Under The Mistletoe (38 page)

He felt angry suddenly. “They have to be stolen?” he asked. “They are not granted?”

She smiled. “Mrs. Raven, my employer, suffers from migraine headaches,” she said. “She cannot stand the sound of the pianoforte.”

His jaw tightened. “It is not a good life, is it,” he said, “being a governess?”

She stiffened and withdrew her hand from his. She reached out to
pick up her cup and raised it to her lips. “It is a living, my lord,” she said, “and a reasonably comfortable one. There are many women, and men too, far worse off than I. We cannot all choose the life we would live. You do not need to pity me.”

He looked at her broodingly. Her hand was shaking slightly, though she drank determinedly on. Did he pity her? He was not in the habit of pitying other mortals. No, he did not think it was pity. It was more admiration for her and anger against employers who evidently did not appreciate her. It was more the desire to protect her and see happiness replace the quiet discipline in her face—the desire to give her a pianoforte for Christmas, all wrapped about with red ribbons. His lip curled in self-derision. Was this unspeakably dull Christmas making him sentimental over a governess?

“What would you be doing now,” he asked her, “if it had not rained?”

She set her cup down in its saucer and smiled down into it, her eyes dreamy. “Decorating the house with the children,” she said. “Helping my mother and our cook with the baking. Finishing making gifts. Delivering baskets to the poor. Helping my father arrange the Nativity scene in the church. Getting ready to go caroling. Looking forward to the church service. Running around in circles wishing I could divide myself into about twelve pieces. Christmas is always very busy and very special at home. The coming of Christ—it is a wonderful festival.”

He took her hand again, almost absently, and smoothed his fingers over hers. He was the Marquess of Lytton, she reminded herself, and she a mere clergyman's daughter and a governess. Last night he had held her and kissed her, and she had almost gone to bed with him. She was still not sure if she would have allowed the ultimate intimacy or if she would have drawn back at the last moment. But he had drawn back, and now they were sitting together in the taproom, talking, her hand in his. This was a strange, unreal Christmas.

“What would
you
be doing?” she asked. “If it had not rained, I mean.”

He raised his gaze from their hands, and she was struck again by the keenness of his blue eyes beneath the lazy lids. They caused a strange somersaulting feeling in her stomach. “Stuffing myself with rich foods,” he said. “Getting myself inebriated. Preparing to make merry and to drink even more. Flirting with a lady I have had my eye on for some time past and wondering if I would be spending tonight with her or if she would keep me waiting until tomorrow night.” One corner of his mouth lifted in an expression that was not quite a smile.
“A wonderful way to celebrate the coming of Christ, would you not agree?”

Pamela found herself wondering irrelevantly what the lady looked like. “I cannot judge,” she said. “We all have our own way of enjoying ourselves.”

“Yours is a large family?” he asked.

“I have three brothers and four sisters,” she said, “all younger than myself. It is a very noisy household and frequently an untidy one, I'm afraid.”

“I envy you,” he said. “I have no one except a few aunts and uncles and cousins with whom I have never been close.” He raised one hand and touched the back of a finger to her cheek. “I am sorry you have not been able to get home for Christmas.”

“I believe that everything that happens does so for a purpose,” she said. “Perhaps I was meant to be trapped here for Lisa's sake.”

“And perhaps I was meant to be trapped here with you for . . . for what purpose?” he asked.

His eyes were looking very intently into hers. She could not withdraw her own. “I don't know,” she said.

“Perhaps,” he said, and his voice was very soft, “to discover that innocence can be more enticing than experience. And far more warming to the heart.”

He raised her hand while she watched him with widening eyes and warming cheeks, and set his lips to it.

“I must be going back upstairs,” she said.

“Yes.” He lowered her hand. “You must.”

But the next moment they were both on their feet. Lady Birkin had appeared at the top of the stairs. She was looking distraught and was beckoning urgently.

