ONCE UPON A REGENCY CHRISTMAS Read online

  ‘Thank you.’ The food was adequate. Plain but hot, dull but filling. Miri ate with a delicacy that concealed any distaste for what was unfamiliar for both of them.

  ‘After shipboard fare for months this has to be an improvement.’ She reached for the pepper. ‘But if we stay I must order some spices. I cannot endure such bland seasoning much longer.’

  ‘You are in two minds about remaining?’ Captain Markham twirled the stem of his wine glass slowly between fingers and thumb. The cellar had revealed a number of dusty bottles of dubious vintage and they were cautiously sampling one.

  ‘This house is a disappointment,’ Julia admitted. More than the house, if she was honest. After six years of brutal realism and clear thinking she had allowed freedom to go to her head. She had let herself dream and had followed that dream. She looked at Miri and acknowledged that she had been selfish as well. All for the very best of motives. ‘I will sell it.’

  ‘You will achieve a better price if you wait until the spring,’ Markham suggested. ‘Once it has been cleaned and had a lick of paint and the sun shines on it, it might be transformed.’

  ‘And a maharaja on a white elephant might come down the driveway and offer me chests of gold for it,’ she retorted and was rewarded with a laugh from Miri.

  They ate the apple pie, the desire for cream politely unspoken. ‘There was no port in the cellar, I gather,’ Julia said as she and Miri stood up. ‘We will leave you to your wine. If you will excuse us, we will retire now.’

  ‘Of course.’ The Captain got to his feet. ‘Goodnight, ladies. And my thanks for rescuing me from the snow.’

  Julia saw Miri to her door, then turned, restless, and walked back to the head of the stairs, back to her own door. Dithered. What was the matter with her? She never dithered. Perhaps fresh air would steady her. If nothing else it might drive her to her bed and then, surely, she would sleep.

  She jammed her feet into her half-boots and swung her cloak around her shoulders. The front door opened with its sepulchral groan and then she was picking her way cautiously towards the stables, the only destination for a stroll in the freezing darkness.

  It had stopped snowing and she could see the glow from candles in the room above the stables and the drift of smoke from the stove chimney. Below, the light of one lantern shone out across the trodden snow and she followed it to the door and went in.

  The air was warmer here and smelt of dusty hay and horse. Four heads appeared over the half-doors of the boxes, but Julia did not approach them. She missed her mare, Moonstone, and these handsome beasts were no substitute for a brave little horse who was afraid of nothing, not even elephants. Another mistake, to have sold her, but Julia had thought she was being strong and decisive.

  An irritable sound drew her to the door without a horse behind it. Scratching about in the straw was the turkey, his pompous dignity returned now he was free of the rug. He thrust out his chest and spread his tail at the sight of her.

  ‘Ridiculous creature. You’ve no doubts, have you? You make an idiotic dash into a snowstorm and certain death, but of course you are rescued and looked after and now you will escape your proper fate.’

  Whereas she had made an idiotic escape and ended up here. And if she wasn’t careful and didn’t make the right decisions she would find herself trapped, or lured, or simply cornered into marriage—the proper fate for a rich widow. ‘Oh, what have I done?’ She bent to rest her forehead on her arms, crossed on the top of the loose-box door.

  ‘Well, what have you done?’ a voice behind her asked. Captain Markham.

  ‘Let my heart rule my head,’ she said wearily without moving. ‘I left India full of nostalgia for England, dragging Miri behind me. I hate it here.’

  ‘What will you do?’ He was so close she felt her skirts brush against the backs of her legs. For a moment she thought he would touch her, but he stayed still. It must be she who was shivering with reaction. Not with cold. Not with his heat at her back.

  ‘Go back to India. I know where I am there.’ Who I am.

  ‘Do you love it so much?’ Giles Markham asked softly, the deep voice intimate, as though he asked her about her feelings for a man.

  Julia straightened, but she kept her gaze on the turkey cock. Was it her imagination or could she feel Markham’s breath, warm on her neck?

