A Matchmaker's Christmas Read online

  “Ah, the benefits of youth and a clear conscience.”

  It was fortunate the old lady’s eyes were cast down as she sealed a letter, dripping the wax onto the edge of the paper and waiting, then pushing the fleur-de-lis seal into the puddle of hardening blue, or she would have seen Beatrice’s guilty start.

  “I have made a decision,” Lady Bournaud said in her clarion voice.

  Taking a deep breath and resuming her task, which was supplying her ladyship’s table with fresh handkerchiefs, Beatrice steadied her nerves and said, in what she hoped was her normal voice, “Why do I have the feeling that this decision is going to mean more work for me?” After ten years, she was allowed more latitude in her behavior to the old woman but always kept a close eye on the comtesse’s uncertain temper. She appeared to be in a cheerful mood this morning, and indeed the autumn sun flooded the emerald chamber with glorious light.

  “It could be that you are right,” Lady Bournaud said, “but I think you will enjoy this, too. This great dungeon has been silent and cold for too long. When my husband was alive . . .” Her voice trailed off, and there was a note of pain. But she cleared her throat and continued. “When François was alive, this house echoed with music and laughter. He loved English tradition, and at no time of year was that more evident than Christmas. So this year we are going to have an old-fashioned English Christmas here, with the Yule log, and mistletoe, Christmas pudding, everything. And laughter and talk and music. We are going to invite company.”

  Every one of the past ten Christmases had been spent quietly, with Squire Fellows and his wife attending for dinner, and the exchange of small tokens of appreciation. Beatrice approached the bed and gazed down at her employer. “Does this mean you are inviting the St. Eustace children for Christmas? All seven of them? Oh, yes, and another on the way, if I remember right?”

  Lady Bournaud shuddered. The St. Eustaces, her nearest relations and inheritor, by entail, of the estate and all of its furnishings, were not well-beloved by her, being too numerous and too noisy for her aging sensibility. “No, most certainly not. They are quite happily at home in Cornwall. Traveling with that many children would be like gathering a band of Gypsies and poor Rosetta could never do it, especially not in her current condition.”

  It made a convenient excuse, Beatrice thought, that the heir’s wife was with child yet again. She looked down at the oak lap desk and tidied the mess of splotched ink and the sand that had been used to dry it.

  “No, this is the guest list,” the older woman said, handing her a sheet of paper covered in spidery writing.

  Beatrice took the list and perused it, noting before she did the letters already addressed, piled on the lap desk. Lady Bournaud kept up a large and varied correspondence, and it was the one thing with which she required no help. She wrote and sealed all of her letters herself, and Tidwell took care of everything else, delivering them to the village with his own hand.

  She scanned the list and her heart thumped and her stomach clenched. Her mouth was dry, as if it was wadded with cotton. But it was, perhaps, just a list of suggestions. It did not mean that Lady Bournaud had invited each and every one of them. “I . . . I’ve seen some of the people’s names before, but I don’t think I know any one of them.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” the comtesse said, taking the list back and squinting at it. “And truthfully, I do not think all of them will come.” She pointed her finger to three names and said, “These will not come, almost certainly. But I am hopeful of a few.” Her smile was sly. “In fact, Beatrice, I must say I have made a special plea to those I truly wish to attend more than the others.

  “Mark Rowland, for instance. He is the great-nephew of my oldest friend in the world, Mrs. Cordelia Selwyn. Delia is confined to her home in Bath right now—she suffers badly with gout—and for a time we did not correspond. Some idiotic tiff which we have now mended; I do not even remember the genesis nor the resolution of it. Mark will come because I may have—inadvertently, you understand—led him to believe in my letter to him that I wish more than anything to make amends, but need his personal attendance to help me frame my apology. Delia will know by advance warning and will back my story. Mark is a dear boy—taken holy orders, you know—and will do anything to make peace for his beloved aunt.”

