Page 12 of Marie’s Merry Gentleman (The Bookshop Belles #2)
CHAPTER 11
Christmas Day at Alston Castle
M other Nature had no respect for the importance of Christmas Day, Marie thought as she carefully moved to her wheeled chair and pushed herself out of her makeshift bedroom. Cold winds howled outside, bringing more snow from a dark sky. Being on the ground floor, she was close to the great room and it didn’t take long before she reached the open doorway.
The Yule log still burned magnificently in the hearth, and the candles on the table had melted overnight into a strange layered mass that looked like the surface of a badly made cake. A few had gone out early and could be reused, but the rest had burned all the way down. She looked at the section of table where she’d placed her candle. To her surprise, it had burned all the way down. Perhaps her wish - that she would return here to Alston - would come true. She found she was missing the boys already and would so love to see them again in the near future. They were lovely children, and deserved a bright and happy future with their father. In time, she hoped Lord Renwick would recover from his heartache and marry again, giving the boys the mother they obviously craved.
A cold shiver ran through her at the thought of him kissing his new bride on their wedding day, some day in the future, and Marie shook her head, wondering at herself.
She couldn’t possibly be jealous. That was out of order. For her to be jealous, she’d have to have formed a deep attachment and perhaps have some kind of promise of reciprocation. How could she be jealous of an imaginary person?
That kiss had clearly addled her brain. She’d read many of the Minerva Press books and had vicariously lived out many such romances. But the reality of a magnificent kiss was something else entirely.
The tell-tale noise of two lively children echoed in the hall. George and Richard ran in so they could check their candles. “It melted all the way!” Richard gasped with wonder. “That means…”
“... Don’t say it out loud!” George elbowed him.
Marie playfully put her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t accidentally hear the secret wish.
Richard clapped his hand over his mouth in an exaggerated effort. When he pulled them away he said, “Phew! That was close.”
George pointed to a candle that had burned only part way down before blowing out. “I think that one is mine. Oh well. Looks like I won’t get pudding every day after all.”
Marie giggled at that. “You might still, if you are ever so good.”
The boys turned to face her, as if they suddenly realised they were not alone, and greeted her. “Good morning, Miss Baxter! Merry Christmas,” they sing-songed together.
“Good morning George, good morning Richard. Merry Christmas to you both.” She held up her arms, and they both ran over to give her a hug and kiss her cheeks.
“Do you need to go anywhere?” George offered. “We can give you a push.”
“Thank you, I should like to visit the library, I am part way through a book.”
They took a side each and guided her towards what had become her favourite room in the castle.
George said, “When your foot is better, we can give you a tour of the castle.”
“We’ll show you our favourite rooms,” Richard finished.
“That would be most enjoyable, I shall look forward to it immensely,” she said, giving her foot a gentle tilt and feeling only a little resistance. It shouldn't be long now before she could walk a little.
Lord Renwick was already in residence. He looked up and offered his greetings of the season, and asked if they’d had breakfast.
The boys nodded and said they’d had extra honey on their porridge, but were feeling hungry again already.
Lord Renwick grinned. “Ah, the bottomless stomachs of growing boys. Oddly, no medical text I have ever read has been able to explain this curious phenomenon.”
“We could play some games until nuncheon,” Marie said, then wondered what games she could play that didn’t involve having to get up and move around. Hide and go seek was out of the question, even though she dearly would have loved to explore more of this castle. Especially as the boys had offered to be her guide.
“I don’t know any,” George said.
Marie pressed her lips together in thought. Buffy Gruffy might work, or it might result in injury. In any case, there weren’t enough of them to disguise their voices and pretend to be someone else. “How about we play Consequences ?”
“What’s that?” Richard asked.
The poor lads, did they truly not know any parlour games? “It’s lots of fun,” Marie explained. “We need a piece of paper and a pencil.”
George ran to the desk and took a sheet.
Marie made herself laugh with an idea and shared her thought, “We can play it in French if you want to make it educational?”
“No thanks,” the boys said in unison.
Renwick chuckled, his eyes shining with humour.
