What a Lady Needs for Christmas (16 page)

Nonetheless, Joan was convinced that in some regard, Mr. Hartwell had rescued somebody. “And yet, this fire saw you married to the man’s daughter.”

He studied his toast and added a touch more honey. “Not directly. Shatner’s wife had long since died, but he’d kept her jewelry for Rowena. He was convinced we could find those jewels in the ruins that had been his house. I’d come up from the mines and was helping my father in the foreman’s office. We organized volunteers to search the mess for the master’s jewels, sifting through the rubble and ash as if looking for gold.”

Cleaning a hearth of a day’s ashes was a messy enough undertaking. “I can’t image it was enjoyable work.”

“And old Shatner knew the men would do it for free, too, up to a point. They wanted his favor, and wanted the chance to slip a stray earbob into a pocket. Eventually, though, they gave up. A man must feed his family before he feeds his ambitions.”

“You did not give up.”

He passed her the piece of toast.

“We Scots are sentimental, though we’re not given to the noisy verbal flights of you English. Had Shatner been unable to pass that jewelry on to his daughter, he would have felt like a failure as a father. I did not stop searching, and eventually, I found the damned jewelry, including a slightly melted version of Mrs. Shatner’s wedding ring. I suspect, in hindsight, that single piece was the point of the entire endeavor.”

Joan took a bite of toast. The bread was no longer warm, but the butter and honey were a perfect counterpoint to its crispness. Damn Tiberius for disrupting breakfast, anyway.

“Go on.”

“My tenacity recommended me to Shatner, though I was too big to be of use down in the mines. My father suggested I might be helpful in the mills, and by God, I made myself indispensable.”

“You became the son Mr. Shatner never had.” For powerful men were much taken with their sons.

“Oh, I did better than that,” he said ruefully. “I became the son he’d lost to smallpox ten years earlier. Damned old fool didn’t hold with vaccination. Phillip is named for the uncle he’ll never know.”

Without doubt, Charlie and Phillip had been vaccinated, as had Joan.

She took another crunchy, contemplative bite of toast. “And Miss Shatner fell in love with you?”

“She resented the hell out me, for she fully intended to run those mills when her father stepped aside. She might use foremen and stewards and crew chiefs to do it, but Rowena loved those mills.”

“You do not love them?”

Joan loved fabric. She loved watching a design emerge from the trial and error of a pencil wandering for hours over a clean page. She loved the way each fabric had its own feel, and specific preferences for dyes and drapes and even seasons of the year.

“I love that my son will never watch his friends cough themselves to death. I love that Charlie can aspire to more than hiring puppets to run her mill upon her papa’s death.”

What did Dante Hartwell consider
more
than doing a man’s job in a man’s world, however indirectly?

“And yet, you loved your wife.”

“We learned to appreciate each other. Shatner left her the mills in trust, provided she married me, otherwise the mills would have gone to me directly. He saw what Rowena did not. She and I were a good team. I had know-how and the expected gender for running the mills. She had ambition and shrewdness, and the mills benefited.”

Joan finished the toast only to find another perfectly buttered, honey-sweet slice passed to her. “This led to love?”

“She wanted children. We were young, and fighting is both exhausting and in some regards exhilarating, for some. I would have said we entertained a proper respect and affection for each other, but then one morning, in the middle of another rousing argument over how much debt the mills ought to carry, I noticed that my wife’s face was thinner.”

Fashion favored a full figure on a woman, with her waist cinched to make her bosom look more generous, and yet, Mr. Hartwell had noticed his wife’s face.

“You will tell me the rest of it,” Joan said gently because she had the sense this tale was seldom, if ever, recited.

“I at first attributed the change to maturation, to being run ragged by the children, the business, entertaining…but my wife was unwell. She’d hidden it—we had separate quarters—and then she’d told me it was fatigue, but fatigue does not strip the very flesh from a woman’s bones and take the light from her eye. When I accepted that my wife would not recover, I also realized I would lose somebody I loved.”

“I hope she did not suffer.” Except Rowena Hartwell would have suffered terribly, to have come to the same realization about her husband, and know that their time together was over all too soon.

