Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow. Lyn Stone
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the hall below she heard the ten echoes of the case clock chiming the hour, and swiftly patted her hair one last time. She’d dallied long enough; now that she’d made up her mind to meet Revell—though only for the briefest few minutes imaginable!—she didn’t want to keep him waiting.
She hurried down the back stairs, keeping her footsteps as soft as possible so that no one else would know she wasn’t asleep. Not that anyone was likely to notice. With the house so full of guests, most servants were still busy helping in the kitchen or with serving, and from the voices and merry laughter in the drawing room, the Fordyces and their friends weren’t likely to retire to their bedchambers until midnight at the earliest. She paused to press herself against the wall to allow two footmen to bustle past with covered trays.
Around this corner, she thought as she fastened the front of her cloak, then down the last hall to the terrace doors, and to Revell. As hard as it would be, she meant to tell him the truth, as quickly and with as few words as possible, and then she would—
“Miss Blake!” called Lady Fordyce breathlessly behind her. “Oh, Miss Blake! How vastly fortuitous that you are still awake!”
Reluctantly, Sara stopped, her anticipation crumbling. As much as she wished to run ahead, to pretend she hadn’t heard her mistress, her conscience wouldn’t let her.
“I couldn’t sleep, my lady,” she said, her explanation mechanical with disappointment as Lady Fordyce joined her. “I was only going outside for a brief walk.”
“Then how glad I am to have found you first,” declared the older woman, her round face flushed and glistening with a hostess’s duress as well as the wine from dinner. She took Sara firmly by the arm to steer her back toward the drawing room, clearly unwilling to let Sara even consider escape.
“Miss Talbot wishes to sing,” she continued, “and none of the other ladies seem to be able to cope with the stiffness of our sorry old pianoforte’s keys. But now we have you, Miss Blake, a born accompanist if ever there was one! You must play for Miss Talbot. Come, come, come, you cannot wish to keep such a splendid company waiting a moment longer!”
Miserably Sara thought of Revell, of keeping him waiting far more than a moment, of dreams of her own that had waited for six years and more. But that was nothing tangible, nothing definite, and nothing that could be explained to Lady Fordyce without risking her position and her livelihood. And so, with her head bent in dutiful unhappiness, Sara went to her fate, and the pianoforte.
She hadn’t come.
For over an hour Revell had waited for her on the terrace, letting the cold wind flail away at his body through his coat as well as the hopes he’d held somewhere near his heart. He’d come early, not wanting to miss her, and he’d stayed late, in the ever-dwindling possibility she’d been delayed. He’d stayed until he’d lost the feeling in his hands from the cold and his face had settled in an icy grimace, and he’d given up only when he could invent no more excuses on her absent behalf.
She hadn’t come because, quite simply, she hadn’t cared.
Now he sat at the breakfast table, listlessly prodding at his toasted rolls and shirred eggs while the purposelessly cheerful conversation rolled around him. He wondered what he’d do to pass this day, and all the ones that would follow. He reminded himself that Sara hadn’t promised to meet him, or anything else, for that matter. He tried to compose a suitable greeting for her when they met again, one that somehow wouldn’t put his disappointment and bitterness on public display. He considered inventing some sort of family emergency and leaving this afternoon, and never looking back. He endeavored not to imagine how his older brother would jeer and call him the greatest, most sentimental fool in Christendom, and how, this time, Brant would be right.
“Like the rarest, sweetest nightingale!” the man next to him was gushing. “Ah, Miss Talbot, how we were blessed to have such a songbird in our midst last night!”
Miss Talbot, the plump and amorous blonde who, to Revell’s dismay, persisted in trying to catch his attention, now giggled, balancing a teaspoon delicately between her fingers.
“You are too, too kind, Mr. Andrews,” she simpered. “I do my best, I do, even when you gentlemen do make me go on and on!”
“‘On and on,’ my word,” said Mr. Andrews, chuckling as if this were the greatest witticism in the world. “I could have listened to your sweet voice all the night long!”
He leaned into Revell, suddenly confidential. “Such a gem of a voice you missed last night, Lord Revell, oh, what you missed!”
“Indeed,” said Revell, as dry and discouraging as he could be, but the other man plowed onward undaunted.
“Indeed, yes, my lord,” he maintained, slyly winking at Miss Talbot and her décolletage. “Why, I hate to consider the pleasure we would have missed if Lady Fordyce hadn’t drummed her daughter’s governess into playing the pianoforte so Miss Talbot could have her music—”
“She made her governess play for Miss Talbot?” asked Revell, incredulous. “Last night, in the drawing room?”
“Oh, my, yes, my lord,” answered Miss Talbot, practically purring to have finally gained Lord Revell’s attention. “I must have sung for simply hours. The kind gentlemen wouldn’t let me stop, my lord.”
“And Miss Blake—the governess—played for you the entire time?”
“Yes, my lord.” Miss Talbot smiled winningly. “It was Lady Fordyce’s wish and order that she accommodate me. And though I am more accustomed to the touch of a true lady’s hand upon the keys, for one evening that sour little wren’s skills were adequate enough for—”
“Forgive me, Miss Talbot, but I must, ah, leave, leave directly.” Revell rose so fast he nearly toppled his chair backward, and as he bolted from the room to amazed gasps and outraged murmurs, he didn’t bother to look back, leaving Andrews to console the indignantly abandoned Miss Talbot.
At this hour of the morning Sara and Clarissa must be on their morning walk—”regular as clockwork,” the maid had said—and if he hurried, he might meet them before they returned home. Having Clarissa there wouldn’t let him speak as freely as he would have done last night, but it would still be far better than if he had to seek her out inside the crowded house. He raced to his room for his coat and gloves, past more startled servants and guests with his coattails flying about behind him, before he reached the back door and opened it himself, not waiting for the footman who belatedly hurried to do it for him.
A light dusting of new snow had fallen in the night, softening and smoothing the outlines of the landscape, but also making any new footprints sharp and clean by contrast. Revell crossed the yard near the stables, heading in the direction where he’d seen Sara and Clarissa yesterday. A wide trampled path of muddied snow showed where Albert had ridden out with his friends earlier, but there, off to one side, Revell found what he’d sought: two sets of prints walking closely together, one small, one smaller, and both framed by the sweeping trail of long petticoats.
He found them in a small copse of ancient holly, the leaves glossy and dark green against the snow, the berries crimson. In the snow sat a large willow basket that Sara and Clarissa were filling with branches Sara was cutting from the holly to take back to the ballroom. The little girl laughed with excitement, clapping her red-mittened hands as she kicked her feet in an impromptu dance in the snow.
Yet as pretty a scene as this was, Revell still hesitated to interrupt. While Sara’s role as an impromptu accompanist was certainly a plausible explanation for why she hadn’t joined him, she could just as easily have chosen to play over meeting him. Nothing was certain, but then nothing concerning Sara was.
Except, of course, that he wished it to be.
Sara turned, tossing another branch into the basket, and now that Revell could hear the song she was humming, without thinking he began singing along with her, the words coming back to him from at least a lifetime away.
“‘Green grow’th