  Diverted for a moment from her growing uneasiness, Beatrice said, “Lady Bournaud, that is diabolical! To lure the poor fellow all the way to Yorkshire in winter on a false mission is too bad of you. Why are you doing this?”

  The woman pointed one thick fingernail at another name on the list. “This is my reason, my dear.”

  “Miss Verity Allen,” Beatrice read out, leaning over the edge of the bed. She looked into the old woman’s eyes. “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Miss Verity Allen is the daughter of Fanny, my second cousin. They moved away to Upper Canada and make their home there now. But I received a letter in the summer that Fanny had sent her eldest daughter home to England. Verity refuses to marry appropriately.” There was disapproval in the quavering voice. “Poor Fanny is at the end of her patience, and her brother, with whom Verity is staying while here, is resolute in sending her back to Canada. She is a bad influence, he fears, on his own daughters. Incorrigible, I am told! The girl is four-and-twenty, time and past that she was wed. And if Mark is to be a vicar, it is high time he wed.”

  Beatrice, appalled, said, “You cannot mean you intend to match these poor unsuspecting young people? A reverend and a hoyden?”

  “Young Rowland is strong-minded. Just the influence to calm a disobedient girl.”

  If she wasn’t so agitated over something else, Beatrice would have been amused. “My lady, it seems to me that you told me a story once of a young girl who refused resolutely to marry the man her father had matched her with. And she stayed unmarried until she found the mate of her heart.”

  The comtesse shifted awkwardly under her bedclothes and signaled for the desk to be removed. As Beatrice lifted it from her lap, she said, “That was different. That man was a bully and a coward, and I was right to refuse him. He died in a drunken duel the next year over some wager or other.”

  “And perhaps Miss Allen had similar justification.”

  “No, she has just refused to marry at all! It isn’t natural.”

  Beatrice was speechless.

  “There is another name on the list, another guest I am sure will come.” The woman’s tone was arch.

  Beatrice placed the desk carefully on the table by the window. When she returned to her employer’s bedside, Lady Bournaud held the list again and pointed out one name on it.

  Sir David Chappell.

  Beatrice felt a wave of sickness flood over her.

  “He is my godson.” Lady Bournaud traced the spidery script with her fingernail. “Such a dear boy. Not really a boy, I suppose. Forty-seven, I think? Could he really be forty-seven? I suppose. If I remember correctly, the last time he paid me a visit you came down with that terrible summer grippe and did not come out of your room the whole time he was here, so you have not met him yet.”

  Beatrice turned her face away and busied herself at the old woman’s bedside table, filling her water glass and rearranging the vase of crimson bittersweet and rose hips. Her ladyship liked nature at her bedside, now that she was unable to get about herself to enjoy it. “Surely . . . surely such an important man will not wish to absent himself from London . . . he will have other invitations. He will want to stay south.”

  “He will come,” Lady Bournaud said.

  “Why are you so insistent?” Beatrice said, trying to tamp down the desperation in her voice. But it was like banking a fire; covering it only made it burn brighter and hotter. “Why do you want him to visit?”

  “I have my own reasons,” she replied sharply. “I may need to accede to invasions of my privacy in a bodily sense, but my mind is my own, and my reasons are my own.”

  If she was not so desperate and so fearful, Beatrice woul
d have heeded the warning in the sharpening tone of her ladyship’s voice. “But Yorkshire, in winter—”

  “Every person that I wish to come, will come,” Lady Bournaud said, in her tone an abrupt dismissal of the subject. “Now call Partridge. I wish to dress.”

  Beatrice retreated to the hallway on her mission to call her employer’s maid. But outside the door she stopped and sagged against the wall, the tears she had been stifling flowing now, burning a trail down her cheeks. “Oh, Lord,” she prayed, scrubbing at her eyes. “Please do not let him come. Please. Have I not done my penance? Have I not paid the price? I can’t bear to see him after all this time. Please, just let me have peace.”

