Louise Allen - Once Upon A Regency Christmas - On a Winter's Eve / Marriage Made at Christmas / Cinderella's Perfect Christmas

‘Thank heavens for that.’ Julia stamped her feet in their layers of woollen stockings inside the clumsy boots. ‘Is the road clear?’

‘The hedges have stopped the snow drifting off the fields for as far as I can see, although it may be bad further on. It is still too thick for the carriage and too soon to try on horseback. We may get out by Christmas if this weather holds. Now, snowmen.’

He showed Miri how roll a snowball across the lawn so that it grew. ‘We need a big one for the body and a smaller one for the head.’

‘Let me.’ She pounced on the ball and began to push it, laughing with delight, her breath making white puffs in the air.

Giles left her to stand beside Julia. ‘Shall we walk along the edge of the shrubbery, see if there are any evergreens for your Christmas garlands?’

‘Is it worthwhile, decorating this place?’ A nice safe topic.

‘Walk, before your toes freeze.’ He possessed himself of her hand and tucked it under his elbow before she could object, studying her from his superior height. She was not used to having to tip her head back to meet a man’s eyes. ‘You are determined to be miserable, aren’t you?’ he enquired.

‘No!’ She glared up at him, indignant. ‘I am determined to get out of here, that is all. Poor Miri, dragged all this way from home. I was mad to even contemplate it.’

‘Poor Miri?’ He tipped his head towards the lawn where her stepdaughter was already working on a second snowman’s body, every line of her bundled-up body radiating enjoyment.

‘Snow is a novelty. So is being cold, being snubbed, feeling homesick. I wanted to do the right thing for her, I told myself. Now I wonder if I wasn’t being selfish in demanding her company.’

‘What was it like for you, arriving in India, being hot, being homesick? Not snubbed, I imagine. Not an earl’s daughter.’

He was curious, but she was not surprised. She would have found it strange if he was not. ‘No, not snubbed.’ The temptation to pour it all out into a sympathetic ear was almost overwhelming. Instead she said what she had been avoiding all morning. ‘I must apologise for last night.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘If you had pounced on me in the stables, forced a kiss on me, you would be apologising.’ She risked a sideways glance when he remained silent.

‘You are very refreshing, Julia.’ When she frowned up at him the corner of his mouth kicked up, emphasising the scar on his cheek. ‘If I had done that then, yes, an apology would be in order unless it was obvious that a kiss was welcome. But I could have stepped away at any point, which might give you a clue that I enjoyed it. I assure you, I would have fled screaming if I had been unwilling—the door was right behind me.’

‘How very gallant you are, Captain. You kiss the poor, needy widow, you refrain from taking advantage of her and then you protest that you enjoyed the experience.’ She must stop talking now before she made any more of a pathetic spectacle of herself.

‘If you are suffering from a lack of male attention, Julia, then I can only assume that the passengers on the ship and every man in London between the ages of sixteen and sixty had something seriously wrong with them.’ There it was again, that narrow-eyed, very masculine assessment that had her pulse pounding.

Oh, yes, the men on the ship had looked. They had seen either a rich widow ripe for the plucking or her beautiful stepdaughter to be seduced. Or, in one or two cases, both. What none of them saw was a woman yearning for experience, for passion and for a virile man in his prime to deliver them.

Well, she had a virile, attractive man by her side at this moment. One who appeared to be discreet and considerate. She could be a coward or she could risk a monumental snub and tell him what she wanted. Julia took a steadying breath, but Giles was before her.

‘Tell me how you came to be in India, married so young to a man who must have been much older than yourself.’

Why not? None of it was a secret and she had already abandoned any pretext of pride with this man. ‘I was poor and unlucky in my relatives,’ Julia began. ‘My father died five years after my mother, when I was sixteen. He had married below him, his family said, and it was good that he had no son by such an unsuitable woman, a merchant’s daughter. The title went to his cousin, who was horrified to discover the state of the family coffers. Papa was not the most provident of men and there was no money, not enough to maintain the estate as it should be.’

‘One can understand the heir’s feelings,’ Giles observed.

‘Cousin Richard said I was a further drain on his pocket and that he had no intention of funding a Season for me the following year. An acquaintance was going out to India, so I could make myself useful by accompanying her as a companion and then I was sure to pick up a husband for myself. The problem was solved.’

She glanced up at his face when he said something sharp under his breath. He looked appalled. ‘You were sixteen, bereaved.’

‘I was also exceedingly pretty and his daughters are rather plain. I can say it now because my looks did not survive long. I was blonde and curvaceous and I had a beautiful roses-and-cream English complexion. Enchanting, though I say it myself. I arrived in Calcutta just as the cholera did. It killed thousands, amongst them many of the eligible young men who had come down to meet the Fishing Fleet. I caught it, too. They shaved my head because of the fever and when I recovered I was as thin as a rake, the roses had fled and my hair grew back straight and much darker. My travelling companion was dead, my looks gone, my pockets empty. I was desperate.

‘And so Sir Humphrey Chalcott won himself the daughter of an earl.’

Giles tried to imagine what it would have been like for a girl scarcely out of the schoolroom to find herself in an alien land, weak, abandoned. Where had she found the strength to carry on?

Julia’s voice was quite steady as she told her tale, almost as though she spoke of someone else entirely. ‘Sir Humphrey thought he was acquiring status and influence. What he did not realise until too late was that the new earl had no intention of giving him anything, let alone the allowance he was hoping for.’

‘He was much older than you were.’

Julia nodded. ‘I suppose I hoped for a substitute father. I soon learned that he couldn’t even be a decent parent to his own daughter, let alone comprehend the fears and needs of a young bride.’

They came to a gap in the planting. Julia waved at Miri, who now had a line of five snow bodies in descending order of size. ‘I think Miri is building a snow family. She was the one bright spark at first. Her mother died when she was fifteen so she was shut away in the women’s quarters. She is four years younger than me, the sister I never had.’

‘And your husband was not a successful man?’

‘He was self-indulgent, indolent and had made himself ill by surrendering to all the temptations of the east. The food, the drugs, the women. He did not have to lift a finger to live a comfortable life, so he did not. He never saw it was his fault that he did not achieve the wealth of other merchants, who did apply themselves.’

They reached the corner of the shrubbery and Giles ducked under a snow-laden branch and into the shelter of the plantings. With the evergreens arching overhead the winding path was almost clear of snow.

‘It was not as bad as it might sound.’ His silence had left a space that she seemed compelled to fill. Giles wondered whether she had bottled all this up for so long that she was confiding things that she never had to anyone else. ‘You can live much better in India on little money than you can over here. I rapidly learned to be a housekeeper.’