“Fair enough, I shall give you a reprieve. All right, here are the rules. I’m going to write the first clue, which is an adjective for a gentleman. I won’t say what it is, and then,” she wrote down ‘A towering brute’, “and then I fold it over so nobody else sees it. Now George, you get to write the next part, which is a gentleman’s name.”
“Right,” George wrote something on the paper.
“Now fold it zig zag and hand it to Richard,” she said.
Richard had the paper and waited for instruction.
“Richard, you need to write an adjective for a lady.”
The tip of his tongue poked out in concentration as he wrote. Then he folded his comment away and said, “I give it to Father?”
“Yes you do. My Lord, you need to write a lady’s name.”
He chuckled and wrote something, then made a fold. Then the paper and pencil came back to Marie for the next round of prompts. “I now write down where they met,” she said, “But I have no idea what anyone else has written.” She thought for a moment about writing ‘in a castle’ but that wasn’t imaginative enough. They were in a castle right now. Instead she wrote, ‘in a cooking pot’ just to be extra silly. Then they went around again. The next parts, if she remembered correctly, were ‘what he wore’, ‘what she wore’, and ‘what he said to her’. When it was her turn again she said, “And now I must write down what she said to him!” Thinking back on her giggle, she wrote, ‘you’re standing on my foot’ and folded the paper again. ‘George, you get the fun part, you get to write, ‘what the consequence was’, and Richard, you get to have the last laugh by saying, ‘what the world said’.
When it was all done, Richard gave the paper to Marie, but she gave it to Lord Renwick instead who read the whole thing out in a deeply serious tone.
“A towering brute, Named Oliver Flint, A fire-headed washerwoman, Flora … oh, I see, called Flora . In a cooking pot?”
They giggled.
Marie said, “That’s where they met.”
“I see, they met in a cooking pot. It must have been enormous. He wore a teacher’s robes, she wore a bonnet … made of bacon?”
That set them all off into fits of laughter and it took a while to recover.
Lord Renwick looked unable to continue, so he handed the paper over to Marie, who picked up the concertina-folded paper. “He said to her the sun is out, she said to him you’re standing on my foot. The consequence was they had to sleep in the stables and the world said he should be prime minister!”
Both boys were on the floor absolutely howling with laughter, and Renwick’s deep chortles made a merry music over it. Delighted with the success of her game, Marie giggled along with them.
“Again!” George gasped, getting to his feet. “Let’s have another round!”
They played a second round, which was even more ridiculous as everyone had the hang of the game now and were trying to top each other with silly suggestions.
This brought about another contagious case of giggles that took them even longer to recover from. Marie had to wipe tears away. The boys laughed so hard they stopped making noise altogether. For a moment, they looked as if they were in pain, they were laughing so hard.
They were listening and laughing to Marie reading out the results of the third round when Mr Charles came in to join them, smiling broadly at their laughter.
“Are we playing games? What great fun!”
“Do you know any good parlour games we might play, Mr Charles?” Marie asked.
“Well.” He looked at the boys, a grin forming on his face. “Bullet pudding was always rather a favourite when I was growing up.”
“Ha!” Renwick chuckled. “I remember that one. Ma wouldn’t let us use a bullet, so we used a coin instead. Here, I have half-a-crown in my pocket, that will do. Ring the bell, George, and we’ll see if Mrs Ellwood will bring us a plate of flour.”
He’d used George’s name twice this morning, Marie noticed. And from the beaming smile on George’s face, his son appreciated the acknowledgement.
Mrs Ellwood duly produced a mounded dish of flour, and then stood at the back of the room grinning with Mr Martin while everyone took it in turns to use a letter-opener to cut slices off the flour without the coin perched on the top of the mound falling. The mound became thinner and thinner - almost a spire - and Marie breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to carve off a slice without the coin toppling. Surely it couldn’t survive another full round!
Renwick was up next, and then George and Richard after that. Both boys were biting their lips, wide-eyed with nerves, and Marie saw Renwick look at them, then glance at her with a small smile on his face, before he took the letter-opener and made a deliberately clumsy slice.
The coin toppled, and Renwick cried “Oh no!” in a very dramatic fashion, before shrugging his shoulders and plunging face-first into the floury pile to retrieve the coin with his teeth.