  Chapter Two

  Sir David Chappell gazed out at the hard rain that drummed against the window of his library and fingered the letter in his hands. A steady stream of raindrops down the glass obscured the view of horses and carriages on the street and the black umbrellas that bobbed along the walk outside.

  November. It was the dreariest month, or so he had been wont to think as a youth, the creeping darkness taking its toll on the spirits of the oversensitive child he had been. December had stolen that honor of most dread month after the awful events of twenty years before that forever changed for him the joyous Christmas season. The sorrow had abated somewhat when he was raising Alexander, the school holiday over the Christmas season being their opportunity to become the good and fast friends they were, more so than was usual, perhaps, for most fathers and sons. Together they had created new meaning in the season and he was grateful for his son, or the tragedy of that time in his life would have forever blighted Christmas.

  But Alex was stationed in Paris with Lord Pelagar, one of Wellington’s retinue, a diplomat in the service of the War Office; he would not be home for some months, perhaps, or even some years, the first time father and son would not spend at least Christmas day together. The tiny babe who had been left so tragically motherless on that cold Boxing Day so many, many years before was now a fine young man, one whom his father was proud to call “son.”

  But a man. And no longer in need of his father at the coming season. He would have the gaiety of Paris, young ladies to flirt and dance with, companions of his own age.

  Chappell looked down once more at the letter in his hands. It was a pathetically worded missive, and that was enough to make him frown over it. I am going to be all alone at Christmas, Lady Bournaud had written. The iron-willed lady of his memory would never have written a letter containing that plaintive phrase. Didn’t she have a companion? Perhaps the old lady was sickening for something, or perhaps . . . he frowned at the paper and creased the corner absently. She was getting older. For all he knew it could be her last Christmas on earth.

  His mind drifted back, past the last twenty years when Christmas had meant him and Alex spending it together in London, going to pantomimes and shops, or in visiting friends’ country houses. Back further, to the days of his own youth in Yorkshire.

  Comte François Bournaud and his comtesse, the English Lady Bournaud, were his father’s employers. Mr. Arthur Chappell was merely their estate manager. But childless, the aristocratic couple had lavished attention on the rather serious young boy David Chappell had been, and at no time more so than Christmas.

  Christmas at Chateau Bournaud, as the comte had called his home in the wild North Riding of Yorkshire, had become, for the motherless boy, a time of joy: sledding, skating, riddles and forfeits and silver loo. Chappell would never forget the elegant silver-haired Comte Bournaud snatching burning raisins out of the flame as they played at the wildly popular game of snapdragon. Chappell smiled, the misted glass in front of him like a magic lantern screen where the pictures of his youth flashed and danced.

  As Chappell grew from boyhood to manhood, Lady Bournaud, for all her crusty demeanor, had been his savior, ensuring that he attended a good school, introducing him to the appropriate people, making sure he gained a valuable position with the secretary of state. These boons were not to be taken lightly by the son of an estate manager, with no money and no connections to recommend him. He had made the most of her help, working hard and diligently furthering every social connection that could aid his rise in the government.

  But then the dark days came; Comte Bournaud died, and then Chappell’s father fell sick with a wasting illness. Lady Bournaud was there even in her own deep mourning, comforting, sturdy, paying endless amounts of money for physicians who, though they could do little for the aging Mr. Chappell, at least made him comfortable. It had been a horrible, sorrowful time for Chappell, with Melanie’s death, and his infant son ill at first. At least with Lady Bournaud at his father’s side, David had known the man was comfortable and well cared for. David had broken away from his demanding London position and was in Yorkshire at his father’s side at the end, comforting for both of them.

  Eventually the darkness had receded as Alex grew, and some modicum of joy had reentered Chappell’s life. The past few years had been entirely taken up with travel and work, friends, and then the honor and surprise of his knighthood in the wake of the end of the war. He had not been back to Yorkshire for four years, if memory served him right.

  And now Lady Bournaud sent him a letter, calling on his indulgence, asking for the favor of his company at Christmas, when no work would be done in London anyway. He was ashamed even to have hesitated for a moment. He owed her more than mere “indulgence” and found that he looked forward to seeing the grand lady again.

