Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Breakfast had been more ham, cheese, and bread. Joshua was grateful to have had shelter for the night. Grateful for his health. Grateful to have made a safe passage across the Atlantic. Grateful, grateful, grateful, and grateful for the breakfast fare.
He was also tired of it. He was tired of puzzling out how to raise more cash when his trunks had apparently disappeared to the North Pole. He was tired of being cold and tired of being tired, and he had let himself in for two more weeks of this holiday joy.
What was I thinking?
He’d been thinking of how not to cast Hope and Holly on the charity of their negligent family. How to avoid being a holiday guest at the ducal residence. How to put off admitting that, in fact, he might have signed away Grandpapa’s residence in a fog of grief and exhaustion.
And as to that, a wing chair and a hassock provided no better rest than did a lumpy, too-short sofa.
“Heifer is my friend,” Holly said, dangling a string before the cat’s nose. “I must give him a Christmas token because he gives me the gift of his friendship all year.”
The cat took a halfhearted swipe at the string, then strode off across the conservatory’s brick flooring to recline beneath a venerable camellia.
“You spoil him rotten, Hollister Ann, and as soon as you’re asleep, he helps himself to the warmth you radiate.”
“I know. I help myself to his warmth too. And he is wonderfully soft. What shall I get him for his token?”
The cat was wonderfully indolent. Joshua had forgotten how persistent children could be. How annoyingly persistent, bless the little dears.
“Give him a flower. The camellias are about at their peak.” Thank goodness Grandpapa had had them planted on the warmer side of the conservatory. The biddies were also penned on that side, clucking softly as they scratched in the dirt.
“Mama likes flowers. Will you give her a token for Christmas?”
My ancestral home with all the trimmings.
Joshua shoved the fading remains of a potted lemon aside.
He was looking for another shovel, his own having been contributed to Gabriel’s future enterprises.
The conservatory had had its own supply of coal once upon a time, and where there was coal, one frequently found shovels.
“Will you give Mama a special little gift,” Holly went on, “all wrapped up with paper and colored string?”
“I have known your mother but a handful of days, child. A Christmas token would be presumptuous.” A proper token would necessitate cash, shopping, more shopping, a bit of ribbon, a note on pretty paper.
The gesture was meant to sound simple—a small gift to symbolize warm feelings—but in actuality, the process done right could be complicated.
As any husband or dedicated suitor knew. Joshua had felt slightly resentful of the whole business, until he’d endured a Yuletide season with nobody to give a token to.
“I wish we could give Mama gingerbread. She loves warm gingerbread with melted butter.”
Joshua was abruptly famished for warm gingerbread with melted butter. “Help me look for the shovel, Holly. The shovel is how we might be able to purchase gingerbread and butter.”
“Mrs. Colquitt pays Mama in butter. Mama teaches their servants to read because the housekeeper hasn’t the patience, but the Colquitts go to the country for Christmas. They get their butter from the country, and so they have lots and lots of it.”
Another potted lemon was summarily pushed closer to the window. “How jolly for them.”
“Will you give me a holiday token?” Holly asked, joining her cat by the camellias.
No, I will not… Joshua abruptly stopped heaving trees about. Decisions have consequences, many of them unintended.
The voice in his head belonged to Quinn Wentworth. His Grace of Walden, rather. Quinn could think a question into tiny, unrecognizable pieces, while Joshua had excelled at seeing the good that might come of each potential choice.
Deciding to offer Hope a truce had held up to scrutiny from many angles, but Holly, with her persistent questions, presented Joshua with a consequence he’d not considered.
Children could grow quickly attached, to pets, to people, to places, even to toys or trees.
Their capacity for fondness was indiscriminate and passionate and could have sad, sad repercussions.
“Holly, I am but a temporary lodger here, for all we know. You might not see much of me past the end of the year.” Putting the reality into words earned another tree—a sizable orange boasting a dozen unripened fruits—a swift trip across the conservatory.
“Are you going back to America?”
“No.” Joshua had tried making life in America work, but without Maureen and Eric… Not a chance.
“It would not matter if you did.” Holly stroked her cat’s head, and the conservatory filled with stentorian purring. “You and I are friends. We’d write letters, and you could send me a token, though it would take ever so long to arrive. I could send one to you too.”
