The Wallflower's Mistletoe Wedding. Amanda McCabe

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You are doing what you have to—your duty to King and Country as you are called to do. No one has been more dutiful than you, ever since we were children.’

      He thought again of what their home had once been, what it was now. ‘I don’t know about that.’

      ‘Well, I do. Whatever I face here with Father is as nothing compared to whatever you have faced all these years. Besides, I’m seldom here at Hilltop at all these days.’ He grinned and that strange, solemn, thoughtful Charles vanished. The rakish, fun-loving young man everyone knew was back. ‘London is much more diverting. Why would a man ever live anywhere else?’

      ‘Diverting—and expensive,’ Harry muttered, but he couldn’t help laughing at Charles’s devil-may-care smile. It was always thus with his younger brother, their mother’s golden boy. While Charles was the fun one, Harry had indeed always been the responsible one. The quiet one.

      Charles shrugged. ‘What else can one do? I would be wretched in the army, worse than useless. The church would never have me.’

      ‘What of your painting?’ he asked, remembering the rare talent Charles once possessed with a brush, the way he could capture the mood of a landscape in a few deft strokes of paint.

      Charles laughed. ‘A boy’s diversion. Not fit for a grown man, y’know.’

      ‘According to who? Our father?’ Harry asked quietly.

      Rather than answer, Charles pushed open the carriage door as soon as they came to a full halt and jumped down. Harry followed him up the shallow stone steps into the echoing hall of Hilltop Grange. In the shadows, the portraits of their ancestors, including their golden-haired mother, watched them in silence. In the rooms beyond, the furniture was shrouded in canvas covers, like ghosts. Their mother’s cherished pianoforte was silent.

      For just an instant, Harry had such a different vision of the house, light gleaming on polished wood. The warmth of the fire, the scent of flowers from the gardens, the rush of small feet down the stairs, music. But the lady who turned from the keyboard to welcome him with a smile—her eyes were the sweet, soft hazel of Rose Parker.

      ‘Father, wake up!’ Charles shouted, banging on the library door with his fist. The dream was shattered, like the dust of Hilltop itself.

       Chapter One

      Winter, three years later

      ‘Jouissons dans nos asiles, jouissons de biens tranquilles! Ah, peut-on être heureux, quand on forme d’autres vouex?’

      ‘That’s quite enough!’ Aunt Sylvia shouted from her armchair near the fire, where she was swathed in shawls and a fur blanket. Her three lapdogs shifted and barked. ‘What a wretched song by that horrid Rameau. Why would you play such a thing?’

      Rose sighed and rested her wrists on the edge of the keyboard as the last notes died away in the overheated drawing room of Aunt Sylvia’s vast house. She would have laughed if she wasn’t quite so tired. She removed her spectacles and rubbed at her eyes. In her years of working as Aunt Sylvia’s companion, she had come to learn no moment was predictable. A favourite food one day, which had to be ordered from London and fetched from the village shop, a two-mile walk, by Rose every day, would not be wanted once it arrived. An expensive pelisse would be dismissed as too itchy, then needed again. The wheeled Bath chair would have to be fetched for a walk in the garden, only to be greeted with shouts of ‘What do you think I am, an old invalid? I shall walk! Give me your arm immediately, Rose. You cannot be rid of me so easily, you know, you silly girl.’

      Rose did not want to be rid of Aunt Sylvia. She paid a wage that kept Rose’s mother in her cottage, now that Lily and Mr Hewlitt had two children to take care of in their small vicarage and Mama’s small income seemed even smaller than ever. Her mother deserved to stay in her own home and Rose had to work to make it so. But Rose did wish Aunt Sylvia would make up her mind for once.

      ‘I thought you always enjoyed the old French songs, Aunt,’ she said. ‘Because they reminded you of your time at Versailles.’

      In her youth, Aunt Sylvia had once waited upon Queen Marie Antoinette, before she married the wealthy Mr Pemberton and returned to England. She spoke of it all the time and definitely never let anyone forget it, with her grey hair piled high and panniers strangely paired with newer, higher waists and puffed sleeves.

      ‘Why would I want to hear songs that remind me of such a terrible loss?’ Aunt Sylvia said, thumping her walking stick on the floor. One of the dogs barked. ‘You young people, you know nothing of such things. Nothing of how fortunate you all are.’

      Rose suddenly remembered Captain St George and their dance at the midsummer party so long ago, the haunted look in his dark eyes as he mentioned battle and seemed to remember Waterloo. She had thought of him too often in the years since, especially in the long, quiet nights as she lay awake waiting for Aunt Sylvia to call her. Had he married the beautiful Miss Layton, had he come back from battle and found peace at last? She couldn’t help but hope so.

      She glanced out the window, out the slim rectangle of thick glass revealed between the heavy brocade curtains Aunt Sylvia kept closed all the time. It had started snowing, a light, lacy, delicate pattern of white against the night sky. It reminded her that it was nearly December, nearly the Christmas season, and she wondered what her mother, what Lily and her little family, were doing now.

      Lily and her babies were surely decorating their small sitting room with greenery, baking plum cakes to carry to Mr Hewlitt’s parishioners. Perhaps her mother was embroidering new little gowns to wrap up for her grandchildren’s gifts.

      She felt the familiar pang of sadness of missing them and she had to remind herself why she had to work in the first place.

      ‘Perhaps I could play you a Christmas carol or two, Aunt Sylvia?’ she said. ‘It is nearly that season.’

      ‘Christmas!’ Aunt Sylvia cried. ‘Don’t even talk to me about the wretched thing. Play some Mozart. You know how I always like that.’

      Except for when she called Mozart an overrated performing monkey of a boy. Rose smothered a laugh, and launched into the ‘Allegro’ from Marriage of Figaro. Just as she always could, she soon lost herself in the music, and the harsh world of Aunt Sylvia’s house, her loneliness for her family, vanished. She floated in her own realm, above everything else.

      One day, she thought with a happy smile, perhaps she would have her own home with her own pianoforte. Could play whatever she chose, while her family listened...

      The piece ended and Rose felt as if she was pushed out of that magical, floating world into the stuffy drawing room. Suddenly all she could hear were the snores of her aunt, mixed with the softer snuffles of the dogs and the crackle of the flames as a log collapsed into ashes in the grate. She remembered how her childhood home had once collapsed, how such things were always dreams.

      She peeked over her shoulder to find Aunt Sylvia had indeed fallen asleep, her head lolling back on her cushioned chair. Hardly daring to breathe, for fear she would awaken everyone and prolong the evening, Rose carefully lowered the lid of the pianoforte over the keys and slid off the stool. She cautiously tiptoed over to make sure Aunt Sylvia’s shawls were still warmly tucked around her, and then crept out of the drawing room. She found Miss Powell, her aunt’s long-suffering maid, waiting outside.

      Rose gave her a

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