  ‘Most of the time I fought it as though it was a person, an enemy. But sometimes it was an exotic fairy tale. It can take your breath with beauty and magic so deep and rich it cannot be true. The people. The colours. Oh, and the mornings...just at sunrise, when it was cool and clear and the whole impossible place was coming to life and I would ride my mare and the world was mine.’

  ‘That sounds like love to me. An attraction that goes soul-deep, but which you fought against even as it seduced you.’

  ‘You are a romantic, Captain.’

  She shivered and he moved closer, put his hands on the stable door either side of her, caging her against his heat, the muscled wall of his body. There were responses she should make to that. A sharp elbow in his ribs, the heel of her boot on his toes, a jerk backwards with her head into his face. She knew all the moves, had used them before now.

  Julia turned within the tight space and stared at the top button of his waistcoat. Hitting this man was not what she wanted. ‘A romantic,’ she murmured.

  He made no move to touch her, to crowd closer. ‘Only a man who has ridden at dawn over wide plains before the battle started, who has seen the mist rise and heard the birds begin to sing and who has tried to hold the moment, hoping against hope that the sun will not burn away the mist and the guns will not begin to fire and that the earth will not be reddened with blood.’

  ‘That seems strange for a soldier to say.’

  ‘Soldiers are not immune to beauty. Only a few of us want to fight and kill for the sake of it. But when the mist vanishes and the guns begin, then we forget those moments of peace and plunge into hell.’

  ‘Who do you fight for, Captain?’

  Chapter Three

  She had surprised him. ‘It is my duty,’ Giles said after a moment.

  ‘Is that always what soldiers fight for? King and country? Or did you become a soldier to impress your lady-love?’ She had meant to tease and he smiled when he shook his head. ‘So you have been fancy-free while you break hearts across the Continent.’

  Darkness swept through his gaze, his jaw hardened. Julia glanced away, shocked and guilty. In her own awkwardness she had stumbled into something private, something that hurt.

  After a moment she felt the big body caging hers relax and she dared to look up and meet his eyes. Grey eyes with gold tracing out from the pupil like tiny flames in the lantern light. The moment was a fragile bubble—one wrong move and it would be gone again like that morning mist. She reached up her hands and pulled down his head, lifted her lips to his and the iridescent shimmer of the bubble enclosed them both.

  There was a momentary pause, the faintest hitch in his breath, then the Captain’s lips moved over hers, firm, slightly cold. His tongue touched the seam of her lips, shockingly hot against her own chilled mouth as she opened to him.

  Could he tell that she had hardly ever been kissed? Julia made herself hold back, forced down her need to simply drown in his embrace, drag him to the heaped straw, discover, finally, what it was like to know a virile man in his prime.

  Over-eagerness would betray her inexperience. She let him lead, followed the strokes of his tongue with her own daring movements, allowing him to angle her head for his taking. Giles Markham knew what he was doing, she thought hazily, striving to focus, to learn and not to lose herself in this assault on her senses. On the few occasions Humphrey had actually kissed her she had been frightened by his forcefulness, repelled by the taste of him—cheroots, heavily spiced meat, strong spirits.

 
The taste of this man was enticing, which was puzzling as it seemed to be made up of faint traces of tooth powder, wine and...masculinity, she supposed. There was the heat of his mouth and the cold of his skin, the scent of plain soap and the dusty hay of the stables, the comforting smell of horses. And there was his body under her hands. Muscled shoulders, short hairs on his nape, the strength of his arms as he held her.

  When he released her she swayed back against the stable door, dizzy and enchanted, her hands still on his shoulders. So this is what it is like. After all these years. At last.

  ‘Julia?’

  Just her name. She found she liked it on his lips.

  ‘Giles.’ She liked that, too. A good, straightforward name. She let her fingertips stray to the bare skin of his neck above his collar and even in the dim light saw his gaze darken. You want me. Tell me you want me.

