair into place. “Other women my age have earned
an afternoon’s nap. I must still dash around after my son, as I have done for
so many years. My hair will be quite gray before he is safely married, I can
tell right now.”

At least he will not break your heart, Marian thought
as the door closed. She picked up the sample invitation and felt her heart turn
over and her eyes begin to prickle again.

“‘Lord Gilbert Ingraham, Earl of Collinwood, requests
the pleasure of your company at a reception and dance to honor Lady Amanda
Calne,’” Marian read out loud. She looked at the mound of cream-colored note
cards in front of her on the desk. “It is rather like spinning straw into gold,”
she said as she sharpened the pen and then dipped it in the inkwell.

Dinner came and went and Marian continued at the desk.
The words bothered her at first, but by the time she finished the twentieth
invitation, and then the thirtieth one, they had all run together like soup,
and it was merely a task that demanded precision and no emotion. Gilbert
Ingraham and Amanda Calne were only letters, she told herself, even though that
reasoning didn’t explain the ache that started in her stomach and spread upward
until her head throbbed.

“Mare? I say, Mare, are you still in there?”

She looked up and set down the pen gratefully, curling
and uncurling her fingers. “Come in, Alistair,” she called, and got to her
feet.

Her brother entered the room and flopped in the chair
close to the desk. He looked at the uneaten tray of dinner on the table and
then up at his sister. “The veal was good, Mare, and you know how you like
veal.”

She waved her hand over the food and blew on the last
invitation she had penned. “It smelled funny,” she said.

Alistair looked at her long and hard. “There’s nothing
wrong with the veal, sister,” he said evenly. “Sit down a minute.”

She did as he said, and stared back into his eyes.

Alistair crossed his legs and continued his appraisal
of her. To her tired mind, for one moment he looked very much like Percy. “Marian,
what’s the matter?”

She forced a smile. “Nothing, Alistair, nothing. I’m
just tired.”

“That’s a hum, Mare, and you always were a dreadful
liar.” He got out of the chair and perched himself on the desk to be closer to
her. “I don’t pretend that I’m anything but a care-for-nobody, but. Mare, I
know when something’s wrong. Tell me?”

A week ago, Marian Wynswich would have no more confided
in Alistair than she would have walked on her hands through Picton. She had
learned from sad experience that all her tales of woe were carried throughout
the neighborhood and arrived back at her doorstep much enlarged by her brother.
But this time, as she looked into his eyes, someone different looked back at
her.

“You care, don’t you?” she whispered, and reached for
his hand.

“I do,” he said simply. “You’re starting to worry me,
and I want to know why.” He would not let her hand go, but grasped it tighter,
even as he got up from the desk and pulled his chair around until they were
sitting quite close together, “it has to do with Lord Ingraham, doesn’t it?”

She nodded and then began to sob. Without a word,
Alistair picked her up and deposited her in his lap, where he held her close
and patted her back, murmuring nothings that made her sob harder at first and
then unaccountably feel better. When she sat up and looked about, he pulled a
handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. She blew her nose
vigorously.

“Do you love him, Mare, is that it?” Alistair asked
finally.

She nodded. “I know it’s foolish. I know I am foolish.”
She dabbed at her eyes. “I mean, didn’t he tell me that there was someone he was
trying to work up the nerve to offer for?”

“I remember something like that.” Alistair shifted a
little and patted his right pocket. “Anytime you say, Mare, we can be off home.
The roads are open, and I can spout your pearls again.”

She stared at her brother and got up off his lap. “Alistair,
I don’t understand. You have my pearls back? How is this?”

He grinned. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. A package
came this morning from London with your pearls and a note from Lord Ingraham.”

Marian continued to stare. “I really don’t understand.”

“Well, when we were walking along through the snow on
the way to Bath, I might have mentioned the pearls to him.” Alistair scratched
his head. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Marian brushed aside his explanation. “You know I do
not. But doesn’t it strike you as strange that Lord Ingraham has such
connections as would enable him to recover my pearls so quickly, and get them
back here? I mean, he would have to know a lot of people in Picton, and we know
that he does not.”

Alistair regarded her with a frown on his face. “Funny,
I didn’t think of that. I was just so glad to see the pearls again. Fancy
explaining that to Mama. Or to, good God, Percy.”

Marian shoved her hands in her pockets and began to
pace the room. She stopped at the window, not looking at her brother. “You say
he wrote a note. Did he mention me?”

“He did. I thought it was rather cryptic. Maybe you can
make sense of it.” Alistair took the note from his pocket and handed it to his
sister, who grabbed it up eagerly.

Marian smoothed out the paper. “‘Maybe these will help
your sister feel better. Be a good brother right now, please,’” she read
slowly. “‘Ingraham.’” She handed the note back to her brother. “Alistair, how
odd! He seemed to know I would be feeling bad.”

She clapped her hands together in frustration and took
another turn about the room. “He knew I would be upset by his engagement, but
that did not deter him from affiancing himself to someone. I mean, a gentleman
would have waited until we left Bath if he wanted to spare my feelings. I just
wish I knew the purpose of all this.”