to any reference to his health.
“Are you certain I can’t convince you to postpone your return?” Ian continued, leading the way toward the door. “I should hate to think of you benighted on the road.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Sinclair, although I thank you for your kind offer of hospitality.”
“Then I shall wish you Godspeed, Mr. Smythe. And a safe journey home.”
When they reached the hall, Ian watched as his butler helped his visitor into his greatcoat. Mr. Smythe then placed his tall beaver over sparse, iron-gray hair. He ducked his shoulder almost defensively when the wide front doors were opened, letting in the sharp, wet chill of the December wind.
“Not a fit day for man nor beast,” Williams said, closing the door very quickly behind his master’s departing guest.
“I tried to persuade him to stay the night, but he was eager to be off.”
“Perhaps he has holiday entertainments awaiting him in London,” the butler said. “Anxious to get back to his family, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Ian echoed, thinking that this would be the first Christmas he had spent at home without any member of his own family with whom to celebrate.
The youngest Sinclair brother was still with Wellington, fighting the French on the Iberian Peninsula. And having spent three years in those same circumstances, Ian knew exactly how Sebastian would keep Christmas.
There would be wine, if the Beau could possibly manage to procure it. And perhaps a couple of scrawny chickens, stewed until they were almost edible. After dinner, the officers would gather around the fireplace of whatever building Wellington had commandeered as his headquarters to sing carols. They would probably be forced to wear their woolen uniform capes against the damp that relentlessly seeped in through the stones and chilled to the bone.
Ian realized that in remembering those deprivations he was smiling. The warmth of the camaraderie those men shared would help them endure. And at least Sebastian wouldn’t be spending Christmas alone.
Nor would Val, of course. Ian’s smile widened, although he refused to allow himself to imagine exactly how his older brother would be engaged during this holiday season. Ensconced in the Sinclair hunting lodge, Dare and his countess seemed determined to stretch their honeymoon to the full year such milestones had once encompassed.
And Ian would be the last person to begrudge his brother that newfound happiness. Dare had more than earned it in his behind-the-scenes efforts to defeat that same enemy Ian and Sebastian had fought by more conventional means.
Still, he thought, limping back to the welcome blaze of the library fire, it would be a lonely Christmas here. And unbidden came the nearly forgotten image of those small, pale faces pressed longingly against the windows of Harrow so long ago. A damnably lonely Christmas.
Chapter One
“I beg your pardon,” Anne Darlington said, finally looking up from where she was kneeling on the stone floor, her hands full of the grimy edge of Sally Eddington’s woolen petticoat.
She was stitching up the hem of the offending garment so that it wouldn’t drag on the ground as the child walked. Her concentration on the task, which she was attempting to perform while six-year-old Sally was still wearing the petticoat, had prevented her from hearing the first part of the message the headmistress had sent.
“It’s your guardian,” Margaret Rhodes said importantly. “Come to take you home for Christmas.”
“How nice for you, Sally,” Anne said. She took one very large and hurried stitch and then looped the needle through and tied a quick knot. She broke the thread with her teeth before she added, “I didn’t know you were leaving today.”
In all honesty she hadn’t even known Sally had a guardian. Anne distinctly remembered that the little girl had spent the previous holiday at school. There were only a handful of students who did that, and since Anne herself had always been one of them, she certainly knew who the others were. And most of their stories as well.
The loss of a mother, usually in childbirth with the next, too quickly conceived baby. A father’s remarriage, perhaps. Or his disinterest.
Anne supposed she herself might fall into that latter category, but her father’s disinterest was something she had stopped thinking about a long time ago. She was actually grateful for the upbringing he had provided her, even if it had never included his presence. And just this week Mrs. Kemp had offered her a teaching position here for the next school year.
Then she would never have to leave, Anne thought contentedly, automatically straightening Sally’s skirt and smoothing with her hands the carrot-colored frizz that surrounded the little girl’s freckled face.
“But I’m not,” Sally said, her eyes round at the thought.
“Not her, you big silly,” Margaret said. “It’s you he’s come for.”
Anne turned her head, looking full at Margaret for the first time. “For me?” she repeated in astonishment.
“And Mrs. Kemp says you mustn’t keep him waiting.”
Anne opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. After all, whatever was going on, it offered to be different from her normal afternoon routine of wiping noses and hearing lessons.
Either the girls were having a joke or there had been some mistake in who had been called for. In either case, going along would prove more entertaining than what she was presently doing. If it were a prank, then the others would enjoy a laugh at her expense, nothing she was averse to. And if it weren’t, the mistake would probably have been straightened out by the time she reached the headmistress’s office. Until then…
“Well, of course, I won’t keep him waiting,” Anne said cheerfully. “Come from London, I suppose.”
“I don’t know about that,” Margaret confided, “but he arrived in a bang-up rig with four of the primest bits of horseflesh I’ve ever seen.”
“If Mrs. Kemp hears you talking like that, my girl,” Anne warned, “you’ll be the banged-up rig.”
She lightened the rebuke with a smile and then ran down the wide hallway with the younger girl at her heels. Not setting a good example, Mrs. Kemp would have said, especially for someone about to become a teacher.
Since the headmistress wasn’t by to say it, however, Anne didn’t see any reason not to run off the excess energy the recent weather’s confinement had produced. She would be so glad when spring arrived and the woods and fields were again available for roaming.
She slowed to a sedate walk as she neared the open door of the school’s office. Working by feel, she tucked a few tendrils of hair back into the neat coil from which they had managed to escape and straightened the shoulders of her linsey-woolsey dress, brushing her hands over the bodice. Then she cast a quick glance behind her to evaluate Margaret’s appearance, knowing that in Mrs. Kemp’s opinion it, too, could usually be improved upon.
She was right. The younger girl’s flannel pinafore was unbuttoned. Anne turned and, still walking backwards, attempted a couple of quick adjustments to the ten-year-old’s