“She left the mills to me to manage in every regard, though eventually, I’m to pass one to Charlie and one to Phillip. I took that as an indication that my sentiments were returned. She was Scottish.”

And thus sentimental, but not loquacious with it.

Joan finished the tea and toast, much restored by the breakfast she’d been served from the nursery tray, and in some regard, fortified by the tale Mr. Hartwell had served up with it.

When the maid returned, Joan sent Mr. Hartwell off to meet with his man of business, while she repaired to the floor before the hearth, there to learn all she could about sheep who had the claws of a lion, the horn of a unicorn, and the wings of a dragon.

Eight

“Time for a trip to the kitchens,” Hector announced from the nursery door. A petite white-capped nursery maid, napping in a rocking chair, gave a start. From the floor before the hearth, Lady Joan, Charlie, and Phillip looked up at him with expressions suggesting they’d been expecting somebody else.

“My drawing is almost done,” Charlie said. “May I show it to you?”

The girl was on her manners, probably as a function of being in new surroundings, or maybe because Lady Joan was here, sprinkling sweetness and fairy dust on all and sundry.

“Later we’ll have an art show,” Margaret said, wedging past Hector.

And what a blow that was. Margaret didn’t believe in lacing herself tighter than perdition, and preferred the old-fashioned country stays to the modern variety. Her female attributes were thus in soft, abundant evidence as she squeezed through the doorway and into the nursery.

“Good morning, children!” Margs said. “The cook is making the Christmas pudding today, and that means every member of the household must give the batter a stir, especially you weans.”

“Everybody? Does that mean Papa, too?” Phillip asked, replacing pastel chalks in their box, ordered from brightest to darkest.

“Everybody,” Lady Joan replied, neatly stacking the drawings. “That’s the tradition.”

“English tradition,” Hector said, extending a hand down to the lady. “In Scotland, we don’t emphasize Christmas as much as we try to prepare for the New Year.”

Lady Joan put her hand in his, a slim, pale hand sporting not a single freckle. She rose easily, nearly matching him for height, and set the drawings on the mantel, face out.

“How fortunate, then, that we shall have the benefit of both traditions this year.” Her smile was pleasant, her tone entirely civil, and Hector nearly hated her for it.

“Come along.” Margaret waggled her fingers at the children, while Hector endured the knowledge he was being ignored—again. “Lady Balfour says the servants like to sing when they’re mixing up the pudding, and you two both have such strong voices.”

“Especially me!” Charlie grabbed her aunt’s hand. Phillip was slower, looking around for a place to store the box of pastels. Lady Joan took the box from him before Hector had the chance, and put it on the mantel.

“We can draw more when you’re done in the kitchen, Phillip,” she said. “You were making great progress on your dragon.” Slow progress, no doubt. Phillip was a plodder, and Hector had sympathy for all plodders.

“Shall you come with us, Lady Joan?” Hector asked. She might be English, and a distraction Hector’s employer could not afford, but, to Hector’s eyes, she could use a few servings of pudding, for all that.

“Let’s fetch Mr. Hartwell. His children will enjoy having him take part in the merriment. I’m sure Balfour and even Spathfoy will put in an appearance.”

Charlie’s happy voice faded as Margaret and the children left for the kitchen. A cool draft from the hallway cut through the nursery’s peaty coziness.

“You refer to your own brother by his title, my lady?”

Lady Joan appeared to consider Charlie’s drawing, a fanciful amalgamation of wings, fangs, horns, and God knew what in every color of the rainbow.

“Of course—also by his given name and even his nickname. He answers to all of them, unless he’s absorbed with some problem on the estate, and then he answers not at all. I think you know the type?”

She sent the merest glance in the direction of the nursery maid, who was studying the fire as if a pot of gold might be contained therein.

That glance was a rebuke to a mere man of business who would pick a fight with a proper lady before the help—a deserved rebuke, at least in part. And yet, Hector presumed to offer the lady his arm, which she took with easy grace.

“I’m protective of him,” Hector said when he’d intended to maintain a stony silence through four stories of elegant Highland decor. “If it weren’t for Dante Hartwell, my family would still be freezing on the coast, living on mackerel, kelp, and stubbornness.”