I am not your friend. And yet, Joshua would not soon forget Holly or her mother, or the sudden surge of longing that had gone through him when Hope had surprised him with a hug at bedtime.
Not lust. Longing.
“Holly, you give your friendship too easily. I might well steal away in the night, and you’d never see me again.”
She picked up the cat and hugged him, and damned if the beast did not reciprocate by rubbing his head beneath the child’s chin. Shameless fraud.
“You are my friend. You would not disappear like that, unless you had to go spy on Napoleon or something, but old Wellie beat Napoleon to smithereens at Waterloo.”
Old Wellie’s army had taken a fearful drubbing on the same occasion. “Where would you hide a shovel if you were trying to keep it safe during a long absence?”
“Shovels are big. A shovel would be hard to hide. You could bury it. The conservatory has bare ground near the glass well. The hens might be guarding the buried shovel treasure!”
Nobody would bury a shovel, for pity’s sake.
“Where else?” The conservatory was nowhere near as crowded as it would have been had Joshua been in residence.
The camellias were putting on a worthy show, but the citrus trees were anemic, the palms were straggly, and the spices mostly dormant.
The ferns by the window were in shabby condition and making a mess for six feet in every direction.
The scent was off, too, thanks to the hens. Earth and greenery, but with the pungent tang of resident fowl added to the mix.
A conservatory stuffed cheek by jowl with thriving plants would have stayed warmer. One free of hens would have been quieter and less aromatic.
“That bare ground once sported roses,” Joshua said. Grandmama’s pride and joy. “Let’s look in the cupboards, shall we?” A workbench along one wall had been set up like a kitchen counter, with cupboards below and a sink with a rusty pump on the end nearest the hearth.
“Heifer says the mice like the cupboards because they are warm.”
“Heifer ought to say the mice would never hide in the cupboards, because the fiercest predator in the jungle will come along and eat them.”
One cupboard held two dozen small, entirely useless, matching vases. Another housed folded burlap sacks. Most were empty save for mouse droppings. All were musty and dusty.
Joshua closed the last cupboard with a bit of force, which earned him a scowl from the cat in Holly’s arms.
Why not hike to the bank, announce himself returned from the ends of the earth, and impose upon Quinn and Jane’s hospitality? Leave Hope and Holly in peace for the next two weeks, then arrange for them to rejoin Hope’s family. Mother and child would be safe, and Joshua would be warm, well fed, and…
Miserable. Miserable in a way that eclipsed bad sleep and boring menus by miles.
Jane and Quinn would spend their holidays lurking beneath mistletoe, Ned would whistle jaunty carols, and the girls…
Quinn’s sisters were not girls anymore. Had not been for some time.
Even Cousin Duncan, the family expert in quiet good sense, had gone for a happily married husband, and to a duchess, no less.
“You should look in the coal closet,” Holly said, rubbing her cheek against the cat’s crown. “Gabriel says it’s filthy. He’s my friend too. He says I’m just a girl, but Mama has promised me that stating the obvious is what boys do when they haven’t anything truly witty to offer.”
“Coal closet.” Joshua had assumed the conservatory coal storage had long since been emptied, but, well, yes. “Logical. Of course. If you did get me a holiday token, I would be delighted with a ripe, juicy orange.”
“I love oranges.”
“Lack of fresh fruit is making me stupid.” He moved one of the lemon trees he’d already wrestled with and considered what appeared to be a door to the garden, except it wasn’t.
Grandpapa had built the coal shed onto the northern side of the conservatory.
The structure was convenient to the alley, provided one had keys to the door in the garden wall on the exterior side, and out of sight of the street.
The hinges were rusty, of course—conservatories were notoriously good at collecting damp—but Joshua was in a foul enough mood that a few hearty shoves and muttered curses saw the door budging open a good foot.
“What are you two getting up to?” Hope closed the conservatory door with her hip, her hands being full of a dish covered with a towel.
“Mama has brought gifts from afar!” Holly set the cat aside and bounded across the conservatory. “Did you come from the east, Mama?”
“I came from the kitchen. Mrs. Colquitt’s housekeeper stopped by, and she brought both butter and gingerbread. This will tide us over until lunch. Joshua, what are you peering at?”
Gingerbread would tide Joshua over for the next twenty minutes, but what he’d found in the coal closet would warm his heart and his toes for weeks.