  “Drucker,” he called over his shoulder.

  His valet entered and waited.

  “We will be going to Yorkshire for the Christmas season. Have my secretary attend me, for I have much to do if I am to take off the entire month of December. And I will want him to take down my letter of acceptance in response to this invitation.”

  • • •

  “I . . . oh, Lady Bournaud, I do not feel well at all.”

  It was late November. Lady Bournaud gazed at her companion shrewdly, noting the burning cheeks and pale forehead. So Beatrice was ill. And yet, she had been well just that morning. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I have a sore throat and a heaviness in my chest,” Beatrice said. “I very much fear putrefaction, my lady. Perhaps I should retreat to my bed. I would not want to infect you.”

  “Nonsense. I have outlived disease. I begin to fear I shall live forever,” Lady Bournaud said. The crimson saloon was warm, overheated even, from the blazing fire necessary to keep old bones limber. And Beatrice was warmly wrapped in a woolen gown with a heavy shawl over it. That could account for the burning cheeks. “Come, kneel by me, child.”

  Obediently, Beatrice knelt on the carpet at Lady Bournaud’s feet and gazed up at her. The comtesse felt her cheeks and forehead, then gazed steadily into her eyes. “Open your mouth.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, open your mouth. Are your wits wandering?”

  Beatrice opened her mouth and the older lady stared down her throat. She harrumphed once and said, “Looks fine to me, but I will have Roth come see you,” she said of her elderly physician, whose practice was twenty miles south in the great city of Richmond. Just then a wind whipped up and a shower of ashes billowed from the fireplace. A sleety rain began, tapping impatient fingers at the saloon window.

  Beatrice looked down at the carpet for a moment, and then said slowly, “No, my lady, I would not have you summon Mr. Roth all the way here for me, and in this awful weather.”

  “But I will not have you sicken,” the comtesse said, her eyes shrewdly assessing her companion. She watched the flickering alarm cross Beatrice’s face, and the quick calculation in the younger woman’s eyes. Beatrice was not really ill, of that she was certain. But what had led to this charade was still a mystery.

  But Lady Bournaud won, as always.

  “I am sure I will be much improved by morning, my lady.” Her voice was meek, but rebellion blazed in Beatrice’s deep blue eyes.

  “I
am sure you will be,” the older woman said, her face crinkling into a smile. “I am somehow certain that you will be. Now run off to bed and get a good night’s sleep. I have much for you to do if the first of our guests are not to find us at sixes and sevens.”

  And that was the last Lady Bournaud heard of any illness on Beatrice’s part, though the woman’s lovely sapphire eyes did not lose the haunted expression, nor did her nervous tension break. Something was afoot, but for once in her life Lady Bournaud was stymied. She could conjecture, but Beatrice’s heart was a closed book to her. Lady Bournaud did not like closed books.

  Chapter Three

  December had arrived with every promise of chill winds and isolating snowstorms. It was not that the snow had really set in yet, though the high moors were white-topped, but the hard wind wailed and battered the square manse. The locals would say about it that it “blew a bit thin,” but for Beatrice, who had grown up in the south, it was a bitter season indeed. She had to remind herself often of her philosophy, that no weather was bad weather when you had a home and a fire to warm you, a soft bed at night and good food. There had been a time when she doubted she would ever have any one of those things again.

  She glanced around her room. It was not the largest nor the most ornate on the family floor—in fact, it was a former dressing room converted into a bedroom so she could be close to Lady Bournaud—but she had come to love it over the last ten years. She had a simple modern bed, a four-poster with carved finials in the shape of pineapples. A washstand, cheval mirror, chest of drawers, and a table with two chairs by the window made up the entirety of her furniture, but she had made it homey with the addition of books and pictures, and a colorful Turkey throw rug rescued from the attic. It was home.

  Much better than what she would have had without Lady Bournaud.