Lady Joan smelled good, all female spiciness with a hint of something expensive. Margaret, by contrast, smelled like vanilla and common sense.

“Protectiveness can be smothering, Mr. MacMillan, all the more so for being well intended. I’m only a female, what can Mr. Hartwell possibly have to fear from me?”

She wasn’t pretending they were making small talk, for which he accorded her a few grudging points.

“He has everything to fear from you. You sport a passel of wealthy, titled English family at your back. They will not understand. They will stand against him, and Dante deserves better than that.”

Better
than
you.

That was her cue to drop his arm, stick her sniffy nose in the air, and beat him down the corridors with lectures on presumption and knowing one’s place.

She patted his arm. “Margaret needs to see this protective side of yours, Mr. MacMillan. Making allies of the children is clever, and I can understand that Mr. Hartwell might take some winning over, but when the lady herself doesn’t know she’s being pursued, it’s time to reevaluate your tactics.”

“I’m not pursuing her.” Hadn’t dared.

“The holidays are a fine time to win a woman’s notice,” Lady Joan went on, as if Hector hadn’t spoken. “And while your Scottish heart probably winces at all of our English silliness, you can work it to your advantage.”

“Margaret’s not English.” And when had he lost control of this discussion, which was to have been about how daft marriage between Dante and Lady Joan would be?

“Margaret’s not English, but she’s a woman much in need of kissing and cosseting, and you’re just the fellow to take on that challenge.”

Lady Joan did stop then, right where two hallways converged on the balcony leading to the main staircase. She pointed straight up, to some greenery hanging from a crossbeam.

As if pine boughs…

And then she kissed Hector’s cheek. “I can be protective too, Mr. MacMillan. This is your only warning.”

She sashayed on down the stairs, all purple grace, and while Hector had no idea what she might be warning him about, he did grasp that mistletoe was a fine old English tradition.

***

Dante had made a sketch of the Balfour family tree, for the MacGregors had managed, repeatedly, to marry English wealth. Balfour himself had married an American heiress less than a year ago, while each of his four siblings had plucked a matrimonial English goose.

Ian MacGregor, the next oldest to Balfour, was married to Augusta, Baroness of Gribbony.

Gilgallon, described by Balfour as the family charmer, had married Augusta’s cousin, Eugenia Daniels, another heiress and a beauty.

Connor, the youngest brother, and “whatever the opposite of a charmer is,” had married a wealthy Northumbrian widow, with whom he was hatching up a brood of fat, noisy bairns.

Mary Fran, in addition to being the widow of Spathfoy’s late younger brother, had married another of Augusta’s cousins, Matthew Daniels, whose substantial assets included nothing less than the personal favor of the Queen and the Prince Consort.

And finally, the youngest of the Daniels cousins, Hester, had the dubious honor of the Earl of Spathfoy for a husband.

The lines on the page crossed and recrossed, forming the sort of genealogical fortress a Highland laird would have been proud to call family—wealthy family.

Lady Joan interrupted Dante’s musings, striding into the library—no hesitating on the threshold for her—her purple skirts a-swishing.

“Are you hiding, Mr. Hartwell?”

She was a master at hiding, even in her velvet and snowy lace. Dante ever so casually folded the family tree in half, so the various golden apples dangling from it were not visible to Joan.

“I’m working. Hector gets frantic when we have to be away from the mills for any length of time, and he knows I’ll use the Sabbath to catch up.”

“It is Sunday,” she said, stopping short of the armchair Dante occupied near the hearth and veering off in the direction of the bookshelves. “The trains won’t run. You’re not supposed to work on Sundays.”

He liked the look of her, wandering around Balfour’s high-ceilinged library. She was made for lofty spaces, for places that flattered her height.

“You work on Sunday, madam.”

Her ladyship left off studying a portrait of some Highlander of old directly over the crackling fire. A fierce old fellow who yet had a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t work, ever. This is a point of contention between my family and me. I’m a lady, and worse than that, a lady blessed with a papa who thinks I’m to be ornamental.”

She was very ornamental. “I assume this papa will arrive on one of those trains you’re so worried about.”