He did that on purpose, so neither of the boys would have to . The loving kindness of the gesture - an earl willing to suffer such humiliation for his children’s sake - melted Marie’s heart. The twins might not have a mother, but they were deeply loved, nonetheless.
Renwick emerged laughing and covered in flour, the coin clenched between his teeth, and excused himself to go wash and change, saying he hoped his valet was in a good mood. Mrs Ellwood reclaimed the dish of flour before the boys got into it and made a mess, and Mr Charles suggested a game of spillikins, to which the boys agreed very happily.
Renwick returned a little while later clean and tidy, if with the faintest traces of white still marring his dark hair in front, and brought out a box of beautifully carved ivory dominoes.
It was one of the loveliest Christmas mornings Marie could recall, full of joy and laughter, and then Mr Martin called them in to nuncheon. Renwick had decided they would have the Christmas Day feast at nuncheon, so the boys could join them, and there were a great many exclamations of delight as Renwick pushed Marie into the dining-room, the boys following, and they saw the feast laid out on the long table.
A roasted golden goose was the centrepiece, surrounded by dishes of all sorts; a whole salmon baked in cream and parsley sauce, a pigeon pie, roasted potatoes, mushrooms cooked in butter, green beans and almonds, carrots baked in honey, and more.
“We could not eat all of this in a week!” Marie half-laughed.
Renwick said, “Oh, the staff will feast after we do, and then leftovers will be packed up for the Boxing Day tradition. We deliver it to a couple of the tenant farmers,” he explained, wheeling her to her regular place at the table.
There was a large tureen of soup at one end, which Mrs Ellwood said was the potato and leek recipe Marie had provided. Marie felt almost homesick at that gesture.
“But, there’s no pudding!” George exclaimed in sudden horror. “It’s all savouries.”
“There’s more to come, of course,” Renwick said to the boys.
“There is both plum and treacle pudding, young man,” Mrs Ellwood said with a fond ruffle of George’s hair as she passed. “As well as a fancy custard tart Miss Baxter gave us the recipe for, and baked apples stuffed with raisins!”
“Hooray!” George and Richard cheered together, taking their seats.
“And what is this?” Mr Charles asked with interest, inspecting a dish close to him.
“I believe that’s the potatoes Dauphinoise,” Marie said. “A favourite my mother used to make.”
“How marvellous!” he replied. “And that reminds me, we should be speaking French, shouldn’t we?”
The boys looked a little glum, and Marie looked an appeal at Renwick.
“I think perhaps we might make an exception for Christmas Day,” Renwick said with an affectionate smile at his sons. “Since you have been working very hard on your French. Don’t you agree, Miss Baxter?”
They had come on in leaps and bounds since she’d been having nuncheon with them, Marie agreed at once, and was rewarded by happy smiles.
“You make French great fun, Miss Baxter. I wish you were one of our teachers at Eton,” George said, passing his plate as Renwick began to carve the roast goose.
“Well I am very honoured, George, but I rather suspect Eton wouldn’t hire female teachers,” Marie said. She entertained a sudden wistful thought of perhaps offering to come and stay with them next summer and tutor them… but all she could really teach them was French and mathematics, and they needed so much more than that. She was being silly. As if the earl would ever hire a female tutor, anyway! Whoever heard of such an idea? It was just as ridiculous as the thought of a female teacher at Eton!
Both boys nodded in agreement, chuckling at the mere idea.
The meal was a joyous affair, if rather over-indulgent. Both boys appeared quite sleepy afterwards and Mr Charles took them away to have some quiet time and probably a short nap himself, Marie thought. She had a little lie down on the chaise in her room herself, but soon enough it was four o’clock, the time they’d agreed on for their concert of carols.
Richard scratched on the door, his face alight with glee. “Everyone’s ready, and George has gone to fetch Father! How surprised he’ll be!” Richard crowed, pushing Marie’s chair into the music room and helping her to get aligned at the pianoforte.
