“She is hiding,” Miss Craggs said quietly.
“Hiding?” he frowned.
“She suspects that something dreadful has happened to her mother,” she said. “And she knows that you are a stranger, although you are her father. She is not at all sure that she is safe, despite your assurances to her and my own. She does not know what is going to happen to her. And so she has found a hiding place. The only one available. She is hiding inside herself.”
The notion was thoroughly preposterous. Except that he recalled his impression that morning that Miss Craggs herself did most of her living far inside herself. What was her own story? he wondered briefly. But there was a topic of more pressing importance on which to focus his mind.
“But she must know,” he said, “that I will care for her, that I will find her a good home. I always have cared for her.”
“Why must she know any such thing?” Miss Craggs asked. “She is four years old, my lord. A baby. Financial care and the assurances of a good home mean nothing to her. Her world has rested firmly on one person, and that person is now gone.”
“Miss Craggs,” he asked quietly, though he already knew what her answer was going to be, “you are not suggesting that I keep the child here, are you?”
She looked down at the hands in her lap. “I am suggesting nothing, my lord,” she said.
But she was. She obviously knew nothing about life. She knew nothing about the types of relationships that might exist, between a man and his illegitimate offspring.
And yet, even as he thought it, he recalled the totally unfamiliar experience of standing in the nursery looking down at his own small child in the bed there, lying still and staring quietly upward, in a most unchildlike way. And he felt now, as he had felt then, an unidentifiable ache about his heart.
She was his child, the product of his own seed. She was his baby.
“Miss Craggs.” He heard the irritability in his voice as he got to his feet. “I see clearly that nothing can be done and no decisions can be made until Christmas is over. It is looming ahead of us, a dark and gloomy obstacle, but one that must be lived through. Make of it what you will, then. Load the house with greenery if you must. Do whatever you will. And in the meantime I shall call upon my neighbors and try to organize that unheard-of phenomenon, a preadult party.” He felt thoroughly out of sorts.
“Very well, my lord,” she said, and looked up at him.
He felt almost as if he might fall into her eyes.
“Come,” he said, extending an arm to her even though he had brought her here as more of a servant than a guest, “I will escort you to your room, Miss Craggs.”
She got to her feet and looked at his arm with some misgiving before linking her own through it. Her arm was trembling quite noticeably though she did not feel cold, and she stood as far from him as their linked arms would allow.
Good Lord, he thought, had she been shut up inside that school for so long?
He stopped outside her dressing room and opened the door for her. “Thank you,” he said, “for agreeing to accompany Deborah here. And thank you for showing kindness and gentleness to Veronica. Good night.”
“Good night, my lord,” she said, her eyes on a level with his neckcloth.
And she moved hastily into the dressing room and closed the door behind her even as he prepared to take her hand to raise to his lips.
He was glad then that she had not given him a chance to do it. She was, after all, merely a servant. What was her first name? he wondered. He hoped it was something more fortunate than her surname. Though it was of no concern to him. He would never have reason either to know it or to use it.
Jane helped Veronica get dressed the following morning and brushed her curls into a pretty style while the child sat very still on a stool, her legs dangling over its edge. They were breakfasting together in the nursery when Mrs. Dexter, the viscount’s housekeeper, arrived there to ask Miss Craggs what her orders were regarding the Christmas baking and cooking.
“What my orders are?” Jane asked, bewildered. “Should you not be consulting his lordship, Mrs. Dexter?”
“He said I should come to you, miss,” the housekeeper said, looking somewhat dubious. “He said that whatever you wanted was to be supplied.”
Oh, dear. He really meant what he had said last night, then. She was to do whatever she wanted to celebrate Christmas. The thought was dizzying when at the age of three-and-twenty she never had celebrated the season. She was to have a free hand?
“Where is his lordship?” she asked.
“He has gone visiting with Miss Deborah, miss,” the housekeeper said.
“He said you were to wait until this afternoon to gather greenery so that he can help you carry it.”
“Oh, dear,” Jane said. “What is usually cooked for Christmas, Mrs. Dexter?”
The housekeeper raised her eyebrows. “Anything that will not remind his lordship that it is Christmas,” she said. “The cook threatens every year to resign, miss, but she stays on. It is unnatural not to have a goose and mince pies, at the very least.”
Goose and mince pies. The very thought of them was enough to set Jane’s mouth to watering. “Perhaps,” she said, “I should go down to the kitchen and consult the cook.”
“Yes, miss,” Mrs. Dexter said. But she paused as she was about to leave the room. “It is time Christmas came back to this house. It has been too long gone. And it needs to be celebrated when there is a child in the house, poor little mite.” She nodded in Veronica’s direction.
Jane wondered what had happened to banish Christmas from Cosway. She could not imagine anyone’s deliberately deciding not to celebrate it.
She looked at Veronica and smiled.
“Shall we go down to the kitchen and talk to Cook?” she asked.
The child nodded and got down from her stool to hold out her hand for Jane’s. Jane, taking it in hers and feeling its soft smallness, wondered if there could be a greater happiness in life.
The cook was so overjoyed at the prospect of Christmas baking that Jane found she did not need to make any suggestions at all. She merely sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and approved every suggestion made.
The cook lifted Veronica to the table, placed a large, shiny apple in her hand, and clucked over her and talked about the delight of having a child in the house again.
“I do not care what side of the blanket she was born on, if you take my meaning, miss,” she said to Jane. “She is a child, and children have a right to a home and a right to be loved. Chew carefully, ducky. You do not want to choke on a piece.”
Veronica obediently chewed carefully.
“It will do his heart good to have her here,” the cook said, jerking her head toward the ceiling. “He does not love easy, miss, and when he do, his heart is easy to break.”
Jane could not resist. “Was his heart broken once?” she asked.
The cook clucked her tongue. “By his childhood sweetheart,” she said.
“You never saw a man so besotted, miss, though she were a flighty piece, if you was to ask me. Their betrothal was to be announced on Christmas Day here at a big party. A big secret it was supposed to be, but we all knew it, miss. And then halfway through the evening, just when his lordship were excited enough to burst, a stranger who had come home with her brother a month before stood up and announced his betrothal to her. And she smiled at him as sweet as you please without so much as a guilty glance at our boy-or at her papa, who was as weak as water, as far as she was concerned. Six years ago it was, miss. His heart don’t heal easy. But this is one to mend any heart.”
She nodded at Veronica, who had spotted a cat curled beside the fire and had wriggled off the table to go and kneel beside it and reach out gingerly to pat its fur. The cut purred with contentment.