“Pamela,” she called. “Oh, thank heaven you are there. Something is happening. Oh, please come.” And she turned and hurried out of sight again.

Pamela could feel the color draining from her head as she rushed across the room toward the staircase. She scarcely heard the quite improper expletive that was the marquess's sole comment.

“Bloody hell!” he said.

 

The bed was soaked. Fortunately Mrs. Palmer had given them a pile of old rags and told them to spread some over the sheets. There was something about waters breaking, she had mumbled before scurrying away about some real or imagined chore. Pamela and Lady
Birkin stripped away the wet rags and replaced them with dry ones. But Lisa was in severe distress. She was panting loudly and thrashing about on the bed. Her moans were threatening to turn into screams.

“Hot water,” Lady Birkin said, trying to keep her voice calm. “I have heard that hot water is needed.”

“Lisa,” Pamela had a cool cloth to the girl's brow. “What may we do for you? How may we help?”

But there was a feeling of dreadful helplessness, an almost overpowering urge to become hysterical or simply to rush from the room.

And then the door opened. Both Lady Birkin and Pamela looked in some surprise at the Marquess of Lytton, who stood in the doorway, his face pale. Perhaps they would have felt consternation, too, if they had not been feeling so frightened and helpless.

“I think I can help,” he surprised them both by saying. And he grimaced and turned even paler as Lisa began to moan and thrash again. He strode over to the bed. “I think she should be pushing,” he said. “The pain will subside soon, will it not? Next time we must have her in position and she must push down. Perhaps the two of you can help her by lifting her shoulders as she pushes.”

The two ladies merely stared at him. Lisa screamed.

“The Peninsula,” he said. “I was a cavalry officer. There was a peasant woman. There was a surgeon, too, but he had just been shot through the right hand. He instructed a private soldier and me. The private held her and I delivered.”

Lisa was quiet again, and the marquess turned grimly back to the bed. “Raise your knees,” he told her, “and brace your feet wide apart on the bed. The next time the pain comes, I want you to bear down against it with all your strength. This little fellow wants to come out. Do you understand me?”

Through the fog of weakness and pain, the girl seemed to turn instinctively to the note of authority and assurance in his voice. She looked up at him and nodded, positioning herself according to his instructions. And then the fright came back into her eyes and she began to pant again.

“Now!” he commanded, and he pushed his hands forward against her knees through the sheet that still covered her to the waist while Lady Birkin and Pamela, one on each side of her, lifted her shoulders from the bed and pushed forward. Lisa drew a giant breath and bore down with all her might, pausing only to gasp in more air before the pain subsided again.

“Send down for hot water,” Lord Lytton said while Lisa relaxed
for a few moments. “Go and give the instruction yourself, Pamela, but come right back. Someone else can bring it. But wait a moment. She needs us again.”

He was going to forget something, he thought as he pushed upward on the girl's knees. He would forget something and either she or the child was going to bleed to death. Or there was going to be a complication, as there had not been with the Spanish peasant girl. This girl was already weak from a long and hard labor. Soon—perhaps after the next contraction—he was going to have to take a look and pray fervently that it was the child's head he would see. He could recall the surgeon's talking about breech births, though he had given no details.

And then between contractions, as he was about to draw the sheet back, there was a quiet voice from the doorway. It almost did not register on his mind, but he looked over his shoulder. He had not been mistaken. The quiet gentleman was standing there.

“I am a physician,” he repeated. “I will be happy to deliver the child and tend the mother.”

Anger was the Marquess of Lytton's first reaction. “You are a physician,” he said. “Why the hell have you waited this long to admit the fact? Do you realize what terrors your silence has caused Lady Birkin and Miss Wilder in the course of the day?”

“And you, too, my lord?” The quiet gentleman was smiling. He had strolled into the room and taken one of Lisa's limp hands in his. He spoke very gently. “It will soon be over, my dear, I promise. Then the joy you will have in your child will make you forget all this.”

