Greetings of the Season and Other Stories (10 page)

“The ring is an heirloom, the book is in every bookseller’s, and you must know Vincent selected the combs. I want to give you something all your own.” Bevin was searching through his pockets, damning his valet for being so meticulous. At last his fingers touched the object he was seeking, and he drew out a small black circle, a horseshoe nail twisted into a ring, rust showing in spots, uneven welding in others. He proudly placed this ring on her finger, right above the diamond-and-emerald Montravan betrothal ring. “This one I made myself. Greetings of the season, sweetheart.”

And every season.

The Proof Is in the Pudding

1

“Faugh,” declared Sir Otis Ogden from his place at the head of the long table. “’Tis a waste of good spirits, I say.”

Since Sir Otis considered any spirits not flowing directly down his shriveled gullet a waste, his wife Johna did not bother raising her voice to be heard across the mahogany expanse. Lady Ogden’s younger sister, Phillipa, though, seated somewhere in the middle of the table behind an arrangement of pine boughs, holly leaves, and red apples, clapped her hands when the butler and two footmen carried in the flaming pudding on its silver platter. Drenched in brandy, the traditional holiday dessert flared blue and gold and scarlet in the dimmed dining parlor.

“It’s beautiful,” Phillipa whispered. “It’s…it’s Christmas.”

“It’s poppycock,” Sir Otis spit, spewing wine down his shirtfront. The claret stains added a festive touch to the remnants of turbot in oyster sauce, roast goose, and asparagus already decorating the aged knight’s neckcloth. If his young wife had thought to sweeten Sir Otis’s disposition by serving a fine meal, festooning his dreary house with ribbon and holly, entertaining him with carols in Phillipa’s pretty voice and her own pianoforte accompaniment, she was wrong. Again. All the sugar in the gingerbread men, in the marzipan angels, in the candied fruits—all the sugar that got baked, boiled, and blended for a hundred holiday feasts—was not going to improve the curmudgeon’s nature. As for peace, goodwill, and Christmas feeling, Sir Otis was feeling bilious.

“Next thing you’ll be doing is setting the blasted house on fire,” he muttered. “Just my luck to marry a damned arsonist. Fires in every hearth, a fortune in candles gone up in smoke, now you’re setting torches to my food. Hell and tarnation, if you had any fire in your blood mayhaps I’d have me an heir.”

The servants pretended deafness, a not infrequent malady in this household, while Johna supervised the cutting of the pudding. Her face might be as red as the maroon velvet gown she wore and her lips might be pinched into a thin line, but Johna would not let the old glump ruin Phillipa’s Christmas. He’d already ruined Johna’s hopes for a happy life with a man who could love her. That was enough.

Obviously, this was not a marriage made in heaven. It was, in fact, a business transaction conducted in a smoke-filled gambling hall, over a table of unpaid and unpayable gaming debts.

Slavery being illegal, Johna’s father, Baron Hutchison, sold his elder daughter into matrimony. Johna was eighteen at the time, a raven-haired beauty with her dead mother’s blue eyes and levelheadedness. She might have made a splash in the Marriage Market if Hutchison could have dowered her, dressed her, and dropped her into the
ton
under some dragon’s watchful eye. But the dissolute baron could barely feed his daughters, much less get them entree into the
belle monde.
Gambling, drinking, and poor management of his properties, all had combined to keep Hutchison one short step away from debtor’s prison.

Sir Otis Ogden was his only hope—and the holder of most of his notes. If Lord Hutchison was barely skirting the fringes of society, Sir Otis was beyond the pale. He’d been able to purchase a knighthood but not respectability. A cardsharper, a moneylender, a fleecer of green lambs fresh from the country, his reputation did not bear scrutiny. His lusting after a young girl did.

So Lord Hutchison got his debts paid and a handsome settlement besides. If his conscience needed more soothing than the sound of rustling bank notes, he convinced himself that Johna would be a widow sooner rather than later, considering Ogden was ten years older than himself, to say nothing of the rough company the man kept. Odds were she’d still be young enough to attract another husband, and wealthy enough to provide for her dear papa in his dotage. He promptly gambled away his windfall, got tossed out of some foul dive into the snow, caught an inflammation of the lungs, and died—before seeing another s
hillin
g of his senescent son-in-law’s blunt. Which only went to prove that Hutchison never had been lucky at playing the odds.