Some extra chairs had been brought in, Marie saw, and all the staff were present, seated and smiling, waiting for the concert to begin. Morag stood by the pianoforte, gazing adoringly at Mr Charles, who was studiously ignoring her as usual.
“Whatever is all this?” Renwick exclaimed from the doorway.
Everyone in the room except for the twins was well aware that Renwick knew all about the concert, but none of them could have guessed as he played his part to perfection, showing surprise and delight as George urged him to a reserved seat beside Mrs Ellwood in the front row.
The concert could be described as nothing less than a roaring success. The boys sang their hearts out, Morag’s voice soared like a bird, and Marie thought her face might crack apart from smiling. To everyone’s astonishment, there was one real surprise - at the conclusion of the concert, Mr Martin produced a violin and accompanied Marie for the last carol, a rousing rendition of Hark! The herald angels sing.
As the boys made bows at Mr Charles’ urging when the concert ended, Renwick stood up and clapped so hard Marie thought he might make his hands sore. Then he held out his arms and the two boys ran straight to him for a loving embrace.
Marie had to knuckle away a tear of happiness.
“This has been the best Christmas ever!” George cried happily.
“It really has,” Renwick agreed. “And I do believe we have Miss Baxter to thank for that.”
“Yes!” Both boys nodded vigorously, and then Richard looked up at his father and said; “Pa, you should marry Miss Baxter. She’s terrific!”
Hot flames erupted on Marie’s cheeks. “Richard!” she gasped, horrified. “Goodness, you must not say such things! That is highly inappropriate!” She truly did not know where to put herself. In front of all the staff, no less, how utterly dreadful!
Renwick, thank the heavens, looked more amused than offended, ruffling his son’s hair.
“Richard, you’re embarrassing Miss Baxter. Thank you both so much for my surprise, it is quite the best Christmas gift I have ever received. I am blessed to have such good lads. There’s an extra supper for you upstairs, if you have any room”
Both of them ran back to the pianoforte to hug Marie too, Richard whispering a penitent “Sorry!” in her ear.
“You are already forgiven,” Marie said fondly, and he rushed off after his brother grinning, shouting to George not to eat all the buns.
“How they can think of eating a thing after that midday feast I can’t imagine,” Renwick said as the room emptied out, sitting back down in his chair and patting his stomach. “Perhaps a small dish of soup before bed, but certainly no more.”
“Not even the soup for me. Perhaps a cup of tea,” Marie agreed.
“Thank you for this.” He nodded towards the pianoforte. “You have devoted a lot of hours to the boys’ amusement and education.”
“It was more than worth it to see the joy on their faces,” Marie said simply.
“Yes.” He seemed to steel himself then, before lifting his head and looking for the first time at the wall on which the portrait of the last Countess hung. “There has been little of that in the last few years, I fear.”
“How long ago did the Countess pass?” she asked tentatively.
“Four years ago, almost exactly. A few days before Christmas. News didn’t reach me in London until the New Year. The boys had spent Christmas at Eton, as if nothing had changed. Christmas has understandably been a difficult time for them ever since, which is why I didn’t want them spending it at Eton ever again.” He tore his gaze from the portrait and looked at Marie again. “You have made Christmas a time of joy again in this house, and I can never thank you enough, Miss Baxter.”
Embarrassed, she looked down at her hands, still resting on the keys, and almost absently began to play again, a delicate nocturne. “It has been my pleasure, Lord Renwick,” she said finally. “Although it is the first Christmas I have ever spent away from my family, sharing it with yours has made happy memories I will carry for a lifetime.”
He was silent, listening to her play, and she kept going, playing several pieces from memory until her hands grew weary and finally she finished a piece and closed the pianoforte lid.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “It has been a long time since I enjoyed music for its own sake, but it has been a true pleasure listening to you play.” He hesitated for a moment, then said “I am in your debt, Miss Baxter, for everything you have done for my sons. If there is ever anything that is in my power to do for you, you need only name it.”
She shook her head with a smile, again saying it had been her pleasure, and he nodded as though that was what he had expected her to say, before getting up, bowing, and taking his leave of her.
Left alone in the music-room, Marie looked out into the darkness outside, a smile on her face.
It truly had been a wonderful Christmas.