She looked calmly back at him. There was even a suggestion of a smile in her eyes.

But the marquess was not mollified. Relief—overwhelming, knee-weakening relief—was whipping his anger into fury. “What the hell do you mean,” he said, “putting us through all this?” He remembered too late the presence in the room of three women, two of them gently born.

The quiet gentleman smiled and touched a cool hand to Lisa's brow as she began to gasp again. “How could I spoil a Christmas that had promised to be so dismal for everyone?” he asked, and he moved to draw the sheet down over the girl's knees. “The blood will probably return to your head faster, my lord, if you remove yourself. The ladies will assist me. Have some hot water brought up to us, if you will be so good.”

Lord Lytton removed himself, frowning over the physician's strange answer to his question. Lady Birkin and Pamela, moving back to their
posts, puzzled over it, too. What had he meant? Christmas might have been dismal but was not? Because of what was happening?

“Set an arm each about her back to support her as you lift her,” the quiet gentleman said. “Your labors, too, will soon be at an end, ladies, and you will experience all the wonder of being present at a birth. Ah. I can see the head, my dear. With plenty of dark hair.”

“Ohhh!” Lisa was almost crying with excitement and exhaustion and pain.

But all sense of panic had gone from the room. Both Lady Birkin and Pamela were aware of that as the physician went quietly and efficiently about his work and Lisa responded to his gentleness. Her son was born, large and healthy and perfect—and crying lustily—early in the evening. They were all crying, in fact. All except the doctor, who smiled sweetly at each of them in turn and made them feel as if it were not at all the most foolish thing in the world to cry just because one more mouth to be fed had been born into it.

Lisa was exhausted and could scarcely raise her arms to Tom when he came into the room several minutes later, wide-eyed and awed, while Lady Birkin was washing the baby and Pamela was disposing of bloodstained rags. Lisa accepted the baby from Lady Birkin and looked up with shining eyes into Tom's face while he reached out one trembling finger to touch his son. But she had no energy left.

“I'll take him,” Lady Birkin said, “while you get some sleep, Lisa. You have earned it.”

“Thank you, mum.” Lisa looked up at her wearily. “I'll always remember you, mum, and the other lady.” Her eyes found Pamela and smiled. “Thank you, miss.”

And so Lady Birkin found herself holding the child and feeling a welling of happiness and tenderness and . . . and longing.
Ah, how wonderful,
she thought. How very wonderful. She acted from instinct. She must find Henry. She must show him. Oh, if only the child were hers. Theirs.

Word had spread. Everyone was hovering in the hallway outside Lisa's room. The birth of a little bastard baby was the focus of attention on this Christmas Eve. The ladies oohed and aahed at the mere sight of the bright stripes of the shawl in which it was wrapped. But Lady Birkin had eyes for no one except her husband, standing at the top of the stairs close to the Marquess of Lytton and gazing anxiously at her.

“Henry,” she said. “Oh, look at him. Have you ever seen anything so perfect?” She could hear herself laughing and yet his face had blurred before her vision. “Look at him, Henry.”

He looked and smiled back up at her. “Sally,” he whispered.

“He weighs nothing at all,” she said. “How could any human being be so small and so light and so perfect and still live and breathe? What a miracle life is. Hold him, Henry.”

She gave him no choice. She laid the bundle in his arms and watched the fear in his eyes soften to wonder as he smiled down at the baby. The child was not quite sleeping. He was looking quietly about him with unfocused eyes.

Lord Birkin smiled. What would it be like, he wondered, to look down like this at his own child? To have the baby placed in his arms by its mother? By his wife?

“Sally,” he said, “you must be so tired.” She was pale and disheveled. He had a sudden image of how she should be looking now, early in the evening of Christmas Eve, immaculate and fashionable and sparkling with jewels and excitement and ready to mingle with their friends far into the night. And yet he saw happiness now in her tired eyes—and breathtaking beauty.