Sir Otis got his bride, but not quite what he expected of the marriage either. No female of such tarnished pedigree could advance his social standing, no matter how beautiful she was. And no female could put the wind back in his sail, no matter how young she was. After a few sweat-covered attempts at conjugal consummation, Sir Otis gave it up, along with hopes for an heir. No society belle, no son, just a damned expensive piece of goods, that’s what his money had bought him. So he fired his housekeeper and two maids.

Of them all, Johna was perhaps the least disappointed in her marriage, especially once the grunting and groping were over. She hadn’t expected much, after all, just a better life for her sister and herself. She could have refused the match, could have hired herself out as a governess or companion, but she wouldn’t leave fifteen-year-old Phillipa alone in Berkshire. Hutchison Manor’s roof was falling in, the staff had left for positions that actually paid a salary, and who knew what misguided notion Papa would get into his muddled head next?

Sir Otis agreed to take in the spotty schoolgirl sister, though, so the marriage contract was finalized. Now, three years later, the sisters weren’t hungry and they weren’t in the poorhouse. They were, however, bonded servants. The bonds might be those of holy matrimony, but the results were the same. Johna kept house in London for Sir Otis and did half the cooking, mending, and cleaning. Phillipa worked alongside the maids, dusting and washing. She wasn’t spotty anymore, and she wasn’t a schoolgirl. She was eighteen, the very age at which Johna had been wed. Prejudiced or not, Johna thought her sister was lovely with her brown ringlets and softly rounded form, in contrast to her own straight black hair and tall, willowy frame which Sir Otis, for one, found boyish. Too, Phillipa was an unspoiled, uncomplaining treasure of a girl. She’d make some man a fine wife since, perforce, she knew all about managing a gentleman’s household. The problem was, there were no gentlemen.

Sir Otis didn’t entertain at home and never invited the two young women to accompany him on his evenings out. In fact, he barely allowed them to leave his house, determined not to share what he couldn’t enjoy. Be damned, he thought, if he’d have any dandified nodcocks strutting around his chicken coop. If they could get out of the Albemarle Street residence, Sir Otis and duties permitting, the girls knew no one in London and had barely the fee for the lending library between them. Their few treats depended on what Johna could squeeze out of the nipcheese household budget. The generous allowance her father had negotiated for Johna was going, according to Sir Otis, to pay for the maintenance of Hutchison Manor, to settle the baron’s last debts, and to keep the girls in modest home-sewn gowns so they didn’t shame him.

’Twould take the devil in lace drawers to shame the old reprobate, thought Johna. And ’twould take the heavenly host to please him. For sure her lovely Christmas dinner hadn’t. Johna had hoped to get Sir Otis in a mellow mood, to beg permission to take Phillipa to Bath for the winter. Social standards were less rigorous there, she’d heard, and the place was reportedly full of young army officers, widowers, and second sons. Well, she still had her Christmas wish. While stirring the pudding last month, she’d wished that Sir Otis would relent enough to provide dear Phillipa with a dowry and a future. Meanwhile, Johna was not going to permit the miserable old muckworm to ruin her sister’s joy in the holiday season. She’d been working on this Christmas pudding since early fall, just for Phillipa. First she’d let everyone from the scullery maid to the stableboy help stir the pudding and make their wishes—while the master was out, of course. Then she’d divided the mixture into four boiling bags to steam for hours, then hung them out to set and age, just as in her grandmother’s old recipe. According to the faded household book, one was for family, one for company, one for the servants, and one for charity. Since there was no company, Johna had traded the extra pudding for the special tokens she’d hidden that morning in the family’s dessert, the one that had been soaking in rum for the past week.

As she carefully cut the pudding in precise sections, Johna asked, “Do you remember Mama’s little charms, Phillipa? The ones she used to hide in the Christmas pudding?”

Phillipa clapped her hands again, beaming around the centerpiece. “Never say you found them, Jo. I can’t wait to see. Oh, hurry, do.”