  ‘You are upset, cold, tired,’ Giles said as he stepped back a pace, leaving her cold and alone, her hands still raised. ‘This is not a good time to begin—’

  ‘Begin what?’ Cold, tired and upset was sweeping back to smother dizzy and enchanted.

  ‘A dalliance, I was going to say.’

  So that was what she desired. Julia realised that she did not have the words for this. Giles probably knew all about dalliances and he was tactfully making it clear that he did not want one. And he was not exactly tearing himself from her arms with deep reluctance. How humiliating.

  Julia found the cool smile, the mask she wore when bargaining, whether it was with Rajput gem dealers or desert camel breeders. ‘Goodness, how serious you are. Dalliances indeed! I had merely the impulse to kiss when I found us almost nose to nose.’ She laughed, aiming for sophisticated amusement, fearing pathetic bravery. Share the jest. Please.

  He smiled crookedly, almost as though he did not find any humour, but his eyes were warm, the gold flames intense. ‘Of course. Forgive me. If you give me a moment to check on the livestock, I will walk you back to the house. It is treacherous underfoot.’

  ‘Certainly.’ How cool she sounded. Not at all like a woman who was quivering with desire, lapped by heat, almost speechless with embarrassment at her own recklessness. When Giles came back from checking water buckets and feed she was ready to slip her hand under his proffered arm, curl her fingers around his sleeve.

  He was rock-steady as they negotiated the yard, lit by starlight reflecting off the snow. ‘My goodness, I am chilly.’ An exaggerated shudder would hide her shaking, surely?

  Once inside she went directly to the stairs—walking, not breaking into a run, not fleeing to her room to bury her head under a pillow. ‘Would you check the doors and windows are secure and the fire safely banked? I do not yet know how much reliance to place on Smithers.’

  ‘Of course. Goodnight, Lady Julia.’

  ‘Goodnight, Captain. Sleep well.’ He would make sure all was safe, she was certain of that. Giles Markham made her feel protected, sheltered. Rejected.

  * * *

  Sleep well. Lady Julia, Julia, had a sense of humour hidden under that baffling exterior because she surely couldn’t have been serious with that blessing. Giles hauled the blankets up over his ears and wondered why the arousal was not keeping him warm. Or why the cold was not killing the arousal, come to that. This was the worst of both. He was stone cold and hard as a hot icicle.

  You shouldn’t have kissed her, common sense pointed out. She kissed me first, came the answer from considerably south of his brain. Yes, but you were going to kiss her, weren’t you? Telling yourself she needed comforting, pretending that all you wanted was to offer a shoulder to cry on. Haven’t you learned your lesson? You start out in a fit of gallantry, or of lust, then you get yourself tangled deep in whatever webs they are spinning and you end up as damaged as you would after a bayonet in the chest.

  He was a soldier—that was what he was, what he did. What he had been, he reminded himself, giving the pillow a thump. No more.

  Yes, but... That was what was keeping him awake, almost more than his frozen feet and the throb of desire. She kissed me and she had no idea what she was doing.

  Not that it had been any less delightful for that. Julia had tasted delicious, her lips under his had been sweet and generous, her body curving into his had promised an abundance of the femininity that her practical manner struggled to deny. Yet she was a widow and, from what had been said, had been married and in India for several years. So what was the truth? A marriage in name—or was the husband a complete fiction? In which case, was she even Lady Julia Chalcott and the daughter of an earl?

  A blast of wind hit the window panes, sending a draught swirling around the room. Giles swore and got out of bed, still fully dressed save for his neckcloth and boots. He had slept like a log in far worse conditions than this, but not if there was an alternative. He bundled up the bedding and let himself out of the room, then went down to the drawing room, where at least there was a fire.

  He made himself a nest in front of the hearth on top of the sofa cushions and set to work on the sullen coals. By the time he had a cheerful blaze going he felt warmer and his brain was beginning to focus. He climbed the stairs again, dug in his bag for the thick red book he had bought to study, that had cost too much to throw away as he’d ploughed through the snow.

  Giles settled back into his makeshift bed before he began to investigate the Peerage and Baronetage.

