Good Lord, snow! He could not remember when it had last fallen at Christmastime. Certainly not the year Elise had humiliated him and broken his foolish young heart. It had been raining that year and blowing a gale. Typical British winter weather. This was not typical at all. He wondered if Veronica had seen the snow, and was halfway up the stairs to the nursery before he realized how strange it was that he had thought of sharing the sight of snow with a child. But he continued on his way.
They were all in there, Veronica and Deborah kneeling on the window seat, their noses pressed against the glass, Miss Craggs standing behind them.
“Look, my lord.” She was the only one who had glanced back to see who was coming through the door. “Snow. We are going to have a white Christmas. Can you conceive of anything more wonderful?”
Sometime before she returned to Miss Phillpotts’s school he was going to have to sit down and have a good talk with Miss Jane Craggs. There was something deep inside the woman that could occasionally break through to her face and make her almost incredibly beautiful. She was beautiful now, flushed and wide-eyed and animated. And all over the fact that it was snowing for Christmas.
He found himself wondering quite inappropriately what her face would look like as he was making love to her. Totally inappropriately! He had a mistress waiting for him in London with whose services he was more than satisfied. He had had her for only two months. He had not even begun to tire of her yet.
“I am trying,” he said in belated answer to her question. “And at the moment I can think of nothing.”
She smiled at him and his heart and his stomach danced a pas de deux.
Good Lord, he wanted her, the gray and prim Miss Craggs.
“Look, Papa,” his daughter was saying. “Look at the trees. They are magic.”
He strolled over to the window and stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Jane Craggs, looking out on a Christmas wonderland.
“And so they are,” he said, setting his hand on the child’s soft curls.
“I have just had a thought. There used to be sleds when I was a boy. I wonder what happened to them.”
“Sleds?” Deborah turned her attention to him, “Oh, Uncle Warren, could we go sledding tomorrow. A sledding party. Do you think so? How many are there?”
“Wait a minute,” he said, holding up one hand. “I am not even sure they still exist. I suppose you are going to insist that I get on my greatcoat and my topboots and wade out to the stables without further delay.”
Yes. Three pairs of eyes confirmed him in his suspicions. And then three voices informed him that they were coming with him, and Jane Craggs was bundling Veronica inside her coat and winding her inside her scarf and burying her beneath her hat while Deborah darted out to don her own outdoor clothes.
“I knew,” Miss Craggs said, looking up at him with a face that was still beautiful, “that this was going to be a perfect Christmas. I just knew it.”
How could it be perfect for her, he wondered, when she had been brought here merely as a glorified servant to chaperon a sullen girl and then had been saddled with the responsibility of caring for an illegitimate child, whose presence in the house might well have offended her sensibilities? How could it be perfect when she was away from her own family?
But there was that light in her eyes and that beauty in her face, and he knew that she was not lying.
And he knew suddenly that for the first time in many yeas there was hope in him. The hope that somehow she might be right, that somehow this might be the perfect Christmas.
That somehow the magic might come back.
There were four sleds, three of them somewhat dilapidated. But he was assured that by the morrow they would be in perfect condition.
“Well, Veronica,” he said as they were wading back to the house with the snow falling thickly about them and onto them, “are you going to ride on a sled tomorrow too? Faster than lightning down a hill?”
“No, Papa,” she said.
“With me?” he asked her. “If I ride with you and hold you tight?”
“Yes, Papa,” she said gravely.
He could not ask for a more docile and obedient child. Nancy had brought her up well. And yet he could not help remembering what Jane Craggs had said about her-that she was hiding inside herself. And wondering how she could know such a thing, if it were so. But he was beginning to believe that perhaps it was true. Over the past few days the child had joined in all the activities, and she had made a great friend of the kitchen cat, whom he had found curled impertinently in his favorite chair in the drawing room, of all places, just the day before. But there had been no exuberance in her as there had been in Deborah and even in Miss Craggs.
He was beginning to worry about Veronica. The sooner he found her a good home to go to, the better it would be for her. She needed a mother and father to care for her. As soon as Christmas was over he must set Aubrey to work on it. It must take priority over all else.
“Look at me,” Deborah shrieked suddenly, and she hurled herself backward into a smooth drift of snow, swished her arms and legs to the sides, and got up carefully. “Look. A perfect angel.”
“Which you assuredly are not,” he said, looking at the snow caked all over her back.
She giggled at him. “I dare you to try it, Uncle Warren,” she said.
“It certainly does not behoove my dignity to be making snow angels,” he said.
But he did it anyway because it had never been his way to resist a dare.
And then they were all doing it until they had a whole army of angels fast disappearing beneath the still-falling snow. Like a parcel of children, he thought in some disgust, instead of two adults, one young person, and one child.
“This must be the multitude of the heavenly host that sang with the angel Gabriel to Mary,” he said. “I do not know about the rest of you, but I have snow trickling down my neck and turning to water. It does not feel comfortable at all. I think hot drinks at the house are called for.”
“Veronica has made the best angels,” Deborah said generously. “Look how dainty they are.”
It was the first time she had mentioned his daughter by name, the viscount thought.
“That is because she is a real little angel,” he said, stooping down impulsively and sweeping the child up into his arms. “Are you cold, Veronica?”
“A little, Papa,” she admitted.
She weighed almost nothing at all. He tightened his hold on her and realized something suddenly. He was going to miss her when she went away. He was always going to be wondering if she were happy, if she were being loved properly, if she were hiding inside herself.
“Snuggle close,” he said. “I shall have you inside where it is warm before you know it.”
Miss Craggs, he noticed, was watching him with shining eyes-and shining red nose. She looked more beautiful than ever. Which was a strange thought to have when, really, she was not beautiful at all.
At first she was going to go to church alone. It was something she had always done on Christmas Eve and something she wanted to do more than ever here. She had seen the picturesque stone church on her journeys to the village. And the thought of trudging through snow in order to reach it was somehow appealing. It would bring another part of her dream to life.
She asked Veronica at dinner-the child still ate in the dining room with the adults-if she would mind not being sat with tonight until she slept.
Jane explained her reason.
“I promise to look in on you as soon as I return,” she said.
But Veronica looked at her rather wistfully. “May I come too, Miss Jane?” she asked.
It would be very late for a child to be up, but Viscount Buckley immediately gave his permission and announced his intention of attending church, too. And then Deborah wondered aloud if Mr. George Oxenden would be at church, blushed, and declared that anyway she always enjoyed a Christmas service.