“What’s that you two are nattering on about now?” Sir Otis demanded. “Mealymouthed chits talk barely loud enough to be heard.”

The footmen passed the plates while Johna tried to soothe her husband. “It’s just an old tradition, like making wishes when you stir the batter.”

“Balderdash. Tommyrot. More nonsense to fill a gudgeon’s empty head.” He stuck his spoon into the dish before him.

“Look, Jo, I got the ring! That means I’m going to be married within the year!”

Johna smiled. Of course Phillipa had found the ring, right where Johna’d planted it. She dug around in her own portion and came up with a coin.

“What’s this blasted jibber-jabber?” Sir Otis shouted around a mouthful of pudding. “Is this food or some tomfool parlor game?”

“It’s just for fun—” Johna started to explain, and Phillipa chimed in with, “It’s part of the Christmas magic. I got the ring, and Jo got the coin. That means she’s going to come into great wealth this year.”

Sir Otis took another heaping spoonful into his mouth, then banged his fist on the table and thundered, “You mean you stuck a coi—A ch—”

Phillipa answered: “Not a real coin, sir, a special token. Besides the ring and the coin, there’s the shoe that means a long journey, and the key that portends a wonderful opportunity. What else, Jo?”

But Johna was watching her husband down the length of the table. She was frozen in her seat, horrified, as Sir Otis went “Ch—ch—” a few more times, his face turning purplish, before he fell over, right into his dish of pudding.

Sir Otis had gotten the shoe.

*

Six months of mourning was all the respect Johna was willing to accord her departed husband, and that was five months more than the dastard deserved. No improvements had been made at Hutchison Manor, no outstanding debts had been marked paid. And Sir Otis’s own private papers showed exorbitant interest rates on loans, dealings in smuggled goods, a strongbox full of nefarious and underhanded dealings. Johna relocked the box and hid it deep in her clothespress, wondering if a man could be more despicable dead than alive.

Not when he’d left her a fortune to rival Golden Ball’s, he couldn’t. Not when he’d
left,
by heaven’s grace. Johna was twenty-one, rich, and free. There was no one to issue orders, no one to criticize her looks or behavior, no one to tell her what to do. Sir Otis’s solicitor threatened to challenge her in court: a young woman needed a guardian, a trustee. Johna threatened to find another man of affairs to handle her finances. Mr. Bigelow withdrew his complaints.

For six months the Widow Ogden could not go to the theater or the opera or even the assemblies in Bath, not without permanently destroying her reputation. But she could spend her husband’s ill-gotten wealth, smiling with every bank draft she wrote. Johna refurbished the London residence top to bottom, with enough servants that she had a maid just to tidy the other maids’ rooms. She hired a manager for the Berkshire property, and made sure he had ample funds to restore the manor house to a glory never seen in her lifetime. She set up a bank fund for Phillipa’s dowry that made Mr. Bigelow’s hand shake. And then she called in the dressmakers.

By the end of June they were ready. Johna wore pale grays, silvers, the smoky lavenders of half-mourning that became her better than any colors she might have chosen, while the fashionable high waists emphasized her slender elegance. Phillipa’s gowns were pretty pastel muslins, trailing ribbons and rosettes. The fabrics were the finest to be had, the styles absolutely à la mode.

The Prince Regent went to Brighton for the summer and the cream of society followed. So did the Hutchison sisters. They rented a lovely house on the Steyne, frolicked in the sea, rode the little donkeys, and partook of every public concert, every promenade, every open-air pastry shop. To no avail.

Johna made no secret of her widowhood or her wealth, and made sure to mention Phillipa’s dowry in the hired staff’s hearing. To no avail.

They were noticed, of course, as two beautiful young women would be noticed anywhere, but not by the right people. The only persons who approached them, who tried to scrape up an acquaintance, were half-pay officers, basket-scrambling fortune-hunters, or outright rakes. The Regent’s set seemed to consist of an inordinate amount of all three, plus a contingent of bored, blasé snobs. Acknowledging any of their suggestive smiles, accepting a rum-touch as escort, being at home to a here-and-thereian, would have put paid to Johna’s hopes of seeing her sister creditably established. She knew what they all had in mind for a wealthy widow and she wasn’t having any of it. Not yet.