  Sir Humphrey Chalcott, second baronet, born

  London 12th May 1752.

  He would be sixty now, if he had lived.

  Only son...

  Married 1804, in Calcutta to Julia Clarissa Anne, daughter of Frederick Falmore, Fourth Earl of Gresham.

  No first wife, so Miss Chalcott must be the daughter of a mistress.

  Giles looked for the Falmores. Julia had been born in 1787, the only child of the Fourth Earl, who had died in early 1803, five years after his wife. The title passed to the son of his youngest uncle. Giles did the calculation. She had married a man thirty-five years her senior when she had been barely seventeen years old.

  Who would put a grieving, orphaned girl of sixteen on a ship to India? The ‘fishing fleet’ was for the desperate and the poor, the plain or the otherwise ineligible women seeking a husband eager to take any British wife of gentility as they struggled to make their way in India.

  If Julia really was who she said she was, then perhaps her husband had been unable through illness or infirmity to consummate the marriage to his young bride. He had obviously once been virile, Miss Chalcott was proof of that.

  Giles threw another log on the fire, blew out the candle and settled down to sleep, his curiosity now thoroughly aroused. Which was, he concluded as he finally began to drift off, rather more comfortable than what he had been suffering from earlier.

  * * *

  There were doubtless more embarrassing social situations than meeting over the breakfast cups the man you had inexpertly kissed the night before and who had then firmly but kindly rebuffed you. Just at the moment Julia couldn’t think of any and she was applying her mind to it when Giles opened the dining room door.

  Having all one’s clothing drop off in the middle of a dinner party? Walking in on the Governor General in his Calcutta mansion while he was pleasuring his mistress on the billiards table?

  ‘Good morning.’

  She dropped the sugar bowl, sending lumps of sugar scattering across the table.

  ‘Julia!’ Miri was laughing at her. ‘Whatever are you thinking about? Good morning, Captain Markham.’

  ‘Billiards,’ she managed.

  ‘And what is there about billiards to make you blush?’ Miri was intent on teasing.

  ‘If you must know, I was thinking about the Marquess of Hastings. His billiard table. Government House.’ She cast a harassed glance at Giles, who had seated himself at the end o
f the table. ‘Good morning, Captain. There is bacon, eggs, bread and butter. You could ring for cheese. There are also some preserves. Damson, I think. Tea? There is no coffee or chocolate.’

  And if I keep on talking long enough the floor may simply open up and swallow me.

  ‘Thank you.’ Giles accepted the tea cup. ‘What is there about the Marquess of Hastings and billiards to bring the colour to your cheeks? Is he such a bad player?’

  ‘No, I am.’ The floor remained disappointingly intact and Giles’s—Captain Markham’s—faint smile remained provoking. ‘It has stopped snowing. Perhaps the roads will be open soon.’ And you can leave. Please. Before I make more of a fool of myself than I have already.

  ‘I’ll go out and see, although I doubt it. The temperature is as low as ever, so nothing will have thawed.’ He buttered a slice of bread and addressed himself to his food while Julia sought for innocuous topics of conversation.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Miri announced. ‘Mrs Smithers has some stout boots that she said she would lend me.’

  ‘Have you ever seen snow before?’ Giles asked.

  ‘No, not before yesterday. It is very beautiful, but rather frightening.’

  ‘There is no danger if we stay near the house, which I suspect is all we will be able to do. It is best not to take liberties with snow, although I’ve moved troops in worse in an emergency. But it is a sneaky killer and it is best not to provoke it.’

  He sounded utterly matter-of-fact and professional about what must have been a nightmare. Julia cast a covert glance at the firm jaw and the broad shoulders and found she could easily picture Giles leading men through any kind of danger and doing it well. He was still talking to Miri when she pulled herself out of her imagination.

  ‘We can build a snowman if you like. Won’t you join us, Lady Julia?’

  ‘Thank you, no. Please do not let Miss Chalcott get cold. She is not used to low temperatures, let alone these conditions.’